CDC Reports Initial Cases of HIV/AIDS in Los Angeles
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports cases of a rare lung infection in five young, previously healthy, gay men in Los Angeles — the first official reporting of what would become known as the AIDS epidemic. Two of the men have already died.
Learn More.
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described the men as having additional infections, indicating that their immune systems were compromised. By the time the report was published, two of the young men were already dead.
While this was the first official reporting of the disease, the history of the AIDS epidemic actually reaches back to the early 20th Century, when Simian Immunodeficiency Virus made the jump from chimpanzees to humans in Central Africa.
The new virus began infecting residents in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo some time between 1990 and 1920. according to History.com/A&E Networks. More than 60 years later, when HIV tests became available, blood samples from a Congolese man who died in 1959 tested positive for HIV and this was the first confirmed HIV-related death.
But the existence and spread of HIV had gone unreported in the medical community until around 1980, when a handful of doctors serving urban populations in the U.S. started to see unusual symptoms in their patients.
One of these doctors was Michael Gottlieb, a young immunologist at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) who diagnosed a rare lung infection in five young men between 1980-1981. Dr. Gottlieb arranged for his findings to be disclosed to the medical community in the CDC’s weekly alert, MMWR.
Dr. Gottlieb encountered his first patient with unusual infections in November 1980, when one of his medical school residents reported a young patient suffering from a severe yeast infection in his throat. When the patient began having breathing difficulties, Dr. Gottlieb arranged to receive a scraping of the patient’s lung tissue through a non-surgical procedure. He was astounded by the test results.
The patient tested positive for Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a rare lung infection, in addition to oral candidiasis, also known as thrush. Dr. Gottlieb then reached out to a colleague who specialized in the new science of T-cells, the white blood cells important to the immune system. The colleague tested the patient’s blood and found that the sample had no T-helper cells, a result so astounding that he ran the test again, with the same results.
In February 1981, Dr. Gottlieb would come across another young man suffering with PCP and depleted T-cells, and shortly after that, a third patient was referred to him. Thorough examinations of the patients about their lifestyles yielded the information that were gay, but Dr. Gottlieb couldn’t determine how their sexual identity was relevant.
A fourth PCP patient appeared in April 1981, and then a report of a fifth man who already died (an autopsy found PCP). Seeing an alarming trend, Dr. Gottlieb contacted an editor at the New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical journal in the U.S., and was told that the submission-review-publication process would take at least four months. He believed this information needed to get out to the medical community fast, so he instead submitted his report to the CDC’s weekly newsletter, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report(MMWR), a weekly report read by medical officials concerned with infectious disease and public health.
Assisting Dr. Gottlieb in publishing his report was Dr. Wayne Shandera, who worked in the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health as a CDC liaison.
“Gottlieb talked through the charts while Shandera put the information into the dry, turgid prose that the MMWR preferred,” wrote Randy Shilts in his epic recounting of the early years of the AIDS pandemic, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. “The report noted the links between PCP, CMV (cytomegalovirus), and the oral candidiasis that commonly preceded the pneumonia.”
Dr. Gottlieb’s report also stated, “The fact that these patients were all homosexuals suggests an association between some aspect of homosexual lifestyle or disease acquired through sexual contact and Pneumocystis pneumonia in this population.”
The five Los Angeles men in Dr. Gottlieb’s report were not the only early cases in the U.S. Starting around 1979, previously healthy men in New York City and San Francisco were their seeing doctors and baffling them with a range of symptoms that included fatigue, enlarged lymph nodes, flat purple lesions, oral candidiasis, shortness of breath, eczema, fevers, and amebic dysentery. Their medical charts would be marked with notes like “fever of unknown origin,” “Kaposi’s sarcoma,” “cytomegalovirus,” and “toxoplasmosis.” But the traditional treatments for these conditions were not working.
While sporadic cases of AIDS were documented prior to 1970, available data suggests that the epidemic started in the mid- to late 1970s. Grethe Rask, a Danish physician who worked in the Congo, died of pneumonia on December 12, 1977 after suffering for several years from opportunistic infections. Ten years after her death, samples of her blood were tested and found to be positive for HIV.
By 1980, HIV may have already spread to five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Australia), and in this period, it is possible that up to 300,000 people were already infected.
In April of 1980, the CDC received a report on Ken Horne, a gay man in San Francisco who was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma. Horne died on November 30, 1981. The CDC would retroactively identify Horne as the first American patient of the AIDS epidemic.
Following Dr. Gottlieb’s report in the CDC’s MMWR, he and his team published a more detailed report in the New England Journal of Medicine on December 10, 1981.
Today, Dr. Gottlieb is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and still treats patients exclusively at AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA Health). He is also a member of the Council of Advisors to STORIES: The AIDS Monument.
The New England Journal of Medicine, “Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia and Musocal Candidiasis in Previously Healthy Homosexual Men — Evidence of a New Acquired Cellular Immunodeficiency” by Michael S. Gottlieb, M.D., Robert Schroff, Ph.D., Howard M. Schanker, M.D., Joel D. Weisman, D.O., Peng Thim Fan, M.D., Robert A. Wolf, M.D., and Andrew Saxon, M.D.; December 10, 1981
June 1981
Rare Kaposi’s Sarcoma Found among Gay Men in NY & CA
New York City dermatologist Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien calls the CDC to report a cluster of cases of a rare and unusually aggressive cancer among gay men in New York and California.
Learn More.
Dr. Friedman-Kien, whose clientele were primarily young men who identified as gay, said he was surprised at the finding that previously healthy men were developing Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS), a rare cancer historically associated with elderly men of Eastern European or Mediterranean descent.
KS is also associated with people who have weakened immune systems, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Heath (NIH). The disease often presents as a purple plaque on the skin or internal surface of the mouth. KS can also manifest on internal organs, such as the lungs and gastrointestinal system.
Dr. Friedman-Kien told New York magazine:
“In February 1981, I saw a young man who was perfectly healthy except for a number of spots on his skin. I’d never seen anything like it, so I did a biopsy. Under the microscope, the cell structure was clear: it was Kaposi’s sarcoma.”
Dr. Friedman-Kien continued: “A week later, another physician sent me another patient, also a gay man in his late thirties, also with disseminated KS.”
Later research would establish that AIDS-related KS is the second most common tumor in HIV patients with CD4 counts less than 200 cells, according to the NIH. Up to 30% of HIV patients not taking high-activity antiretroviral therapy (HAART) will develop Kaposi sarcoma.
* * * * * Source:
New York magazine, “Fighting AIDS” by Janice Hopkins Tanne, January 12, 1987
POZ magaine, “A Look Back at the Year a Rare Cancer Was First Seen in Gay Men” by Joseph Sonnabend, M.D., July 13, 2020
The New York Times, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” by Lawrence K. Altman, July 3, 1981
June 8, 1981
CDC Report Receives Nationwide Media Attention
News media begin to report out on the MMWR article, and within days, the CDC receives reports from around the country of similar cases of opportunistic infections among gay men.
Learn More.
These news stories — which were published by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Associated Press — captured the attention of the gay community and medical personnel nationwide.
In response to the outpouring of reports and concerns to the CDC, the Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections was created to identify risk factors and to develop a case definition for the as-yet-unnamed syndrome. The Task Force worked under the CDC’s Field Services Division in the Epidemiology Program.
To coordinate the task force, the CDC selected James W. Curran, M.D., who would dedicate much of his life to HIV/AIDS research and would publish numerous research papers on the disease.
Task force members included David M. Auerbach, M.D.; John V. Bennett, M.D.; Philip S. Brachman, M.D.; Glyn C. Caldwell, M.D.; Salvatore J. Crispi; William W. Darrow, Ph.D.; Henry Falk, M.D.; David S. Gordon, M.D.; Mary E. Guinan, M.D.; Harry W. Haverkos, M.D.; Clark W. Heath, Jr., M.D.; Roy T. Ing, M.D.; Harold W. Jaffe, M.D.; Bonnie Mallory Jones; Dennis D. Juranek, D.V.M.; Alexander Kelter, M.D.; J. Michael Lane, M.D.; Dale N. Lawrence, M.D.; Richard Ludlow; Cornelia R. McGrath; James M. Monroe; David M. Morens, M.D.; John P. Orkwis; Martha F. Rogers, M.D.; Wilmon R. Rushing; Richard W. Sattin, M.D.; Mary Ellen Shapiro; Thomas J. Spira, M.D.; John A. Stewart, M.D.; Pauline A. Thomas, M.D.; and Hilda Westmoreland.
In its first year, the Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections received case reports from the following doctors working in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles:
Donald F. Austin, M.D.; Erwin Braff, M.D.; James W. Buehler, M.D.; James Chin, M.D.; J. Lyle Conrad, M.D.; Selma Dritz, M.D.; Diane M. Dwyer, M.D.; Shirley L. Fannin, M.D.; Yehudi M. Felman, M.D.; Stephen M. Friedman, M.D.; Robert A. Gunn, M.D.; John P. Hanrahan, M.D.; Robert J. Kingon, M.D.; Michael D. Malison, M.D.; Stanley I. Music, M.D.; Mark A. Roberts, M.D.; Alain J. Roisin, M.D.; Richard B. Rothenberg, M.D.; and R. Keith Sikes, M.D.
Frontline | PBS, “Interview: Jim Curran,” interviews conducted Jan. 18, 2005 and Feb. 15, 2006
The New England Journal of Medicine, “Epidemiologic Aspects of the Current Outbreak of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections,” January 28, 1982
June 16, 1981
First Person with AIDS Admitted to NIH
A man exhibiting symptoms of severe immunodeficiency is the first person with AIDS to be admitted to the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health.
Learn More.
The 35-year-old, white gay man from New York City was transferred from a Connecticut hospital to the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland after researchers at the National Cancer Institute, an NIH branch that studied immunodeficiency diseases, heard about his case.
Almost immediately after the new disease emerged on the medical scene, researchers recognized that patients with this unnamed syndrome often developed a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma as well as other tumors, such as high-grade B-cell lymphomas. As a result, some of the earliest AIDS patient care and research was performed by cancer specialists at the NIH and elsewhere.
The man admitted to the NIH was, for privacy purposes, referred to as “Patient D.” He came to the NIH from Hartford Hospital, where he had been hospitalized for two months with neumocystis carinii pneumonia, lymphocytopenia, cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex II, Candida esophagitis, and Mycobacterium avium tuberculosis of the lung, bone marrow, and esophagus.
The patient had been healthy through adulthood until February 1981, when he began experiencing fatigue and weakness, followed by weight loss and fever.
Thomas A. Waldmann, M.D., one of the NIH doctors who was first to examine “Patient D” said in a 1990 NIH interview:
“The pattern that we observed in our patient was the kind of pattern one saw in Hodgkin’s disease patients who were profoundly anergic [i.e., a condition in which the body fails to react to an antigen], or in patients with a form of profound immunodeficiency called ‘severe combined immunodeficiency of infancy,’ where the patient cannot make an effective cellular or antibody immune response. What we were seeing was an acquired form of cell-mediated immunity.”
Dr. Waldmann said the medical team performed every test they could think of to try to determine the cause of Patient D’s condition, to no avail.
“We were all groping, trying to understand what was going on,” Dr. Waldmann recalled. “In that era, one couldn’t be fatalistic, even when someone was in an apparently irreversible state. One had to assume that somehow one might be able to reverse the immunodeficiency and with that bring into control the infectious disease.”
Members of the NIH’s Metabolism Branch joined forces to study the patient’s cells in a variety of tests. Once doctors determined that Patient D suffered from a rare case of cytomegalovirus retinitis, the National Eye Institute became involved, photographing and studying Patient D’s deteriorating eyesight.
In addition to the research, the doctors were scrambling to find a treatment that Patient D would respond to, but these treatments failed to reverse the course of the symptoms. In fact, it would later be discovered that chemotherapy, the traditional treatment for many forms of cancer, would be ineffective for (and even harmful to) AIDS patients because of their weakened immune systems.
“At the end, the patient had massive cerebral necrosis and autolysis. We had a great number of people involved in treating all the different systems,” Dr. Waldmann said in 1990. “His disease continued, and the patient finally died on October 28, 1981 of hypotension and respiratory failure, with multisystem involvement.”
An autopsy of the body revealed an even wider spectrum of infectious diseases, including massive necrosis, encephalitis, and degeneration of the brain.
AIDS researcher and early human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) drug developer Robert Yarchoan, M.D., recalled the gravity of the moment:
“AIDS showed us that something that no one ever worried about before suddenly could become a major problem for the country and for mankind. And when HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, it became apparent that, in addition to persons known to have AIDS, thousands of people in the United States were already infected with this new virus without knowing it. Moreover, at this time, infection with HIV was in most cases fatal.”
National Institutes of Health, “Dr Thomas Waldmann Oral History 1990,” interview of Dr. Waldmann on March 14, 1990 by interviewers Dennis Rodrigues, Program Analyst, and Dr. Victoria Harden, Director of the NIH Historical Office.
June 30, 1981
UCSF Researchers Identify Oral Lesion as AIDS Precursor
The husband-and-wife academic team of John and Deborah Greenspan are first to identify hairy leukoplakia, an oral lesion which is a precursor to HIV and AIDS, while conducting research at the University of California San Francisco’s School of Dentistry.
Learn More.
When Dr. Deborah Greenspan started seeing a white lesion on the tongue of gay men coming to her clinical practice, she consulted with her pathologist husband, who suggested a biopsy to find out what was causing it. Dr. John Greenspan (1937-2023) identified the oral lesions as a rare form of cancer which impacted the lymphatoid system, and he decided it warranted a closer look.
“I thought this was strange,” he said in 2012 on the occasion of receiving the Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Dental Research. “We typically saw it in Africa. But in this country, we only used to see it rarely — for example, in immunosuppressed patients, such as kidney transplant recipients. So, we ended up seeing one of the first AIDS lymphoma patients reported in the world.”
The Greenspans conducted studies that showed the lesions — dubbed “oral hairy leukoplakia” (HL) because of its corrugated or shaggy appearance — failed to respond effectively to the usual treatment of antifungal applications. In fact, many of their patients already had or soon developed other immune-depressed symptoms associated with AIDS, such as pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS).
The Greenspans would then go on to establish a connection between HL and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in a 1985 report. By 1987, they would be able to announce that HL and EBV were symptoms associated with AIDS.
They would continue their work at UCSF over the next 30-plus years, leading a series of studies relating to the mouth and HIV/AIDS. Their work has been instrumental in teaching physicians, nurse practitioners and other clinicians how to identify oral lesions associated with HIV infection.
“The work of Dr. Greenspan and his colleagues has provided guidelines that enable dentists to recognize early oral manifestations of HIV/AIDS and thereby assist with early diagnosis and referral for treatment,” said John Featherstone, dean of the UCSF School of Dentistry. “This is of particular importance in the global health world.”
July 1, 1981
Doctors Identify More Cases in San Francisco & New York City
As his first day as an oncologist at San Francisco General Hospital, Dr. Paul Volberding treats his first HIV-positive patient, a 22-year-old man with Kaposi sarcoma (KS). The man would die a short time later.
Learn More.
After completing a three-year fellowship at the University of California San Francisco, Dr. Volberding was ready to become a cancer specialist under renowned virologist Dr. Jay Levy. Instead, he found himself on a lifelong journey of treating people living with HIV/AIDS and fighting the spread of the virus.
“Twenty-two-year-old man, grew up in the Deep South, and as I recall he was estranged from his family,” Dr. Volberding told the San Francisco Examiner almost 35 years later. “He ended up in San Francisco working basically sex for food, and had innumerable previous sexually transmitted infections.”
The man died within a few months, without his family present, Dr. Volberding recalls.
Around this same time in the early summer of 1981, two doctors in the Bronx started to see HIV/AIDS symptoms in their own patients. Dr. Gerald Friedland identified several cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia in injection drug users, and became one of the first to see the connection between IV-drug use and HIV transmission.
Pediatric immunologist Dr. Arye Rubenstein began to identify the immunodeficiency of his pediatric patients, the children of drug addicts, as a symptom of what would be eventually called AIDS.
Dr. Rubenstein, who had been seeing this particular kind of immunodeficiency in children and sometimes in their mothers in his Bronx practice since the late 1970s, was one of the first to connect pediatric cases to the new disease affecting homosexual men.
These doctors who treated some of the first known cases of HIV/AIDS went on to do important, transformative work in the fields of treatment, research and public health policy.
In 1983, Dr. Volberding established what would make San Francisco General Hospital the model for HIV care: the country’s first AIDS treatment center (Ward 86). Later the same year, he joined the medical team at Ward 5B, the world’s first in-patient clinic for AIDS patients.
Dr. Volberding continued to treat HIV/AIDS patients until 2012, when he became director of the UCSF AIDS Research Institute. Volberding would also become co-director of the Center for AIDS Research.
In the years to come, Dr. Friedland also dedicated his life to AIDS treatment and research. Following 10 years of working with HIV/AIDS patients in the Bronx, Dr. Friedland became director of the HIV/AIDS Program at Yale and Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine.
Dr. Friedland also became involved in HIV/AIDS international research aimed at providing access to antiretroviral therapy in developing regions of the world. The major focus of his work became the integration of HIV and TB care and treatment in co-infected patients in South Africa.
In 2018, on the occasion of delivering the keynote address at the 13th annual International Conference on HIV Treatment and Prevention, Dr. Friedland told The Body PRO:
“Many of these people living with HIV, I have cared for, for decades. I know them extremely well. They know me. We have gone through this together and have this close collegial relationship as a partnership, so it’s a wondrous pleasure to continue to provide.”
The other doctor working in New York City in 1981, Dr. Rubenstein, would decide to remain in the Bronx, caring for children with HIV AIDS. In 1983, he received a grant from the National Institutes for Health to study the incidence of AIDS in women and children. In 1986, Dr. Rubenstein established that transmission of AIDS can occur in utero, and his breakthrough findings were published in the journal Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology.
By this time, Dr. Rubsenstein had treated more than a hundred HIV-infected children, and in the summer of 1985, he opened a day care center for pediatric AIDS patients at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. He became Chief of the Division of Allergy & Immunology at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, and Professor of Pediatrics, Microbiology & Immunology at Albert Einstein College.
“Many come from a low socioeconomic group, they’re poor, the family may have broken up, they may have used drugs, and now their child has AIDS because they gave it to him. You wouldn’t be surprised if they threw up their hands, but many don’t. They become the best parents in the world. They straighten out their lives, they spend hours with their kids. They give up longing for material things and look for spiritual and religious values.”
* * * * * Sources:
San Francisco Examiner, “Pioneering AIDS Doctor Reflects on First Cases in SF as City Strives to Eradicate Virus,” February 8, 2015
The Body Pro, “HIV ‘Providers’ Aren’t Just Doctors: An Interview with Gerald Friedland, MD” by Stephen Hicks, June 19, 2018
The New York Times, ” Ideas & Trends: The Strain of Caring for the Littlest AIDS Victims” by Jane Gross, August 4, 1985
July 2, 1981
Mention of ‘Gay Men’s Pneumonia’ Appears in Media
The first mention of “Gay Men’s Pneumonia” is published in the Bay Area Reporter, a weekly newspaper for the gay and lesbian community in San Francisco.
Learn More.
The short item advised gay men experiencing progressive shortness of breath to see their physicians.
* * * * * Source:
Bay Area Reporter, “Health Shorts: ‘Gay Men’s’ Pneumonia,” July 2, 1981
July 3, 1981
‘Gay Cancer’ Enters the HIV/AIDS Lexicon
Coinciding with the CDC’s release of another MMWR detailing opportunistic infections among gay men, The New York Times publishes the article “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” At this point, the term “gay cancer ” enters the public lexicon.
In an 18-paragraph story on Page 20 of TheNew York Times, reporter Lawrence K. Altman cited 41 reported cases of “a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer.” Altman reported that eight of the 41 men diagnosed with the condition were already dead, and that the time between diagnosis and death from the disease was less than 24 months.
In the last paragraphs of the article, Altman wrote:
“The reporting doctors said that most cases had involved homosexual men who have had multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners, as many as 10 sexual encounters each night up to four times a week.
“Many of the patients have also been treated for viral infections such as herpes, cytomegalovirus and hepatitis B as well as parasitic infections such as amebiasis and giardiasis. Many patients also reported that they had used drugs such as amyl nitrite and LSD to heighten sexual pleasure.
“Cancer is not believed to be contagious, but conditions that might precipitate it, such as particular viruses or environmental factors, might account for an outbreak among a single group.”
According to Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, a New York City clinician who was among the first in the U.S. to recognize the emerging AIDS epidemic, this article was significant because of the Times‘ large, international readership. But doctors treating New Yorkers from the gay community had been noticing strange symptoms and unusual illnesses in their patients for at least two years.
“I had been observing some clinical and laboratory abnormalities among my patients as early as 1979. These included enlarged lymph glands, an enlarged spleen, low blood platelets and a low white blood cell count,” Dr. Sonnabend told POZ magazine in 2020.
“Then, in April or May of 1981, I was stunned to learn that Kaposi’s sarcoma was being diagnosed in young gay men in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Joyce Wallace, a physician whose office was close to mine on West 12th Street in New York passed this information on to me,” he recalled.
When Dr. Sonnabend heard about the KS cases in young men, he reached out to a colleague, Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien, a dermatologist at NYU medical center. Dr. Friedman-Kien was caring for several gay men with Kaposi’s sarcoma, and soon Dr. Sonnabend joined him at NYU’s virology lab.
Through their research, the doctors found high levels of interferon in their patients. Early research and discoveries like this formed the foundation of HIV/AIDS research for many years to come.
The New York Times, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” by Lawrence K. Altman, July 3, 1981
POZ magazine, “A Look Back at the Year a Rare Cancer Was First Seen in Gay Men” by Joseph Sonnabend, M.D., July 13, 2020
POZ magazine, “Interferon and AIDS: Too Much of a Good Thing” by Joseph Sonnabend, M.D., May 7, 2011
July 1981
CDC Creates Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma & Opportunistic Infections
A Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections is established at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the direction of Dr. James Curran.
Learn More.
Shortly after MMWR description of five cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) among homosexual men in Los Angeles, additional cases of other life-threatening opportunistic infections and a malignancy, Kaposi sarcoma (KS), were reported to the CDC.
Upon learning of these first cases, the CDC formed the Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections to begin surveillance and conduct epidemiologic investigations. Despite budget constraints at the time, about 30 CDC officers and staff were assigned to the Task Force during the summer of 1981. CDC Director William Foege, appointed epidemiologist James Curran to lead the task force.
The Task Force first worked to establish a case definition for surveillance and investigation of the outbreak. Previously, KS was known as an infrequently-diagnosed cancer that was rarely life-threatening, typically occurring among elderly men. The outbreak seemed to represent a new epidemiologic form of KS.
Between June 1, 1981, and May 28, 1982, CDC would receive 355 case reports of KS and/or serious opportunistic infections, especially Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, occurring in previously healthy persons between 15 and 60 years of age. Of the 355, 281 (79%) were homosexual (or bisexual) men, 41 (12%) were heterosexual men, 20 (6%) were men of unknown sexual orientation, and 13 (4%) were heterosexual women.
Five states — California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Texas — accounted for 86% of the reported cases.
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report | Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Epidemiologic Notes and Reports Update on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections in Previously Health Persons — United States,” June 11, 1982
August 4, 1981
Elizabeth Glaser Receives Blood Transfusion during Childbirth Process
A pregnant Elizabeth Glaser, wife of television star Paul Michael Glaser, is rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles to give birth to her first child. She hemorrhages heavily during labor and requires a transfusion of seven pints of blood.
Learn More.
A former teacher who worked as exhibit director of the LA Children’s Museum, Glaser asked her doctor about the mysterious disease reported recently in the press, and her doctor dismissed her concerns, assuring her, “Your nightmare is over.”
In 1985, daughter Ariel experienced persistent stomach pains and doctors were unable to determine the source. The four-year-old was tested for HIV “as just a precaution,” and the results came back positive for the virus.
Each member of the Glaser family was then tested, and would result in the additional HIV diagnosis of mother Elizabeth and 18-month-old son Jake.
Doctors determined that Elizabeth contracted HIV during her 1981 blood transfusion, and Elizabeth had unknowingly passed the virus on to Ariel through breastfeeding. Jake, who was born in October 1984, had contracted the virus in utero.
Elizabeth Glaser would side-step the media ambush by sharing her harrowing story in her 1991 autobiography, In the Absence of Angels. She and two frinds then started the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and she became one of the most aggressive and effective pediatric AIDS activists in the country.
* * * * * Sources:
Washington Post, “AIDS: The Glaser Family’s Battle” by Janet Huck, August 28, 1989
The New York Times, “The Youngest Victims of AIDS” by Bettyann Kevles, March 3, 1991
Forbes, “Before Charlie Sheen, They Went Public With HIV” by Barron Lerner, November 17, 2015
August 11, 1981
Larry Kramer Hosts First Meeting to Discuss Pandemic
Acclaimed writer and film producer Larry Kramer holds a meeting of over 80 gay men in his large New York City apartment at 2 Fifth Avenue.
Learn More.
Invited speaker Dr. Friedman-Kien, a dermatologist alarmed about the spread of Kaposi’s sarcoma among the gay male population of New York, explained that they were witnessing the arrival of a new disease with a mysterious predilection for gay men.
“We listened intently, respectfully, and full of dread as the soft-spoken Dr. Friedman-Kien described the devastation he was seeing in his practice and hearing from other physicians treating gay men,” wrote activist Andy Humm in 2021 for Plus magazine. “You could have heard a pin drop.”
When Dr. Friedman-Kien asked attendees to contribute money to support his research, Kramer passed a hat around the room and attendees ponied up a total of $6,635. This would be the only money raised — public or private — to fight the AIDS epidemic in 1981.
“While there were many gay groups in those days, none of us stepped up to coordinate a community-wide response — whether through a sense that health authorities would address it (ha!) as they did with Legionnaire’s Disease in 1976 or fear that a community that had just officially ditched the mental illness label in 1973 would now be linked with a deadly physical malady,” Humm wrote in his Plus opinion piece . “It took Larry Kramer … to bring us together.”
Kramer’s call to action and other early efforts to raise funds and awareness around the disease that would later be called HIV and AIDS led directly to the creation of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) Committee. The committee would transition into a corporation in the summer of 1982, and become New York’s primary service organization for HIV/AIDS.
Kramer himself would emerge as an early leader of the effort to raise awareness about the new disease and solicit donations for the new Gay Men’s Health Crisis. And right away, he would be challenged by members of the gay community who accused him of causing unnecessary panic and villifying gay sex.
Photo courtesy of Larry Kramer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
August 13, 1981
President Reagan Introduces Sweeping Tax Cuts, Reducing Funding for Healthcare Programs & Research
President Ronald Reagan’s introduction of a tax reduction plan lays the groundwork for a series of budget policies that drastically cut funding for social services programs and medical research. These policies would adversely impact the work of health officials engaged in AIDS research and the wellbeing of millions of people about to receive an HIV diagnosis over the next 20 years.
Learn More.
In his first year of office, President Reagan introduced a series of conservative reforms that prioritized the military over social services (i.e., “welfare programs”) and medical research. Reagan reduced taxes through the Economic Recovery Tax Act, and in the years that followed, successfully slashed the budgets of social welfare programs by more than $22 billion, according to history professor Claire Bond Potter.
“Mr. Reagan’s welfare reforms just made the poor poorer,” Bond Potter wrote recently in The New York Times. “When a three-year recession hit in 1980, six million more Americans fell into poverty. By 1989, employment recovered, but a weak social safety net meant that workers were an illness or an accident away from hardship.”
Under the Reagan administration, public health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suddenly faced drastic budget cuts to their research programs. Such was the situation when, on April 12, 1983, CDC epidemiologist Don Francis raised the issue about the lack of dedicated funding for AIDS research.
“The inadequate funding to date has seriously restricted our work and has presumably deepened the invasion of [AIDS] into the American population,” Dr. Francis wrote to his supervisor. “It has sandwiched those responsible for research and control between massive pressure to do what is right and an unmovable wall of inadequate resources.”
The Reagan’s economic policy was based on the theory of supply-side economics. The fiscal 1982 budget proposed by Reagan represented a reduction of $44 billion (5.7%) in all programs except national defense, according to the Institute for Research on Policy. More than half of the budget reduction came from two areas: income security; and education, training, employment, and other social services.
These components of “Reaganomics” created the perfect storm for the millions of people who would be diagnosed with HIV in the next decade and beyond. By the end of Reagan’s first term in office, at least 7,700 people had received an AIDS diagnosis and more than 3,500 had died of the disease.
Due to the lack of attention from the White House, non-profit organizations led by members of the LGBTQ communities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and other cities stepped in to provide HIV/AIDS information, support and care. Gay rights activists undertook initiatives promoting education about safer sex and countering discrimination against AIDS. With no treatment available in these early years, friends and family members could only comfort the dying.
August 28, 1981
CDC Reports that 40% of Identified Cases Die of KS/PCP
Of the 108 known cases of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, 107 are male and 94% of those whose sexual orientation is known are gay/bisexual. About 40% of all patients have already died.
News of the article alarms the gay community for its indication that the new disease is spreading and that the outcome of those infected was likely to be a quick and brutal death.
Small Medical Conference is First to Address Epidemic
Fifty leading clinicians gather in Bethesda, Maryland for the first conference to address the new epidemic.
Learn More.
Cosponsored by the National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the medical conference focused on Kaposi’s sarcoma and other opportunistic infections. Researchers began to develop recommendations for further studies in epidemiology, virology, and treatment.
National Institutes of Health, “In Their Own Words: NIH Researchers Recall the Early Years of AIDS | Timeline (1981-1988)”
September 21, 1981
First AIDS Clinic Opens in San Francisco
The Kaposi’s Sarcoma clinic at the University of California’s San Francisco Medical Center opens its doors, becoming the first clinic in the world to exclusively treat what would become to be known as AIDS.
Dr. Conant would go on to create the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (first called the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation) to address both the need to go into the community, which was still in denial about the disease, and the need to find non-government funding sources.
On July 1, 1981, Dr. Volberding saw his first patient with Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), a rare cancer later linked to AIDS, on his first day working at San Francisco General Hospital.
The New York Times, “Constance Wofsy, 53, Doctor Who Directed an AIDS Program,” June 9, 1996
San Francisco Chronicle, “The Good Doctor: He’s been in on the AIDS Battle Since the Beginning,” August 12, 2001
October 28, 1981
‘Patient D’ Dies at NIH Facility
The National Institutes of Health reports the death due to severe immune deficiency of a man admitted to its facility in Bethesda, Maryland in June. He was 35.
Learn More.
Known only as “Patient D” in NIH research reports, the patient had been transferred to the NIH Clinical Center from Hartford Hospital, where doctors had been unable to reverse the course of multiple infections spreading through his body. He had previously been living in New York City.
The white, gay man said he had been healthy through adulthood until February 1981, when he began experiencing fatigue and weakness, followed by weight loss and fever. By the time he was admitted to the NIH in June 1981, Patient D had been diagnosed with neumocystis carinii pneumonia, lymphocytopenia, cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex II, Candida esophagitis, and Mycobacterium avium tuberculosis of the lung, bone marrow, and esophagus.
Thomas A. Waldmann, M.D., who at the time was chief of the Metabolism Branch of the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, said in a 1990 NIH interview that Patient D was the first patient with AIDS seen at their facility. He said that he could see that this disease, combined with the patient’s identity as a gay man, “had a devastating effect on his relationships to individuals who had been close to him in the past.”
He noted that, besides the occasional visit from family members, Patient D was largely left alone to die. Through others on his medical team, he learned that the patient had been abandoned by his partner and others from his social circle in New York.
“No one visited this individual, who was in a critical and life-threatening condition, throughout his whole four-month stay,” said Dr. Waldmann.
The NIH medical team performed every test and issued every treatment they could think of, to no avail, he said.
“We were all groping, trying to understand what was going on,” Dr. Waldmann recalled. “In that era, one couldn’t be fatalistic, even when someone was in an apparently irreversible state. One had to assume that somehow one might be able to reverse the immunodeficiency and with that bring into control the infectious disease.”
“We had a great number of people involved in treating all the different systems,” he said. “His disease continued, and the patient finally died on October 28, 1981 of hypotension and respiratory failure, with multisystem involvement.”
An autopsy of the body revealed an even wider spectrum of infections, including massive necrosis, encephalitis, and degeneration of the brain. The autopsy states: “This case represents an example of a recently described syndrome of acquired immunodeficiency in previously healthy young male homosexuals.”
The willingness of Patient D to spend what would turn out to be the last four months of his life in a NIH cancer research center would prove to be valuable to researchers, health officials, and the medical community for years to come.
Cells taken from Patient D led to the discovery of the first human retrovirus HTLV-I and ultimately to the discovery of HIV-1 as the cause of AIDS — one of the major scientific achievements during the last century, said Dr. Waldmann. In addition, these cells played a critical role in the ability for Waldmann’s lab to achieve a major breakthrough in immunology with the production of the monoclonal antibody to the Il-2 receptor, anti-Tac.
By subjecting himself to research studies, Patient D provided critical information to the country’s top researchers during the very earliest months of the epidemic. The handful of cases reported at that time to the NIH and Centers for Disease Control had included instances of young, gay men with Kaposi’s sarcoma, but the report of Patient D was the first to include malignant lymphoma as a condition.
Patient D was also diagnosed with other conditions that were unique to his case at the time, including his deteriorating eyesight and the failure of his body to repond to a tuberculin skin test, despite the fact that he had widespread Mycobacterium avium.
As these new conditions were reported widely to the medical community, the case study of Patient D helped to broaden the defnition of the disease early on and served to provide critical information to physicians and health officials across the country.
* * * * * Sources:
National Institutes of Health, “Dr. Thomas Waldmann Oral History 1990,” interview with Dr. Waldmann on March 14, 1990 by interviewers Dennis Rodrigues, NIH Program Analyst, and Victoria Harden, M.D., Director of the NIH Historical Office.
Retrovirology journal, “A Historical Reflection on the Discovery of Human Retroviruses” by Anders Vahlne, May 1, 2009
Ken Horne Dies of Kaposi’s Sarcoma in San Francisco
After falling ill in 1979 with unusual conditions related to a suppressed immune system, Ken Horne dies in San Francisco at the age of 38.
Learn More.
In April 1980, the Centers for Disease Control received a report on Horne, who was diagnosed with the then-rare disease of Kaposi’s sarcoma. In 1981, the CDC would retroactively identify Horne, who was a gay man, as the first American patient of the AIDS epidemic.
Horne had grown up in Oregon and, when he was 21, he moved to San Francisco in 1965 to study ballet. Within a few years, he abandoned his dance career and took an office job with the local transit system. He’d also discovered the city’s vibrant gay social scene and became a regular at the leather bars. By the fall of 1980, he’d become ill with the first reported case in San Francisco of what would eventually be called HIV/AIDS. He was 37 years old.
Dr. James Groundwater, a dermatologist, was puzzled by the symptoms Horne presented to him in November 1980. Horne told him that for two years, he was experiencing fatigue, diarrhea and nausea. More alarming was Horne’s enlarged lymph nodes and the purple spots on his skin, one on his left thigh and another near his right nipple. Dr. Groundwater took photos of the lesions and biopsied of one of them. He also drew some of Horne’s blood to be tested.
About a week later, Horne was back in Dr. Groundwater’s office to hear about the results of the tests. The dermatologist told him that something was wrong with his white blood cells and his immune system seemed compromised. Horne’s lesions represented something more mysterious; results were inconclusive. He needed more tests.
Over the next four months, Horne’s condition worsened. He suffered daily now from severe headaches and fever, and new lesions appeared on his face and back. On March 30, 1981, Horne was admitted to St. Frances Hospital in San Francisco, where he was given a lumbar puncture. The results showed he had cryptococcosis, an infection acquired by inhalation of contaminated soil. This made no sense to Dr. Groundwater.
In the San Francisco AIDS Oral History Project, Dr. Groundwater recalled sending the biopsy of Horne’s lesion to as many as ten pathologists, trying to crack the mystery of the purple spots.
“In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, very few dermatologists, dermatopathologists even, had seen much Kaposi’s sarcoma. This was very rare. And so they missed the diagnosis. They read it as hemangioma and proliferating angioendotheliomatosis, et cetera,” he said. “But finally, I think it was Dick Sagebiel, a dermatopathologist over in the melanoma clinic at Mt. Zion, who was the first one who made the diagnosis of Kaposi’s sarcoma on these lesions.”
On April 9, Dr. Richard Sagebiel would give Dr. Groundwater the first “reading” of the biopsy that made any sense of Horne’s deteriorating condition. But this just opened up a bunch of new questions. KS trypically affected elderly men, usually of Jewish or Italian descent, and the condition was easily treatable.
Weeks later, things started to fall into place when Dr. Groundwater was attending dermatology rounds at the University of California San Francisco. Clinic chief Marcus Conant, MD, asked attendees if any of them had seen any unusual cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma.
“At that moment, the realization was born that a new epidemic had arrived in San Francisco,” wrote Randy Shilts in his masterpiece of investigative reporting, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
Drs. Groundwater and Conant exchanged information; they had known eachother since the late 1960s, when Groundwater did his residency at UCSF. Dr. Conant said that Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien in New York had some cases of KS in young gay men.
“So I called Alvin Friedman-Kien,” Dr. Groundwater said in the San Francisco AIDS Oral History Project. “At that point, Alvin had, I think, six, seven, or eight cases of these young gay males with Kaposi’s sarcoma.”
On April 24, Dr. John Gullett, a key member of Ken Horne’s medical team at St. Francis Hospital, called the Centers for Disease Control to report the case of KS, making Ken Horne the first reported victim of the new disease.
Over the next seven months, doctors ordered the usual treatments for Horne’s KS, cytomegalovirus, and cryptococcal meningitis — but nothing was working.
“He went through one horrendous experience after another with these various opportunistic infections,” Dr. Groundwater said. “But I think when he began to lose his vision from the cytomegalovirus retinitis, he gave up the battle. When he went blind, he died within a couple of weeks. I think he gave up.”
Ken Horne died of AIDS-related illness on November 30, 1981 at St. Francis Hospital at the age of 38.
* * * * *
It is now believed that the first HIV/AIDS patient in North America was Robert “Bobby” Rayford, a Black teenager from the Old North neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri. Fifteen-year-old Rayford was hospitalized in 1968 with shortness of breath, swelling in his lower body and other infections that he reported experiencing for about two years.
First suspecting that he had contracted an exotic illness, Rayford’s doctors were surprised to learn that the teenager had never traveled outside of the Midwest. They proceeded to administer numerous tests on Rayford’s blood and tissue, but were unable to determine an overall diagnosis or effective treatment. He died of pneumonia in 1969 at St. Louis City Hospital. An autopsy revealed small, cancerous, internal tumors throughout his body — Kaposi’s sarcoma. Almost 20 years later, a western blot postmortem test on Rayford’s tissue samples confirmed HIV.
Also relevent is the illness and death of Grethe Rask, a Danish physician and surgeon who spent years working in the Congo. Over several years, she suffered from a number of opportunistic infections and severe immunodeficiency, and then died of pneumonia on December 12, 1977 in Copenhagen. A 1987 blood test determined that she was infected with HIV.
An early “cluster” case was that of Arne Vidar Røed, a Norwegian truck driver and former sailor, and his wife and child. While still a teenager, Røed worked in the kitchen of a Norwegian ship, travelling to Nigeria, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, Liberia, Guinea and Senegal. When he returned to Norway in 1965, he married and became a father to two children.
Beginning in 1968, Røed suffered from joint pain, lymphedema, and lung infections, conditions which traditional medicine and treatments failed to resolve. He died in April 1976. His wife, who had come down with similar symptoms, died the following December. Their eight-year-old daughter died, too. Although the disease was not identified until long after their deaths, all three are believed to be the first confirmed HIV cases in Europe. This was also the first documented cluster of AIDS cases before the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s.
University of California Libraries, “The San Francisco AIDS Oral History Series | The AIDS Epidemic in San Francisco: The Response of Community Physicians, 1981-1984,” interview with James R. Groundwater, M.D. by interviewer Sally Smith Hughes in 1996
Discover magazine, “The Sea has Neither Sense nor Pity: The Earliest Known Cases of AIDS in the pre-AIDS Era” by Rebecca Kreston, October 22, 2012
December 1981
Pediatric AIDS Cases Surface in New York City
At Albert Einstein Medical College in New York, pediatric immunologist Dr. Arye Rubinstein treats five Black infants showing signs of severe immune deficiency, including pnuemocytis carinii pneumonia.
Learn More.
The mothers of at least three of the children disclosed that they used drugs and/or engaged in sex work. Dr. Rubinstein recognized that the children were showing signs of the same illnesses affecting gay men, but his diagnoses were initially dismissed by his colleagues.
“This would ultimately prove to be the moment when AIDS emerged in the Black community, driven among men, women, and children by sexual contacts, injecting drug use, and mother-to-child transmission,” writes Michael Broder in his article for Positively Aware.
By 1987, pediatric AIDS cases would be on the rise, especially in New York and especially among minority groups. Many babies would be orphaned, creating insurmountable challenges for social workers seeking foster care placements for them.
Although medical experts estimated the number of infected infants in the city to be as many as 3,000, the City of New York has only 241 recorded cases of pediatric AIDS by the end of 1987. Of these cases, the racial breakdown was 59% Black, 32% Hispanic and 8% White.
The New York Times, “For Child With AIDS, Hospital Is Home” by Bruce Lambert, December 24, 1987
December 5, 1981
Pamphlet on KS Distributed to Conference Attendees
In an attempt to alert the medical community to the yet-unnamed disease afflicting young gay men, three dermatologists from San Francisco and New York City distribute a pamphlet on Kaposi’s sarcoma to attendees of a dermatology conference.
Learn More.
Drs. Marc Conant, Alvin Friedman-Kien, and James Groundwater stationed themselves at the entrance of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology and distributed to incoming attendees a pamphlet they hastily put together about Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer that was being diagnosed in previously healthy young men in San Francisco and New York City.
Held on Dec. 5-10, the conference drew thousands of dermatologists in the United States and Canada to San Francisco to hear the latest developments in their medical field. The pamphlet was likely the first information that most conference attendees received about Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) and its role in the yet-unnamed disease of AIDS.
“At that point in time, not many people knew about this problem, and it wasn’t getting a whole lot of attention,” Dr. Groundwater later recalled for the San Francisco AIDS Oral History Project. “I don’t think the seriousness of it was widely appreciated — the potential for major problems in the future.”
Dr. Groundwater said he wrote the copy for the brochure and used photographs of a patient’s KS lesions so dermatologists could see how the disease manifested. The patient was Ken Horne, the first KS case to be reported to the Centers for Disease Control. Horne had died on November 30, 1981, just days before the conference.
* * * * * Source:
University of California Libraries, “The San Francisco AIDS Oral History Series | The AIDS Epidemic in San Francisco: The Response of Community Physicians, 1981-1984,” interview with James R. Groundwater, M.D., conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Ph.D. in 1996
December 10, 1981
Bobbi Campbell Starts Publishing ‘Gay Cancer Journal’
Bobbi Campbell, a San Francisco nurse, becomes the first Kaposi’s sarcoma patient to go public — and in print — with his diagnosis.
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.
In February 1982, Campbell and Dan Turner, who had just himself been diagnosed with KS, attended what would be the founding meeting of the KS/AIDS Foundation (which later became the San Francisco AIDS Foundation). Campbell also became involved with the Shanti Project, which moved from its original focus of supporting people with terminal cancer, to providing emotional support to people diagnosed with AIDS.
Campbell also helped start the People with AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement (PWA), arguing that people with AIDS should expect to participate actively in the response to the AIDS crisis. The PWA Movement rejected the term “AIDS victim.”
With others, Campbell drafted the Denver Principles, the defining manifesto of the PWA Movement. Inspired by the Lavender Menace radical feminists storming the National Organization for Women convention stage in 1970, Campbell and other activists decided to do something similar at the closing session of the Second National AIDS Forum. As each of the 11 men read out one of the 11 statements of Denver Principles, they did so with a banner stating “Fighting for Our Lives.” These words became the slogan of the PWA Movement.
Campbell gave one of his last speeches at the National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights, occuring while the 1984 Democratic National Convention was in San Francisco. Campbell told the crowd that he had hugged his boyfriend on the cover of Newsweek, and then kissed Hilliard on stage “to show Middle America that gay love is beautiful.”
In a powerful speech, Campbell denounced the Christian right for their practice of using scripture to justify their homophobia, and he slammed the Reagan administration for its lack of action. 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.”
Two weeks later, Campbell appeared on CBS Evening News in a live interview with Dan Rather. While the rumors and fear of AIDS had reached the general public, the facts had not, so Campbell was placed in a glass booth, and technicians refused to come near him to wire up his microphone for the interview.
Soon after his TV appearance, he was admitted to a hospital and placed on life support. With Hillard and his parents by his side, Campbell died on August 15, 1984, exactly a month after his DNC speech. He was 32 years old.
Dreamgirls makes a splashy debut on Broadway with stars Jennifer Holliday and Sheryl Lee Ralph, who both begin raising money for AIDS research and other programs after experiencing the loss of some of their cast mates to the disease.
Learn More.
The successful debut of Dreamgirls marked career breakthroughs for Holliday and Ralph, but it also marked the start of a time of great loss.
In addition to cast members, Dreamgirls Director Michael Bennett would die of AIDS-related illness on July 2, 1987 at the age of 44. He would be diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 and choose to keep his illness a secret from all but a few close friends.
“Friends and cast members just got sick and died,” Ralph would later write in the Huffington Post. “They were sick today and dead tomorrow…. Then the deadly silence would set in because nobody wanted to talk about it, much less do anything about that disease, that shhhhh, gay disease. The silence was deafening.”
Ralph would go on to found the DIVA Foundation, which raises awareness about HIV/AIDS. DIVA stands for Divinely Inspired Victoriously Aware.
“It got to the point I couldn’t cross one more name out of my phone book, back when folks had such a thing called a phone book, when you would actually write a name in a book. That many people [died],” Ralph said in a 2008 Star Tribune interview.
Also, Holliday would dedicate much of her life to HIV/AIDS advocacy and activism. In 2017, Holliday would release a song to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
“I’ve been an advocate for AIDS assistance, because it took the lives of male chorus members and the creative team of Dreamgirls,” Holliday told the Broadway Blog.
“The gay community has really been a vital part of my whole existence. It’s been a vital program under the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and the Black Leadership AIDS Crisis Coalition. They let people know that housing is available and want to serve people who need a place to stay.”
* * * * * Sources:
The New York Times, “Stage: ‘Dreamgirls,’ Michael Bennett’s New Musical, Opens” by Frank Rich, December 21, 1981
www.RonFassler.org, “The Death and Life of Michael Bennett” by Ron Fassler, July 2, 2018
HuffPost, “Thirty Years of ‘Dreamgirls’ and AIDS in America” by Sheryl Lee Ralph, June 14, 2011
CBS News Richmond, “Sheryl Lee Ralph Raises AIDS Awareness with DIVAs,” December 4, 2019
StarTribune, “Original ‘Dreamgirl’ Sings a Song of AIDS Awareness” by C.J., February 6, 2008
Playbill, “Jennifer Holliday Releases Single to Benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS” by Andrew Gans, January 26, 2017
The Broadway Blog, “Jennifer Holliday on ‘Dreamgirls,’ Being an LGBTQ Icon, and Turning 60” by Ryan Leeds
December 31, 1981
45% of Patients Die by Year-End
At the close of 1981, a cumulative total of 270 cases of severe immune deficiency are reported among gay men, and 121 of those individuals have died.
Learn More.
By this time, some researchers began to call the condition GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). This terminology would have a negative influence on both the medical profession and the public, causing people to perceive the epidemic as limited to gay men.
This early misconception of the disease would have serious long-term consequences as it becomes evident that anyone could be infected with HIV, including women, heterosexual men, hemophiliacs, people who inject drugs, and children.
Gay Men’s Health Crisis becomes the first community-based AIDS service provider in the U.S.
Learn More.
The informal meeting that Larry Kramer held in his NYC apartment in 1981 to address the “gay cancer” was credited with being the genesis of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC).
Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White officially established GMHC in early 1982. It began with creating simple lines of communication for the community and medical personnel: an AIDS hotline, a newsletter, a space to meet, and the landmark Buddy program to assist PWAs (People with AIDS) with their day-to-day needs.
Later in the same year, GMHC would open its first office on West 22nd Street in Manhattan.
GMHC would become New York’s leading AIDS service organization, serving approximately 10,000 people each year living with and affected by HIV/AIDS in the five boroughs of New York City. GMHC would continuously provide HIV and STI testing, food and nutrition programs, housing support, workforce development, legal assistance, advocacy for benefits and health insurance, mental health and emotional support, substance use counseling, and more.
Today, over 60% of GMHC clients are people of color, nearly 75% identify as LGBTQ+, and over 80% are people living at or below the Federal Poverty Line.
Antony Valdor, a dancer, choreographer and teacher known throughout North America, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 49.
Learn More.
Valdor, a principal dancer with Théâtre du Châtelet who was fluent in French, toured Europe extensively. After dancing with Les Grands Ballet U.S., Marquis de Cuevas and London Ballet Theatre. he became technical coach for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens.
In the late 1960s, he was ballet master for San Francisco Ballet, and produced one of the company’s most popular events, Ballet69, an innovative series of dance performances in the summer of 1969.
He choreographed several pieces for SF Ballet, for the National Academy of Arts Ballet and co-choreographed ballet pieces with Gemze de Lappe. He toured the U.S. as guest teacher and choreographer with many ballet companies and dance academies.
Born Robert Dishman in Los Angeles, Valdor studied with Olga Preobrajens, Alexandra Danilova, Robert Joffrey, and Jose Limon, among others. He was a Navy veteran, serving for four years. His first performances after being released from military service was in the summer of 1955 with the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera dancing in their summer musical series.
Kenneth Schnorr, president of the Stonewall Democratic Club in Los Angeles, dies of AIDS-related illness at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 35.
Learn More.
Schnorr would be among the first in the U.S. to die of AIDS. After being found unconscious in his car in December 1981, he was hospitalized and Cedars-Sinai’s top-notch medical team was perplexed with his rapidly declining health.
West Hollywood activist Ivy Bottini, who was Schnorr’s friend, would tell the story of Schnorr’s illness and death in her 2018 memoir The Liberation of Ivy Bottini.
Bottini recalled receiving a phone call from Schnorr’s mother, who was sitting bedside with him at Cedars.
“He’s full of black and blue marks…. I don’t know what to do,” Schnorr’s mother told her.
Bottini asked to talk with Schnorr, and quickly realized that he had lost his hearing. She eventually was able to speak with Schnorr’s doctor, Joel Weisman, M.D., who would go on to open one of the first medical clinics to treat HIV/AIDS. When Dr. Weisman was unable to give Bottini a clear picture of what was going on, she felt a growing dread that Schnorr’s condition was an indication of a larger issue.
Schnorr died about a week after entering the hospital. Bottini was among the members of the Stonewall Democratic Club who attended Schnorr’s funeral.
“After Ken died, something said to me there is more to this than we see,” Bottini said. “So, for some reason, I just picked up the phone and called the CDC. I had never done that before. ‘Look, this just happened to my friend. Do you have any answers?’ The hesitancy at the other end of the line, the hemming and the hawing before they would say anything — I just knew it was bad.”
The CDC official told her the black and blue marks was a symptom of Kaposi sarcoma, which was usually found in elderly Jewish men.
“And that was the explanation,” she said. “I thought, ‘No, this doesn’t make sense, because Ken was one of three first guys diagnosed with Kaposi in town, in West Hollywood, in LA, and that started me on working to find out what the hell was going on.”
After many phone calls and the realization that the government was failing to act on the crisis, Bottini called Dr. Weisman to invite him to update the community at a town hall she was organizing at West Hollywood’s Plummer Park. She was hoping he would share any information he had and would provide his theory on how this new illness was transmitted. She herself suspected that it was being passed during sex, through bodily fluids.
“That’s the only thing that made sense to me,” Bottini said. “Because if it was airborne, women would be getting it, everybody would be getting it, and that wasn’t happening.”
On the night of the town hall, Fiesta Hall in Plummer Park was jam-packed.
“It was all guys — and (Bottini’s then-girlfriend) Dottie Wine and I,” Bottini recalled. “And Joel talked about transmission and he believed it was bodily fluids, too. And I thought, ‘I’m not crazy.’”
Schnorr’s legacy was that he may have saved many lives by inspiring Bottini and others to search for answers and share that information with the greater community in the earliest days of the epidemic.
Watermark, “Tribute to ‘Give ’em Hell’ Lesbian Feminist Pioneer Ivy Bottini” by Karen Ocamb, March 3, 2021
February 19, 1982
Billy Kovinsky is First Canadian Known to Die of AIDS
William “Billy” Kovinsky dies of AIDS-related illness, becoming the first known case of HIV/AIDS in Canada. He was 43 years old.
Learn More.
About a month later, Canada Diseases Weekly Report would print an article about the case, alerting medical officials that HIV had come to Canada.
As far back as August 1979, Kovinsky sought medical treatment for illnesses that overwhelmed his immune system. According to his doctor, John Doherty, M.D., Kovinsky came to his office in March 1981, and the doctor found he had enlarged lymph nodes and abnormal levels of immune globulins.
During a follow-up visit a month later, Kovinsky’s immune globulins were normal again. Then in May 1981, he went to a different doctor and received a blood test, which found that his white blood count was “extremely low.”
His sister Anna Levin told Canada’s Xtra magazine that she vacationed with Kovinsky in Florida around that time, and saw that his health was in decline.
“He was very thin and gaunt and suffered from sweats,” Anna recalled.
When Kovinsky returned to Canada in June 1981, he submitted to a series of tests at the University Hospital in London, which showed “leukopenia, atypical lymphocytosis and an elevated sedimentation rate,” according to Dr. Doherty’s case report. He was admitted to the hospital for eight days and then discharged without a diagnosis or treatment plan.
Kovinsky continued to search for an answer to his health problems, but doctors had little to offer him. He became very depressed and attempted suicide in August 1981 by taking an overdose of pills, according to Dr. Doherty.
After a two-day hospital stay, he was sent to Toronto for four weeks of psychiatric treatment. In December 1981, Kovinsky was diagnosed with thrush, an infection which covered the entire lining of his esophagus, from mouth to stomach.
On January 5, 1982, Kovinsky checked himself into the hospital for the last time. A battery of tests were performed on him, according to the case report, including an “open chest upper lobe biopsy.”
His sister Anna said she visited Kovinsky at his hospital bed three times a week. His friends Phyllis and Jack would also come by and try to cheer him up. He had his own room, and Anna recalled that he was treated very well by the staff at the hospital.
Kovinsky died just six weeks later at the age of 43.
Dr. Doherty told the Canadian Medical Association Journal that he reported Kovinsky’s case to Canada’s Laboratory Centre for Disease Control, and the very next day investigators came to his office for more information. On March 27, 1982, Canada Diseases Weekly Report carried a short article on the case, and soon, it would be clear that Dr. Doherty had reported the first known case of AIDS in Canada.
“I still remember this case vividly, because I knew the guy really well,” Dr. Doherty recalled for the Journal in 2002.
“Billy was just a really nice guy who led two lives,” said his sister Anna to the Windsor Star. “One was his public life where he was a supposedly heterosexual guy and had all heterosexual friends. The other one was a life that nobody knew about. I’m sure it was very difficult, exceptionally difficult.”
March 3, 1982
U.S. Public Health Service Hosts AIDS Conference at CDC
U.S. Public Health Service hosts a conference on AIDS at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Learn More.
At the conference, researchers debate whether the opportunistic infections were being caused by one or more transmissible or immune-suppressing agents.
GMHC Holds First Major AIDS Fundraiser, Others Follow
A fundraising event hosted by the newly formed organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis draws over 2,000 attendees to the Paradise Garage in New York City and raises more than $30,000.
Learn More.
“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.
Lenny Baker, who won the 1977 Tony Award for Best Actor in a featured role (musical), dies of AIDS-related illness in a hospital in Hallandale Beach, Florida at the age of 37.
Learn More.
Born Leonard Joel Baker in 1945 in Boston, he began his acting career in regional theater and spent several summers at the O’Neill Center’s National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut. He told an interviewer in 1977 that the center was instrumental in his career, partly because he saw performances of the National Theater for the Deaf there.
”It’s perhaps because of watching them work,” Baker said, ”that I can be so brazen with comic uses of my body.”
After moving to New York City in 1969, Baker acted in Off-Broadway stage productions until making his Broadway stage debut in 1974 in The Freedom of the City. Baker won a Tony award and the Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Actor in 1977 for his performance in the musical I Love My Wife.
Baker also acted in films and television shows, including Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe award. His other film credits included The Hospital (1971) and The Paper Chase (1973).
Following Baker’s death, a memorial service was held at The Public Theater, located at 425 Lafayette Street in New York City.
First Congressional Hearings on AIDS Begin in Hollywood
Congressman Henry Waxman, whose district includes the gay community of West Hollywood, convenes the first congressional hearings on AIDS at the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center.
Learn More.
“I want to be especially blunt about the political aspects of Kaposi’s sarcoma,” said Rep. Waxman, according to the Washington Blade. “This horrible disease afflicts members of one of the nation’s most stigmatized and discriminated-against minorities…. There is no doubt in my mind that if the same disease had appeared among Americans of Norwegian descent or among tennis players — rather than among gay males — the responses of the government and the medical community would have been different.”
Rep. Waxman made an effort to involve the gay community of his district by holding the hearing at the LA Gay Community Services Center (now the Los Angeles LGBT Center). But the media largely overlooked the event, and the coverage that did appear was within the LGBTQ press.
The San Francisco newspaper The Sentinel published a very short blurb three days later, titled “House Holds Cancer Hearings.” The paper would quote an unnamed subcommittee staffer saying the Centers for Disease Control “should not have to nickel and dime” for research funding.
The short article appeared next to a column written by gay nurse Bobbi Campbell, who wrote about going to the Shanti Project to get emotional support for his KS.
Speaking at the hearing, Dr. James Curran, head of the Center for Disease Control’s Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, estimated that tens of thousands of people were already infected by the disease.
On the 40th Anniversary of the CDC’s first report on what would become known as AIDS, reporter Karen Ocamb wrote the Washington Blade article “AIDS @40: White House laughs as gays try to save themselves,” recalling the House hearing chaired by Rep. Waxman.
“Like so many others in California, lesbian feminist Ivy Bottini had high expectations for the federal government to finally intervene in the growing AIDS crisis after the first congressional committee hearing on the mysterious new disease,” Ocamb wrote. “She was upset. Her friend Ken Schnorr had died just before the hearing and Bottini had to explain to Ken’s distraught mother that he had not been abused at the hospital — the purple bruises on his body were KS lesions.”
Ocamb goes on to cite perhaps one of the most egregious examples of the Reagan administration’s homophobic callousness toward people with AIDS, which happened just weeks after Reps. Waxman and Phillip Burton (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill to fund AIDS research.
On Oct. 15, 1982, White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes was holding a press conference, during which reporter Lester Kinsolving asked Speakes about the new disease called AIDS. After indicating that he didn’t know what AIDS was, Speakes dismisses the question and makes light of it, saying, “I don’t have it. Do you?”
When this response elicits chuckles from the members of the press corps, Speakes continues in this vein (“There has been no personal experience here, Lester”) to draw more laughter.
“The exchange goes on like that. For another two years,” Ocamb wrote.
* * * * * * Sources:
Washington Blade, “AIDS at 40: White House Laughs as Gays Try to Save Themselves” by Karen Ocamb, June 23, 2021
The Atlantic, “The Heroic Story of How Congress First Confronted AIDS” by Joshua Green, June 8, 2011
May 6, 1982
Hibiscus – Founder of Cockettes & Angels of Light – Dies
To the shock and dismay of many fans in San Francisco and New York City, The Advocate announces: “Founder of Cockettes, Hibiscus, Dead of GRID.”
Learn More.
Hibiscus was famous on both coasts for founding and performing with the flamboyant theatrical groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light. He died of AIDS-related illness (then called “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency”) at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York at the age of 32, becoming one of the earliest casualties of the epidemic.
Born George Edgerly Harris III in Bronxville, N.Y., he was the child of theater performers who relocated the family to a home on El Dorado Avenue in Clearwater Beach, Fla. Before long, George Jr. had founded his first theatrical group, the El Dorado Players, which performed in the family’s garage.
“He was fascinating even as a small child,” his mother Ann Harris told The New York Times Magazine in 2003. “All the other kids followed him and acted out his fantasies. He did Camelot one time and had the kids on bicycles with the handlebars as the horses’ heads. Another time he directed Cleopatra, and used the garden hose as the serpent and our cats as Cleopatra’s gifts to Caesar. He was very much the little producer.”
When his family returned to New York in 1964, George Jr. reprised the El Dorado Players, augmenting the troupe with children he met in Greenwich Village. He took acting and singing classes at Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, and soon he was cast as an extra in a milk commercial, a deaf-mute in a television series and an antiwar protester in an Off Broadway play called Peace Creeps, co-starring Al Pacino and James Earl Jones.
The latter role would be strangely prescient. On October 21, 1967, an 18-year-old George Jr. would be photographed placing a flower in a gun barrel pointed at him while taking part in an anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon. The photo, widely circulated in the media, became iconic of the anti-war movement and generational divide in the country.
Washington, D.C. was just a stop-over, through, of a trip he was taking to San Francisco with friend Irving Rosenthal, the author of the homoerotic novel Sheeper and the onetime lover of William Burroughs. Inspired by an image in a Cocteau novel, he changed his name to Hibiscus, and started wearing the glittery makeup, diaphanous robes and floral headpieces that would become his signature.
He joined Rosenthal’s commune, KaliFlower, which was dedicated to distributing free food and creating free art and theater. This was the fertile environment in which Hibiscus founded The Cockettes.
Hibiscus and other KaliFlower members first performed at the 1970 New Year’s Eve Show at the Palace Theater, an old Chinese movie house in North Beach. They called themselves The Cockettes, a bawdy allusion to the Rockettes, and danced a cancan to the Rolling Stones’ song Honky Tonk Women.
Under the leadership of Hibiscus, the group’s act quickly evolved into bigger, wilder, and more lavish productions, and The Cockettes’ shows fast became not-to-be-missed events. New shows were created every few weeks, with Paste on Paste, Gone with the Showboat to Oklahoma, and Tropical Heatwave/Hot Voodoo being some of the early productions.
Pearls Over Shanghai became the Cockettes first show featuring an original script, music and lyrics, and was an instant hit with fans. Some members of the Cockettes, like Sylvester and Devine, began to garner their own fan followings. During this time, Hibiscus found he could express his sexual identity with fearless abandon.
”He came out of the closet wearing the entire closet,” says Nicky Nichols, a fellow Cockette.
When some members of The Cockettes began insisting that they begin charging for their shows, Hibiscus refused and found himself expelled from the group he founded. Unperturbed, Hibiscus formed a new theatrical group called the Angels of Light Free Theater. Their shows included Flamingo Stampede and The Moroccan Operette, which Hibiscus described as being ”like Kabuki in Balinese drag.”
Among the people he convinced to perform with the Angels of Light was poet Allen Ginsberg, who appeared in drag for the first time. Hibiscus found another collaborator in his new boyfriend, Jack Coe, also known as Angel Jack, who eventually moved to New York with Hibiscus in 1972, around the same time that the Cockettes disbanded.
Upon his return to NYC, he recruitd his mother and three sisters (Jayne Anne, Eloise and Mary Lou) into an east coast version of the Angels of Light.
“I wrote almost all the music for the Angels of Light,” said his mother, Ann. “George would say, ‘Oh, I need a sheik scene, with a sheik in it,’ and then I would come up with a song.”
In the early 1980s, he and his sisters and brother formed the glitter rock group “Hibiscus and the Screaming Violets,” supported by musicians Ray Ploutz on bass, Bill Davis on guitar and Michael Pedulla on drums. But he had to stop performing in 1981 due to his escalating illness.
It’s testament to the power of his personality and creativity that the spirit of Hibiscus dominates the 2002 Cockettes documentary, even though the film’s focus is on the group. Decked out in gender-bending drag and tons of glitter, the flamboyant ensembles of both The Cockettes and Angels of Light are considered to be the inspiration for later theater productions like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and acts like The New York Dolls.
LA Activist Ivy Bottini Creates Informational Network
Lesbian feminist Ivy Bottini, upset by the AIDS-related death of her friend Ken Schnorr, starts asking questions of the medical community and founds the AIDS Informational Network in Los Angeles.
Learn More.
Bottini called the CDC to ask about the black and blue bruises that covered Schnorr’s body. The CDC refered Bottini to Dr. Michael Gottlieb at the University of California Los Angeles, who co-authored the CDC’s first report on HIV/AIDS.
Bottini and Dr. Gottlieb became friends and met every Friday at Crest Coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake to discuss AIDS. Fueled with trustworthy information, Bottini formed what would become to be known as the AIDS Informational Network, an informal group of leaders who discussed the crisis.
She organized a community town hall at Fiesta Hall in West Hollywood with Dr. Joel Weisman, Schnorr’s physician. More than 300 gay men attended (Bottini and her friend Dottie Wine are the only women in the packed hall), and for years afterward, Bottini heard from men who claim that this event saved their life.
Watermark, “Tribute to ‘Give ’em Hell’ Lesbian Feminist Pioneer Ivy Bottini” by Karen Ocamb, March 3, 2021
May 9, 1982
Genesis for San Francisco AIDS Foundation is Launched
Bay Area dermatologist Dr. Marcus Conant and gay activist Cleve Jones found the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation, which later becomes the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
Learn More.
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.
The New York Times publishes the first media mention of the term “GRID” (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), deepening public perceptions that HIV/AIDS is solely related to homosexuality.
Learn More.
Under the headline “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials,” the Times introduced its readers to “a serious disorder of the immune system” that had proved fatal in 136 people to date.
“It was colloquially referred to as GRID – ‘Gay Related Immune Deficiency’ or ‘Gay Related Immune Disease,’ as if there was something intrinsic about being gay that made people susceptible to it,” wrote Carla Tsampiras in The Conversation.
While the Times article identified 13 cases of the disease in heterosexual women, it went on to state, “Most cases have occurred among homosexual men, in particular those who have had numerous sexual partners, often anonymous partners whose identity remains unknown.”
Even once the disease was renamed HIV/AIDS, the stigmatization continued. Early research elicited categories of people, referred to as “high-risk groups,” who were apparently at increased risk of having AIDS. They were informally known as “the Four-H Club” — homosexuals, Haitians, hemophiliacs and heroin users. Later, “hookers” were added to the list.
“As a result, AIDS avatars — such as The Homosexual, The Prostitute, and The Drug Abuser — were created, drawing on long histories of social and medical prejudice and othering of certain groups of people,” said Carla Tsampiras, Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Cape Town. “The avatars drew on existing stereotypes and reinforced them, reflecting existing prejudices or social attitudes relating to sexuality, sexual orientation, race, class and gender.”
* * * * * * Sources:
The New York Times, “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials” by Lawrence K. Altman, May 11, 1982
The Conversation, “AIDS: What Drove Three Decades of Acronyms and Avatars?” by Carla Tsampiras, June 4, 2015
May 31, 1982
Front-Page Story on AIDS Appears in Mainstream Press
The Los Angeles Times publishes the story “Mysterious Fever Now an Epidemic” on its front page, marking the first time the disease receives top coverage in the mainstream media.
Learn More.
* * * * * * Source:
Los Angeles Times, “Anti-Gay Bias? : Coverage of AIDS Story: A Slow Start” by David Shaw, December 20, 1987
June 12, 1982
CBS News Reports on AIDS among Gay Men in Cities
In one of the earliest broadcast news stories about AIDS, reporter Barry Peterson interviews gay men diagnosed with Kaposi’s Sarcoma.
Learn More.
The news segment opens with AIDS activist Bobbi Campbell talking about his shock at the age of 29, when he was told he had a deadly form of cancer. Then, the segment shows Campbell being examined by his doctor, Marcus Conant, M.D.
Next, New York-based AIDS activist Larry Kramer talks about how the disease is killing more people than toxic shock syndrome and Legionnaire’s disease — two bacterial infections receiving a lot of media attention at the time. When the reporter asks Campbell why no one is addressing the AIDS epidemic, Kramer replies, “Well, I think it’s because it’s a gay cancer.”
James Curran, M.D., speaks on behalf of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling CBS News that now is the time to conduct AIDS research to determine how the disease was being transmitted. The reporter notes that “there is almost no money being spent so far” for AIDS research.
The reporter closes the segment with this statement: “For Bobbi Campbell, it is a race against time. How long before he and others who have this disease finally have answers, finally have the hope of a cure?”
Campbell would die of AIDS-related illness on August 15, 1984, about 26 months after the report aired on CBS News.
It would be almost 12 years later (1996) before highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) would become widely available to people living with HIV/AIDS, finally offering the hope of survival. Deaths from AIDS-related illness fell almost immediately in the industrialized world, and the way we think about HIV and AIDS changed forever.
The Centers for Disease Control publishes an MMWR article that is the first to suggest sexual transmission as the source of Karposi’s sarcoma and other opportunitic infections in gay men.
Learn More.
The MMWR article describes a potential sexually transmitted agent as being the link to outbreaks of KS, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), and other infections recently found among young gay men.
The report describes a study of 19 case subjects from June 1, 1981 to April 12, 1982 involving biopsy-confirmed KS and/or PCP among previously healthy male residents of southern California. Following a report of possible personal connections among the KS/PCP case subjects in Los Angeles and Orange counties, interviews were conducted with the eight subjects still living and with seven of the close friends of 11 subjects who had died.
Through these interviews, the CDC was able to collect data on sexual partners for 13 of the 19 subjects. The study considered “sexual contact” to be established if the KS/PCP case subjects was reported to have “exposure” to another person that was either substantiated or not denied by the other person involved in the relationship (or by a close friend of that person).
Within five years of the onset of symptoms, nine of the KS/PCP case subjects had had sexual contact with others who had KS or PCP. They consisisted of seven case subjects from LA County who had sexual contact with other patients from LA County, and two case subjects from Orange County had sexual contact with one patient with KS who resided outside California.
Four of the nine KS/PCP case subjects had been exposed to more than one patient who had KS or PCP. Three of the nine KS case subjects developed their symptoms after sexual contact with persons who already had symptoms of KS. One of these three subjects developed symptoms of KS about nine months after sexual contact, another subject developed symptoms 13 months after contact, and a third subject developed symptoms 22 months after contact.
The other four KS/PCP case subjects in the group of 13 had no known sexual contact with reported cases. However, one KS case subject had an apparently healthy sexual partner in common with two persons with PCP; one KS case subject reported having had sexual contact with two friends of the non-Californian with KS; and two PCP case subjects had most of their anonymous contacts (greater than or equal to 80%) with persons in bathhouses.
The editorial note to the report included these points:
An estimated 185,000-415,000 homosexual males lived in LA County in 1982.
If one assumes each homosexual male in LA County has between 13 and 50 different sexual partners per year during 1977-1982, “the probability that seven of 11 patients with KS or PCP would have sexual contact with any one of the other 16 reported patients in LA County would seem to be remote.”
With this same assumption, “the probability that two patients with KS living in different parts of Orange County would have sexual contact with the same non-Californian with KS would appear to be even lower.”
Thus, observations in LA and Orange counties imply the existence of an unexpected cluster of cases.
The CDC then puts forth the hypothesis that infectious agents are being sexually transmitted among homosexually active males.
“Infectious agents not yet identified may cause the acquired cellular immunodeficiency that appears to underlie KS and/or PCP among homosexual males. If infectious agents cause these illnesses, sexual partners of patients may be at increased risk of developing KS and/or PCP,” the CDC report posits.
The CDC proposes another hypothesis: “Sexual contact with patients with KS or PCP does not lead directly to acquired cellular immunodeficiency, but simply indicates a certain style of life. The number of homosexually active males who share this lifestyle may be much smaller than the number of homosexual males in the general population.”
The CDC goes on to suggest the possibility of exposure to “some substance (rather than an infectious agent)” leading to immunodeficiency among homosexual males that share a particular style of life.
The report cites a New York City-based report suggesting a connection between amyl nitrite (commonly referred to as “poppers”) and an increased risk of KS. This hypothesis would later be scientifically disproved.
* * * * * Sources:
Mortality and Morbity Weekly Report, “A Cluster of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia among Homosexual Male Residents of Los Angeles and range Counties, California,” June 18, 1982
June 27, 1982
Play Fair! First to Advocate for Safe Sex Practices
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence creates Play Fair! — the first “safer sex” pamphlet to address the growing AIDS epidemic.
Learn More.
The Sisters distributed 16,000 copies of Play Fair! during the San Francisco Gay & Lesbian parade in June 1982.
Written by Sister Florence Nightmare and Sister Roz Erection, who outside the Order were known as registered nurses Bobbi Campbell and Baruch Golden, Play Fair! was among the first guides promoting safe sex and raising awareness around sexually transmitted diseases.
The Sisters originated in 1979 with three gay men who wanted to combine radical politics, street theater, and high camp, according to Will Kohler. Having obtained nuns’ habits from a community theater production of The Sound of Music, these men (a.k.a., Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch, Sister Missionary Position, and Sister Roz Erection ) turned heads as they strolled Castro Street on Easter Sunday.
By 1982, the Sisterhood had many members and promoted a lively campaign around sex-positivity through a combination of fundraising, community outreach and events. With growing anxiety and concern around the spread of Kaposi’s sarcoma and other immune disorders among gay men, it was inevitable that the Sisters would incorporate AIDS awareness into its mission.
Although originally founded as an “Order of Gay Male Nuns,” the group now includes gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, and transgendered men and women. Many of their rituals are influenced by Eastern religious practices and beliefs, as well as by Roman Catholicism. Their doctrine stresses universal joy and the expiation of guilt.
Members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence who have died are referred by the Sisters as “Nuns of the Above.”
Back2Stonewall, “Gay History – April 15, 1979: San Francisco’s Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Founded,” April 16, 2022
The Culture Trip, “Meet the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Francisco’s Order of Queer Nuns” by Deanna Morgado, July 3, 2019
GLBTQ Archive, “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” by Robert Kellerman, 2002
July 4, 1982
Terrence Higgins – Hansard Reporter in UK – Dies
Terrence Higgins dies at St. Thomas Hospital in London, becoming one of the first people to die of an AIDS-related illness in the United Kingdom. He was 37 years old.
Learn More.
Born in 1945 in the Wales town of Haverfordwest, Higgins left for London as a teenager. He worked as a reporter for Hansard, the House of Commons’ official record, and in the evenings as a nightclub barman and DJ. In the late 1970s, he would often travel to work in New York and Amsterdam.
In 1980, he was forced to put his traveling on hold due to persistent and, at the time, unidentifiable illnesses. In the summer of 1982, he collapsed while at work at the Heaven nightclub in London and was hospitalized. Soon after, he died of the AIDS-related illnesses Pneumocystis pneumonia and progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy.
After Higgins’ death, his partner, Rupert Whitaker, and his friends Martyn Butler, Tony Calvert, Len Robinson and Chris Peel founded the Terrence Higgins Trust to raise funds for research and awareness of the illness that was then only known as “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID).
Terrence Higgins Trust was the first service organization in the United Kingdom to respond to the HIV epidemic.
* * * * * * Sources:
BBC News, “Terrence Higgins’ Legacy, 30 Years After Death” by Neil Prior, July 5, 2012
32 Haitian Immigrants Diagnosed with Opportunistic Infections & KS
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a “cluster” of opportunistic infections and Kaposi’s sarcoma among Haitians who recently entered the U.S.
Learn More.
In the summer of 1982, life-threatening opportunistic infections and Kaposi’s sarcoma were reported among 32 Haitian migrants to the United States. The CDC stated in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that most were heterosexual men with no known risk factors who had migrated from Haiti within the past two years.
The MMWR also mentioned that the CDC received reports of KS cases in Port-Au-Prince, and the combined reports indicated “an epidemiologically distinct pattern of illness” that occurred via heterosexual transmission.
Years later, in its report “AIDS: The Early Years and CDC’s Response,” the CDC conceded that by publicly reporting these cases as “Haitian entrants,” the CDC inadvertently contributed to the stigma associated with “AIDS labeling.” This stigma would be endured by thousands of Haitian migrants fleeing poverty and political persecution in the 1980s and 1990s.
From April 1, 1980 through June 20, 1982, 19 Haitian patients were admitted to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami with evidence of opportunistic infections (including Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, cryptococcal meningitis or fungemia, toxoplasmosis, and esophageal candidiasis) and one patient also had Kaposi’s sarcoma. Seventeen were men and two were women. At the time the CDC released its MMWR, 10 of the 19 Haitian immigrants in Florida had already died. Their average age was 28 years old.
From July 1, 1981, through May 31, 1982, 10 Haitian residents of Brooklyn, New York — all men, aged between 22 and 37 years old — were diagnosed with opportunistic infections (including Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, cryptococcal meningitis or fungemia, toxoplasmosis, and esophageal candidiasis). Five of the 10 immigrants in Brooklyn had already died.
The remaining three cases were reported from health officials in California, Georgia, and New Jersey.
The CDCwarned medical officials and doctors who care for Haitian patients to “be aware that opportunistic infections may occur in this population.”
July 16, 1982
CDC Identifies Hemophilia-AIDS Connection
CDC reports three cases of hemophiliacs diagnosed with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a common AIDS-related illness.
Learn More.
The CDC’s MMWR article is the first report of the AIDS-related condition of immunosuppression in patients with hemophilia who have no other known risk factors for AIDS.
By the time the MMWR article is published, two of the three subjects have died.
Louis “Lou” Maletta launches the Gay Cable Network on Manhattan cable channel 35, starting with the program Men in Films and then expanding its programming to include news about the AIDS crisis.
Learn More.
The Gay Cable Network broke new ground by providing television programming from a gay perspective, and often featured news about AIDS that was broadcast nowhere else in the country. While the network existed on Manhattan cable in New York City, Maletta also made his programs available to other cities like San Francisco, Cincinnati and Atlanta, which broadcast his taped programs.
Maletta’s first program, Men & Film, featured strategically edited gay pornographic material that “just barely passed even early cable access censorship standards,” according to Back2Stonewall, Maletta would announce at the start of each show that his goal with the program was to “put the male body back on the map.”
Within months, Maletta expanded his programming to include news, sports and entertainment, and the network became a forum for a range of issues facing the gay community.
In a 2009 interview with Gay City News, Maletta said he realized he needed to provide gay-centric programming about the AIDS crisis after he witnessed a 30-year-old friend become “someone who looked 90 six months after being diagnosed.”
Maletta arranged for officials from New York City’s health department and Gay Men’s Health Crisis to provide updates on HIV/AIDS healthcare and research developments.
Maletta’s Gay Week in Review was sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, and Naming Names was produced weekly by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, according to Gay City News. Maletta himself covered arts and entertainment in a show called Be My Guest, which featured celebrities including Harvey Fierstein, Derek Jarman, Vito Russo, Patrick Stewart, Tony Kushner, Quentin Crisp, and Divine.
The network’s news program, Pride and Progress, eventually became Gay USA, a show co-hosted by Ann Northrop and Andy Humm that outlived the network and today is distributed nationally by Free Speech TV.
Gay USA covered the Democratic and Republican national conventions from 1984 to 2000 with reporters interviewing political leaders from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to Jesse Jackson and Ann Richards. The news program also covered AIDS demonstrations outside the conventions, as well as numerous rallies in Washington and New York City.
“It was critical to the LGBT rights movement,” Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor at Hunter College, told The New York Times. “Mainstream television wasn’t rushing to cover the movement, and public access cable provided entrée for social and political groups that were traditionally excluded. Lou Maletta’s programming allowed voices of the gay community to speak for themselves.”
Maletta videotaped his programs at first out of his apartment on West 15th Street, which he shared with Luke Valenti, his domestic partner of 37 years, according to Gay City News. Later, Maletta operated out of Manhattan buildings that doubled as sex clubs late at night.
“There was nothing quite like bringing a candidate for public office in for an interview with an erotic mural looking down at them from off-stage and lubricant residue still on the chairs,” Humm of Gay USA wrote. “But no one walked out and many sought the chance to be on the shows, including Ed Koch and David Dinkins when they ran against each other for mayor in 1989.”
In 2001, Maletta would shut down the network. He died in upstate New York about 10 years later of liver cancer at the age 74.
“He had a tremendous vision and unlike most people, he acted on it and made it happen. Because he was such a rebel and way before his time, he didn’t reap the benefits, which could make him cranky and difficult. But he is a really important figure in our community,” said Northrup of Gay USA.
“Lou had this grand vision of a 24-hour gay cable network,” Humm of Gay USAtold The New York Times. “That didn’t happen for him.”
Still, Maletta’s legacy continues with the endurance of Gay USA and the introduction in 2005 of Logo, a gay-oriented 24-hour cable channel, wrote NYT reporter Dennis Hevesi.
In 2009, the entire archives of the Gay Cable Network were acquired by New York University’s Fales Library for restoration, and preservation.
“It’s more than 6,000 hours of film about civil rights and human rights,” said Allen Zwickler, who brokered the deal with NYU. Zwickler’s brother Phil was a documentarian and GCN correspondent before he died of AIDS-related illness in 1991 at the age of 36. “It is so incredible that it had to be preserved.”
July 1982
Activists Launch Hotline at Center in Los Angeles
After activists Nancy Cole Sawaya, Max Drew, Matt Redman, and Ervin Munro attend a community meeting featuring a speaker from the Kaposi Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation, they create a hotline to serve the panicked LA community.
Learn More.
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.
In a report to the medical community, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coins the term “AIDS” — Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
Learn More.
The MMWR article also includes the first case definition for AIDS: “A disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell-mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known cause for diminished resistance to that disease.”
Today, AIDS is defined as a set of symptoms (or syndrome) caused by the HIV virus. A person is said to have AIDS when their immune system is too weak to fight off infection. This is the last stage of HIV, when the infection is very advanced.
AIDS Research Bill Introduced (and Dies) in Congress
Congressmen Phillip Burton and Ted Weiss introduce the first legislation for the allocation of funding for AIDS research. Unfortunately, the resolution dies in committee.
Learn More.
It will be almost one year later, in July 1983, when the first dedicated funding for AIDS research and treatment is approved by Congress.
Question about AIDS Draws Laughter at White House Briefing
At White House Press briefing, a reporter asks Press Secretary Larry Speakes: “Does the President have any reaction to the announcement — from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta — that AIDS is now an epidemic and has over 600 cases?”
Speakes: “What’s AIDS?”
Reporter: “It’s known as the ‘gay plague.’”
Everyone laughs.
“I don’t have it,” Speakes replies. “Do you?”
Learn More.
The transcript of the press briefing, which is in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, is a sharp reminder of how governmental officials and journalists viewed the LGBTQ community.
President Reagan would not mention AIDS until 1985, and then it would be in response to a reporter’s question at a press conference. He would not give a major speech about the epidemic until mid-1987 — at which point 20,849 people in the U.S. would already be dead.
* * * * * * Sources:
The Washington Post, “How Attitudes toward AIDS have Changed, in the White House and Beyond” by Juliet Eilperin, December 4, 2013
Washington Blade, “AIDS at 40: White House Laughs as Gays Try to Save Themselves” by Karen Ocamb, June 23, 2021
Vanity Fair, “The Reagan Administration’s Unearthed Response to the AIDS Crisis is Chilling” by Richard Lawson, December 1, 2015
October 1982
California AIDS Hotline is Launched in San Francisco
In a collaboration between the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) and the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the California AIDS Hotline begins taking calls in an effort to provide information and dispel rumors.
Learn More.
Staffed by SFAF volunteers, the hotline quickly gained recognition locally and nationally as a trusted source of information. The hotline operators received intensive training that included 16 hours of classroom sessions, practice calls, and resource-finding techniques.
Training topics included immunology, virology, epidemiology, risk reduction, harm reduction theory, risk assessment, injection drug use, testing, information access, media reporting and theories, crisis and suicide calls, sex roles and power, role playing and practice calls, according to SFAF. The training also instructed volunteers on communication skills and cultural competency.
The hotline developed an “Encyclopedia” which was an accumulation of articles, brochures and memos arranged by subject. Hotline workers would consult the Encyclopedia for the latest information on topics like oral sex, opportunistic infections, alternative treatments, community resources and AIDS research.
In the first few years of the hotline’s operation, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) was still known as Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation, which was founded in April 1982 (the organization would rename itself SFAF in 1984).
Mark Leger began volunteering at the AIDS Hotline in the mid-1980s, so he could stay updated on AIDS research, treatment, education and politics.
Most people called the hotline to find out where they could get anonymously tested for HIV, according to Leger. Questions around safer sex techniques and IV drug use were also common.
“At my last shift, I fielded more than 20 calls during a three-hour shift. By the end, I felt like an overworked Bell operator, checking myself from being too snappy, not always succeeding,” Leger said. “My life was a lot less busy when I started working at the hotline. I should stop. But I’m still answering calls.”
October 21, 1982
Jimmy Howell – Bay Area Dance Teacher – Dies
Dancer and teacher James “Jimmy” Howell dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 47.
Learn More.
Howell was a psychologist in Yakima, Washington, who moved to New York and then Los Angeles to dance and teach with the Joffrey Ballet. He then moved to San Francisco and started his own dance studio.
Howell performed his last ballet, Journey of the Soul, earlier in the year. A videotape of the ballet was shown at a celebration of his life.
Bay Area Reporter, “Gay Victim Dances Over Death” by Konstantin Berlandt, November 11, 1982
November 5, 1982
AIDS Precautions Created for Medical Personnel
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lays out the first set of precautions for clinical and lab staff working with people with AIDS symptoms.
The report noted that “airborne spread and interpersonal spread through casual contact do not seem likely.”
Those providing care to people with AIDS were advised the following:
Extraordinary care must be taken to avoid accidental wounds from sharp instruments contaminated with potentially infectious material and to avoid contact of open skin lesions with material from AIDS patients.
Gloves should be worn when handling blood specimens, blood-soiled items, body fluids, excretions, and secretions, as well as surfaces, materials, and objects exposed to them.
Gowns should be worn when clothing may be soiled with body fluids, blood, secretions, or excretions.
Hands should be washed after removing gowns and gloves and before leaving the rooms of known or suspected AIDS patients. Hands should also be washed thoroughly and immediately if they become contaminated with blood.
Blood and other specimens should be labeled prominently with a special warning, such as “Blood Precautions” or “AIDS Precautions.” If the outside of the specimen container is visibly contaminated with blood, it should be cleaned with a disinfectant (such as a 1:10 dilution of 5.25% sodium hypochlorite (household bleach) with water). All blood specimens should be placed in a second container, such as an impervious bag, for transport. The container or bag should be examined carefully for leaks or cracks.
Blood spills should be cleaned up promptly with a disinfectant solution, such as sodium hypochlorite (see above).
Articles soiled with blood should be placed in an impervious bag prominently labeled “AIDS Precautions” or “Blood Precautions” before being sent for reprocessing or disposal. Alternatively, such contaminated items may be placed in plastic bags of a particular color designated solely for disposal of infectious wastes by the hospital. Disposable items should be incinerated or disposed of in accord with the hospital’s policies for disposal of infectious wastes. Reusable items should be reprocessed in accord with hospital policies for hepatitis B virus-contaminated items. Lensed instruments should be sterilized after use on AIDS patients.
Needles should not be bent after use, but should be promptly placed in a puncture-resistant container used solely for such disposal. Needles should not be reinserted into their original sheaths before being discarded into the container, since this is a common cause of needle injury.
Disposable syringes and needles are preferred. Only needle-locking syringes or one-piece needle-syringe units should be used to aspirate fluids from patients, so that collected fluid can be safely discharged through the needle, if desired. If reusable syringes are employed, they should be decontaminated before reprocessing.
A private room is indicated for patients who are too ill to use good hygiene, such as those with profuse diarrhea, fecal incontinence, or altered behavior secondary to central nervous system infections. Precautions appropriate for particular infections that concurrently occur in AIDS patients should be added to the above, if needed.
* * * * * Source:
Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, “Current Trends Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS): Precautions for Clinical and Laboratory Staffs,” November 4, 1982
November 8, 1982
AIDS Activists Issue Warning to NYC Community
In their New York Native article “We Know Who We Are,” Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz suggests “excessive promiscuity” as a risk factor for contracting AIDS.
After seeing the disease quickly progress and kill people they knew, they wanted to do something that could save lives. In their article, they warned readers against “the cumulative effects of re-exposure to CMV [cytomegalovirus] and other infections.”
“Deep down, we know who we are and why we are sick,” they wrote for the November 8, 1982 edition of the gay weekly.
The reason why men were sick, they theorized, was because they lived a life of “excessive promiscuity on the urban gay circuit of bathhouses, backrooms, balconies, sex clubs, meat racks and tearooms.”
Callen and Berkowitz argued that AIDS was caused by a combination of factors associated with a “promiscuous lifestyle” – drug use, multiple sexual partners and repeated exposure to other sexually-transmissible infections.
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 Callen and Berkowitz of creating unnecessary panic in the community and working against the tide of gay liberation.
“It was widely criticized – not least because it had no scientific basis, and also because it assumed that all gay men with AIDS had lived so-called ‘promiscuous’ lifestyles,” said Colin Clews, author of Gay in the ’80s.
Even so, the article served as a clarion call for many and offered a considerable amount of information that could be useful to its readers:
“If you live in or frequent New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or any of several other metropolitan areas, it is likely you will be having sex with men who are sick.”
“If you have sex with sick men, you may get sick, too.”
The article also included these remarkably prescient suggestions:
“Educate yourself about how your body works — particularly the immune response. Read about health, and in particular, read about the present epidemic of AIDS.”
“We need to support each other’s search for sexual alternatives Certainly the future holds more options than phone sex!”
“We need to form support groups. Some will want to consider group or individual therapy or other means of smoothing an admittedly difficult transition.”
Still, the criticism from the community stung. In the months that followed, Callen turned his attention to his personal life, tending to his own health and that of friends. But Berkowitz was not deterred; he began a new project which would eventually become the 46-page groundbreaking pamphlet How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.
Callen would eventually work with Berkowitz on the new project, and they would both take what they learned from the reponse to their Native article to develop an entirely new approach to fostering AIDS awareness. Published in the summer of 1983, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic would be embraced by the community and eventually have a widespread impact on the sexual practices of gay men.
* * * * * Sources:
Richard Berkowitz Files, “We Know Who We Are: Two Gay Men Declare War on Promiscuity” by Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz with Richard Dworkin
AIDS Takes Center Stage at Medical Conference in Toronto
AIDS is the big topic at the Canadian Public Health Association’s inaugural National Conference on Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Toronto.
Learn More.
In the 10 months leading up to the conference, the number of known AIDS cases in Canada had grown from one to 14. So the issue of AIDS was on the minds of many health officials and medical practitioners attending conference hosted by the CPHA’s new Sexually Transmitted Diseases division.
At the conference, Dr. Marc Steben told participants that, due to a dearth of information from the medical community, gay men had resorted to passing information about the new disease amongst themselves. Dr. Steben would go on to dedicate much of his career to HIV/AIDS treatment and become co-president of HPV Global Action, based in Montréal.
At the time of the conference, 14 AIDS cases had been reported in Canada and 10 people had already died. Eleven of the cases were reported in Montreal, and one each in Vancouver, Toronto, and Windsor. Medical officials were reviewing four more cases that they expected to be AIDS.
Many of the conference attendees were also aware of the publication in the gay weekly Body Politic of two articles: “Living with Kaposi’s” by Michael Lynch and “The Real Gay Epidemic: Panic and Paranoia” by Bill Lewis.
In the first article, Lynch wrote an extensive profile of gay men living with Kaposi’s Sarcoma in New York City. Lynch expressed his concern with the NYC community’s eager embrace of the medical community and its discourses of pathology.
“Gays are once again allowing the medical profession to define, restrict, pathologize us,” Lynch wrote in the November 1982 edition of Body Politic. “What used to be a psychiatric pathology is now an infectious one … This panic could never have set in so quickly and so deeply if within the hearts of gay men there weren’t already a persistent anti-sexual sense of guilt ready to be tapped.”
In his article, Lynch called for a response to AIDS from people who were exclusively gay. Lynch was an American-born English professor who settled in Toronto. He would die of AIDS-related illness on July 9, 1991.
His article in Body Politic was accompanied by a shorter piece by Bill Lewis which argued against panic and urged readers to look at the disease through a lens of science.
“Until recently, the cause of the collapse of the immune system was baffling, and everything gay men did that straight men didn’t was dragged forth as a possible cause,” Lewis wrote. “Abundant sex, poppers, fisting, drugs, ingestion of too much sperm, staying up too late — all have been put forward as an explanation.”
Lynch said that these things failed to make sense as explanations, because none could explain cases of AIDS among nearly celibate gay men, hemophiliacs or children.
According to This is Public Health: A Canadian History, CPHA’s director of the AIDS Education and Awareness Program, David Walters, described Canada’s initial public health response to HIV as “fragmented confusion.”
Canada was facing an economic recession and inadequate healthcare funding from different branches of government. This, along with a lack of coordination efforts at the local level and a general resistance to anything involving the needs of the gay community, contributed to a reluctance by public health officials to take action in the early years of the epidemic.
According to Walters, “There seemed to be no safe ground in talking about homosexuality, condoms and needles at national or provincial levels. This reluctance resulted in foot-dragging and unclear messages about needed commitment to educational programs.”
November 18, 1982
Musician & Producer Patrick Cowley Dies
Patrick Cowley, a dance music pioneer who recorded with musician Sylvester in 1977-1979, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Castro District home in San Francisco at the age of 32.
Learn More.
Cowley, who specialized in electronic dance music, joined Sylvester’s studio band and played synthesizer on Sylvester’s 1978 album Step II, which included the hits “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat).”
In addition, he wrote “Stars” and “I Need Somebody to Love Tonight” from Sylvester’s 1979 album Stars. Cowley also joined Sylvester’s live band and joined him on several world tours.
Born in 1950 in Buffalo, New York, Cowley became a drummer with amateur bands while attending Niagara University and later the University of Buffalo. In 1971, he moved to San Francisco to attend the City College of San Francisco, where he studied music.
After working with Sylvester, Cowley produced his own hits, including “Menergy” in 1981 and “Megatron Man,” from the album of the same name. He also wrote and produced the dance single “Right on Target” for San Francisco artist Paul Parker and “Do Ya Wanna Funk,” a collaboration with Sylvester.
Cowley also did a 15’45” long remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” which is now a collector’s item. Mind Warp, his final album, was composed as he felt the increasing effects of HIV infection.
Pitchfork, “Patrick Cowley Is One of Disco’s Most Important Producers. These Are His Must-Hear Deep Cuts” by Jesse Dorris, January 17, 2018
The Guardian, “San Fran-disco: How Patrick Cowley and Sylvester Changed Dance Music Forever” by Geeta Dayal, October 26, 2016
December 10, 1982
CDC Issues First Report on Pediatric AIDS Case by Transfusion
The case of “an unexplained immunodeficiency” and opportunitistic infections in a 20-month-old infant in San Francisco is described in the CDC’s report.
It was subsequently discovered that the blood transfused to the baby came from a man who was infected with HIV.
“If platelet transfusion contained an etiologic agent for AIDS, one must assume that the agent can be present in the blood of a donor before onset of symptomatic illness and that the incubation period for such illness can be relatively long,” stated the CDC report in an editorial note. “This model for AIDS transmission is consistent with findings described in an investigation of a cluster of sexually related AIDS cases among homosexual men in southern California.”
* * * * * * Source:
Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, “Epidemiologic Notes and Reports Possible Transfusion-Associated Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) — California,” December 10, 1982
December 17, 1982
CDC Reports Additional Pediatric Cases
In another MMWR report, the Centers for Disease Control reports four additional cases of immune-suppressed infants, none of whom received blood transfusions.
Learn More.
The CDC report provides background on the infant cases:
the mother of one infant was a prostitute and IV drug user;
two were the children of Haitian immigrants; and
one was the child of an IV drug-using woman who had died of AIDS.
Although the nature of the immune function described in the four cases was unclear, the report suggests that the infants likely were infected with the AIDS virus and that the death of one of the mothers from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia was probably secondary to AIDS.
The CDC further stated that although the etiology of AIDS remained unknown, a series of epidemiological observations suggested the condition of the infants was caused by an infectious agent.
* * * * * * Source:
Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, “Unexplained Immunodeficiency and Opportunistic Infections in Infants — New York, New Jersey, California,” December 17, 1982
January 1, 1983
Ward 86: First Dedicated AIDS Outpatient Clinic Opens
Ward 86, the worlds first dedicted AIDS outpatient clinic, opens at San Francisco General Hospital, a partnership with the University of California San Francisco.
Learn More.
Ward 86 becomes the gold standard for treating patients living with HIV/AIDS.
The clinic attracted staff passionate about treating people with AIDS. Over time, the clinic team developed the San Francisco Model of Care, which focused on treating patients with compassion and respect; providing an array of health and social services in one facility; and collaborating closely with the local health department and community organizations.
Founded by AIDS pioneers Drs. Paul Volberding, Donald Abrams and Constance Wofsy, the clinic would see thousands of patients annually, ranging in age from 18 to 82, in the coming years.
In June 1983, the inpatient HIV unit, 5B, would also open at San Francisco General Hospital.
Bay Area Reporter, “Hospital’s HIV/AIDS Division Marks 25th Anniversary” by Seth Hemmelgarn, November 27, 2008
San Francisco Chronicle, “SF AIDS Ward 86 – 25 Years of Saving Lives” by Elizabeth Fernandez, December 1, 2008
January 4, 1983
CDC Shares Data on AIDS & Hemophilia with Red Cross
The Public Health Service hosts a meeting convened by the CDC and attended by 200 members of the blood services community to address opportunistic infections in hemophiliacs. At the meeting, the Red Cross and other blood supply organizations receive preliminary data on the indication of the AIDS virus within the blood supply.
Learn More.
At the conference, scientists from the CDC recommended that blood banks begin implementing donor screening measures, such as questioning donors about risk behaviors and running blood donations through a series of tests. Faced with daunting data and the same uncertainties, the blood banks and the plasma companies came away from the conference with different plans..
Playing down the extent of the risk, leaders of the blood banks would decide that the CDC’s evidence did not show conclusively that HIV was a blood-borne disease, and they would decline to screen out potentially infected donors. The blood bank physicians questioned the validity of the CDC data, which correlated of anti-HBc to AIDS cases among a cohort of homosexuals who attended an STD clinic.
By contrast, the plasma companies concurred with the CDC that there was a good chance HIV was being transmitted by their products. They moved very quickly to switch the source of their supply and introduced new methods to inactivate viruses in plasma derivatives. However, they also decided to keep older product batches on the market, and commercial plasma ended up infecting more people than did donated blood.
Getting blood or plasma out of one person and safely into another is a complex process. Blood banks, such as the Red Cross, obtain almost all of their supply from voluntary donors. They process and then distribute freely donated blood to hospitals, which they charge for their services.
Every year, about 14 million units of blood are donated in the U.S. The American Red Cross collects about 45% of the total, blood banks about 42%, hospitals 11%, and the small remainder is imported. About 3.6 million people receive transfusions of these products every year.
In the 1970s, blood collection and transfusion had a number of risks associated with it, in particular the prevalence of hepatitis in the supply. In late 1982, when evidence began to show that a new disease might be spreading through blood products, things became more complicated.
The blood bank scientists accepted that HIV/AIDS appeared to be a threat to the blood supply, but found it difficult to measure the risk. U.S. surveillance systems were ill-equipped to identify diseases with a long incubation period such as AIDS.
The CDC publishes its first article that includes women among those diagnosed with AIDS.
Learn More.
“Epidemiologic Notes and Reports Immunodeficiency among Female Sexual Partners of Males with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) — New York” includes the first cases of AIDS in women participating in a research study.
The MMWR article described the cases of two women who were sexual partners of men diagnosed with AIDS.
In one case, a 37-year-old Black woman began losing weight in June 1982 and had developed oral candidiasis and swollen lymph nodes a month later. Tests revealed she had Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), as well as lymphopenia and a depletion of T-helper cells. She said she was not an intravenous drug user, but her sexual partner since 1976 had a history of IV drug abuse. The woman’s partner died of AIDS in November 1982.
In the second case included in the report, a 23-year-old Hispanic woman developed swollen lymph nodes in early 1982. Tests showed she had elevated immunoglobulin levels, lymphopenia, decreased T-helper cell numbers, and a depressed T-helper/T-suppressor cell ratio. She had no previous illnesses or therapy associated with immunosuppression. Since the summer of 1981, her only sexual partner was a bisexual male who had developed AIDS-related symptoms in 1981.
* * * * * * Source:
Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, “Epidemiologic Notes and Reports Immunodeficiency among Female Sexual Partners of Males with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) — New York,” January 7, 1983
January 7, 1983
APLA Elects Founding Board of Directors
AIDS Project Los Angeles elects its first board of directors, which include Dr. Michael Gottlieb and political organizer Peter Scott. Dr. Joel Weisman and attorney Diane Abbitt serve as the organization’s first co-chairs.
Learn More.
APLA moves into a converted motel built in 1955, located at 937 Cole Street in Hollywood.
Opposing Views in CDC & Red Cross Lead to Blood Screening Delays
Following a meeting hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on opportunistic infections in hemophiliacs, an American Red Cross interoffice memo is released that indicates strong opposition to a widespread screening of blood supply products.
Learn More.
An American Red Cross interoffice memo blasts the CDC after its January 4 meeting, stating, “CDC is likely to continue to play up AIDS.”
The memo goes on to say; “It has long been noted that CDC increasingly needs a major epidemic to justify its existence. To the extent the [blood supply] industry sticks together against CDC, it will appear to some segments of the public at least that we have a self interest which is in conflict with the public interest, unless we can clearly demonstrate that CDC is wrong.”
Donor screening issues arose in mid to late 1982, when cases of AIDS in hemophiliacs were first reported, including the first transfusion-associated AIDS case in an infant.
Between December 1982 and December 1983, there were two critical events that presented opportunities for the blood services community to enact new donor screening and deferral policies to reduce the threat of HIV transmission through blood and blood products.
The first, which occured on January 4, 1983, was at the Public Health Service meeting convened by the CDC. This meeting was widely publicized, and over 200 people attended, including representatives of the FDA, NIH, the National Hemophilia Foundation, the National Gay Task Force, blood banks, and the plasma fractionation industry.
This was where the blood services community first received data on the possibility of a transmissible agent within its blood supply. CDC scientists recommended that blood banks implement specific donor screening measures (such as questioning donors about their risk behaviors and running blood donations through a series of tests).
Some participants in the Atlanta meeting and others in key decision-making roles expressed reservations about the validity of the CDC data and indicated that they did not believe the CDC to be a credible source of information regarding AIDS. Following the conference, American Red Cross officials would encourage colleagues to resist recommendations from the CDC.
The ensuing resistance by blood banks to implementing the CDC’s donor screening measures is now viewed as a critical failure on their part in the effort to limit transmission of HIV early on in the epidemtic.
The second critical event would occur in December 15-16, 1983, when the Blood Products Advisory Committee of the FDA would convene a meeting to discuss all possible options of surrogate marker tests for HIV. This meeting is notable for being the CDC’s second attempt to address the need to implement blood screening as a means to implement safeguards to the blood supply.
In the year between the two meetings, blood banks would continue to collect donations from unscreened members of the public.
The U.S. Health & Human Services Department launched the National AIDS Hotline (NAH). and by the end of the first month, it’s receiving 8,000-10,000 calls a day.
Learn More.
Operated by the U.S. Public Health Service, the AIDS Hotline responds to public inquiries about the disease, and by July 28, the hotline has to be expanded from three phonelines to eight to accommodate the high volume of calls.
In 1985, HHS transferred the hotline to the Center for Disease Control and eventually services were expanded in October 1987 to become the National AIDS Clearinghouse, with electronic linkage to computerized referral databases.
Spanish-languages services on the hotline were not included until August 1988. A month later, the hotline adopted TTY services for the hearing-impaired.
By February 1991, the total of calls to the hotline in eight years of service was 5 million.
First In-Depth Article on AIDS Published in NYT Magazine
The New York Times Magazine releases “AIDS: A New Disease’s Deadly Odyssey,” the first indepth article on AIDS in the mainstream press.
Learn More.
The article describes how the virus — “the century’s most virulent epidemic” — is spreading in “big-city homosexual communities” and has become the second-leading cause of death in hemophiliacs.
Dr. James W. Curran, head of the AIDS task force at the Centers for Disease Control, told the NYT Magazine reporter that AIDS was moving into mainstream America, and scientists still have not identified the disease’s cause or a way to stop its spread.
“The incidence of AIDS has nearly tripled in the past year, from about seven new cases a week to 20 or more,” Dr. Curran says, citing recently released data that shows that the CDC received reports of 92 cases of AIDS in December 1982, about one-third more than had been received in any other previous month.
The article describes how the CDC is struggling to identify the cause of AIDS. The work is being done by 20 full-time physicians and other professionals, with help from 80 professionals working part-time, focusing on four locations of the outbreak – New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami.
The medical investigators have bee able to broadly trace the spread of the disease, the article states.
Beginning in spring 1981, clinicians in New York City began to see a surprising number of young male patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma, an extremely rare cancer usually seen in elderly Mediterranean men
At about the same time, infectious-disease specialists throughout the city noted a surge in another rare disease, Pneumocystis pneumonia. At the weekly citywide infectious-disease meetings sponsored by the city’s Department of Health, where physicians present their most perplexing cases, medical professionals started sharing information about these cases.
In mid-1981, the CDC formed a special task force to investigate these unusual cases, and then published its first findings in June and July in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Of the 116 patients identified at the time, about 30% had Kaposi’s sarcoma, about 50% had Pneumocystis pneumonia, and about 10% had both. The remaining 10% had unusual infections that also usually occur in immunosuppressed patients.
Half of the case subjects lived in New York City, and the next-largest group lived in California. An indepth study of 13 patients in Los Angeles conducted by Dr. William W. Darrow and Dr. David Auerbach, both CDC researchers, was able to compare a list of all the sex partners that the patients (or their survivors) could name for the previous five years with a roster of all the AIDS cases in the country.
The result of the comparison revealed that nine of the 13 case subjects had common sexual contacts. This was the so-called “LA cluster” of AIDS patients. Later, a missing link was found between LA and NYC: a patient from New York was identified as having been a sexual partner of four men in the LA cluster, as well as of four NYC men who also developed AIDS.
The widely-read article also quoted activist Larry Kramer: “You don’t know what it’s like to be gay and living in New York. It’s like being in wartime. We don’t know when the bomb is going to fall.”
Kramer described losing 18 friends in the previous 18 months to AIDS, and said another 12 are seriously ill.
“Doctors and psychiatrists are pleading with the community to learn a new way of socializing. They’re begging us, in the name of all who died, to learn how to date,” said Kramer.
The article also addresses the issue of whether the nation’s blood supply is safe. At the time, the CDC had received a total of eight confirmed reports of hemophiliacs with AIDS, six of whom have died.
”I’m concerned and worried,” says Dr. Joseph Bove, chairman of the American Association of Blood Banks committee on transfusion-transmitted diseases and a professor of laboratory medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine. ”But as a scientist, I have to look at the evidence. And the evidence is that ordinary blood transfusions are not transmitting AIDS.”
Dr. Bove cited the number of people who had received transfusions in the two years since AIDS was first identified — 20 million — and claimed that there was no “epidemic of AIDS spread by blood.”
Dr. Bruce L. Evatt, director of the CDC’s Divisiony of AIDS,” said Dr. Evatt, adding that while the risk appears to be low, it may increase significantly.
At the time the article was published, the CDC had received reports of 958 individuals with the AIDS virus, and 365 were already diseased.
A group of Seattle-area health and business professionals launches the Northwest AIDS Foundation to help provide financial and educational resources to people impacted by AIDS.
Learn More.
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).
– – – – – – –
Sources:
HistoryLink.org (an online encyclopedia of Washington state history)
https://www.historylink.org/file/22555
An AIDS briefing hosted by the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA) draws hundreds of attendees eager for more information on the epidemic.
Learn More.
Speakers include Rep. Henry Waxman, who tells attendees, “I believe that much of the lack of federal research on AIDS has arisen from discrimination intent and self-righteous neglect.”
Held at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, the MECLA breakfast event also features presentations by Dr. Joel Weisman (APLA Co-Chair), Dr. Michael Roth of UCLA’s Department of Allergy and Immunology, Assemblymember Burt Margolin, and Mark Feldman, founder of the “Phooey on AIDS” emergency healthcare fund, according to a report from Pat Rocco.
* * * * * * Source:
March 4, 1983
CDC Gives AIDS a Stigmatizing Label: ‘4H Disease’
Representing four groups that CDC researchers identify as “most at risk” for HIV/AIDS, the four Hs are homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians.
Learn More.
In the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) issued on this date, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pointed to four distinct groups of people in the U.S. who were “at increased risk for developing AIDS.” According to the CDC, those groups were:
homosexual men with multiple sexual partners,
hemophiliacs,
abusers of intravenous drugs (i.e., heroin), and
Haitians (“especially those who have entered the country within the past few years”)
Many in the gay community co-opted the information, referring to it as “the 4H Club,” a sly redefining of its original meaning as a long-standing agricultural youth group.
The MMWR was published at a time when no effective treatment or cure for AIDS was available. People diagnosed with AIDS often had a few years — and sometimes just a few months — left before the disease would kill them.
Two months after this MMWR, the French virologist Luc Montagnier and his team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris would announce their discovery of the virus that causes AIDS. But at the time of this MMWR report, top U.S. researchers were still baffled by the disease and following leads that suggested that the deterioration of the immune system in AIDS patients was caused by a biological substance, likely passed from one person to another through blood.
“Available data suggest that the severe disorder of immune regulation underlying AIDS is caused by a transmissible agent,” the CDC states in its report.
The CDC goes on to recommend that members of high-risk groups refrain from donating blood or plasma.
“As long as the cause remains unknown, the ability to understand the natural history of AIDS and to undertake preventive measures is somewhat compromised,” the CDC report states. “However, the above recommendations are prudent measures that should reduce the risk of acquiring and transmitting AIDS.”
March 1983
Young Legislative Aide Steers AIDS Policy in California
Stan Hadden, a 26-year-old aide to the leader of the state senate, leads the effort in Sacramento to establish the California AIDS Advisory Committee and set up a mechanism for funding AIDS education throughout the state.
Learn More.
Hadden would go on to author much of the state’s HIV-related legislation as a staff member of the Office of then-State Senate President Pro Tempore David Roberti.
Most notably, Haddon would shephard the passage of Senate Bill 910, which established the California AIDS Advisory Committee. The bill included an initial appropriation of $500,000, channeled through the Department of Health Services to some of the state’s community programs which desperately needed funding.
In spite of the meager amount allocated for the program, the main accomplishment was getting any funding at a time when the state was attempting to address a financial crisis and most health programs were suffering from budget reductions.
“AIDS is a national emergency,” Senator Roberti told the media in March 1983 when promoting the merits of SB 910. “It is occurring in epidemic proportions among previously healthy homosexual men, Haitian immigrants, and intravenous drug users, but 6% of those afflcted with the disease are neither homosexuals, IV drug users, Haitians or hemophiliacs.”
At that time, it was unusual for legislators to be educated about HIV. The senator’s awareness of the urgent need for AIDS services could be largely attributed to the work and advocacy of his staffer, Hadden, and the location of his district, which was the Hollywood area.
According to Stephen Morin’s chapter “AIDS: Public Policy and Mental Health Issues” in the 1986 book What to Do About AIDS, Senator Roberti’s legislation, which was researched and drafted by Hadden, was the first significant action that California took in the early days of the AIDS crisis.
“SB 910 required a great deal of advocacy,” said Morin, who was an assistant clinical professor at the University of California San Francisco at the time. “In April 1983, on one of my early trips to the state capital to support that bill, I was joined by Gary Walsh, a friend and psychiatric social worker who had been diagnosed with KS in December 1982. Although AIDS had recently been the cover story in Newsweek, more than half of the legislators with whom we met had never heard of AIDS.”
Around the same time, the California Assembly pushed forward $2.9 million in additional funding for the University of California to work on AIDS research. Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown, whose district was located in San Francisco, introduced an allocation to the UC budget after convening with university researchers working on discovering the cause of AIDS.
“Many of the early breakthroughs in research came from the UC system and were funded through this effort,” Morin wrote. “The discovery of the retrovirus responsible for simian AIDS, for example, was discovered at UC Davis. Later, in Jay Levy’s laboratory at UC San Francisco, a retrovirus responsible for AIDS was isolated.”
In 1985, Hadden would be the staffer behind state legislation to bring a coordinated approach to local HIV/AIDS programs and services. California Senate Bill 1251 allocated about $17 million in funding for AIDS healthcare programs in 1986. In addition, the state directed more than $5 mllion of its federal budget toward research projects and epidemiology studies.
Legislative staffers regarded Haddon as the “unofficial AIDS czar” of California. He was one of only a few in Sacramento who were open about their LGBT identity, journalist Karen Ocamb would later write in The Pride. Scores of administrative and political aides to California legislators remained in the closet, fearful that open knowledge of their sexual identity would end their professional careers. Elected officials and potential candidates who identified as LGBT also remained silenced by the very real fear of ruination.
* * * * * * Sources:
Los Angeles Times, “Stan Hadden: Roberti Aide Influenced AIDS Policy,” December 26, 1991
The Pride, “California Legislative Caucus Honors LGBT Pioneers” by Karen Ocamb
March 14, 1983
Larry Kramer Publishes ‘1,112 and Counting’
Readers of the New York Native take notice of “1,112 and Counting,” AIDS activist Larry Kramer’s urgent plea for the NY Gay Community to get angry at the lack of government support and scientific advances in the fight against AIDS.
Learn More.
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.
* * * * * * Sources:
New Yorker Magazine, “Larry Kramer, Public Nuisance,” by Michael Specter, May 5, 2002
Frontiers Magazine Re-prints ‘1,112 and Counting’ on Cover
Los Angeles publisher Bob Craig publishes activist Larry Kramer’s essay “1,112 and Counting” in Frontiers magazine. Many of the gay bars where the free community magazine is distributed throw it out.
Learn More.
First pubished in the March 14-27, 1983 edition of New York Native, Kramer’s long, comprehensive essay expresses frustration, anger and despair. A newcomer to the gay press, the bi-weekly news-magazine Frontiers gave the essay prominent placement on its cover.
After listing the names of 20 friends who had died of the disease (“and one more, who will be dead by the time these words appear in print”), Kramer closed with a plea: “Volunteers Needed for Civil Disobedience.”
Joe MacDonald — the most popular male model of his time and a favorite photography subject of Andy Warhol and Bruce Weber — dies of AIDS-related illness in New York at the age of 37.
Learn More.
Square-jawed and classicly handsome, he was frequently featured in GQ magazine during its Haber-Coulianos-Sterzin era, described by Meredith Etherington-Smith, who was GQ’s editor in the 1970s, as “so Zeitgeisty, in a tiny window of time when homosexuality was chic but not yet widely accepted.” Considered to be the first male supermodel, MacDonald counted David Hockney among his many friends and he enjoyed collecting art.
Friends were shocked to see how much MacDonald’s appearance had changed when his photo was featured in an early 1983 advertisement appearing in The New York Times fashion supplement, the results of MacDonald’s final modeling assignment.
“He looked very old,” Susi Gilder, a model who knew MacDonald personally, would tell New York magazine for an article published in June 1983. “The eyes were just very sad.”
“When we first started reading about [HIV/AIDS] and hearing about it, people did not want to acknowledge that this disease didn’t discriminate,” Kors told Vogue. “People thought, oh, if you’re young and you’re healthy and you, quote, live a clean life, you’re not going to get it. And then they started seeing people like Joe MacDonald and realized this was not selective. The reality became very harsh at that point.”
As the first AIDS casualty in the fashion industry, the news of MacDonald’s death sent shockwaves through New York.
“I remember walking in NYC on Columbus and 83rd – on the corner – one summer night,” model Rosie Vela told The AIDS Memorial on Instagram. “I passed Joe sitting at a crowded outdoors cafe. It was a year before he died.”
“He stood up when he saw me, and invited me to sit with him,” Vela recalled. “He was gorgeous, elegant and kind. I’ll never forget how welcome he made me feel. A true gentleman.”
City of San Francisco and Shanti Open AIDS Hospice
The City of San Francisco partners with Shanti Project to open a hospice-type care center for people with AIDS.
Learn More.
In 1983, the AIDS epidemic began to inundate the Shanti Project’s emotional support services program. The organization responded by shifting its focus to exclusively serve people with AIDS (PWAs) and expanding its services to include assistance with everyday chores for debilitated PWAs and the creation of the first residence program in the U.S.
Shanti Project was founded by psychiatrist Dr. Charles Garfield in 1974 to offer peer support services to people with life-threatening illnesses. Shanti trained volunteers to provide dying and chronically ill patients with emotional support.
As Shanti transitioned its services to meet the needs of PWAs, Clifford Morrison was among the volunteers who took part in the volunteer training in December 1982. Morrison was a clinical nurse specialist and founder of the AIDS Ward (Ward 5B) at San Francisco General Hospital, and he immediately knew that Shanti’s emotional care program would fill a large need at Ward 5B.
“I decided we needed to have psychosocial support,” Morrison told the San Francisco AIDS Oral History Project in 1995-1996. “The nurses were going to be busy taking care of the physical needs of patients, and I wanted them to have an ability to recognize and deal with the psychosocial issues. But they were not going to be able to handle all of that.”
Morrison pitched his idea to Jim Geary, Shanti’s then executive director, and recommended the organization secure the funding for the project from the City of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health.
After some negotiating with city hall, the funding was put into place for Shanti to provide a program of volunteer counselors for Ward 5B. The result was a place where PWAs could receive both medical care and emotional support.
“All those things did come together, and we did see the advantages right away of having these resources centralized,” Morrison said. “And almost immediately, what we found was that people from within the system — within the Department of Public Health, within the hospital, from other hospitals — started calling and coming to us and saying, ‘Oh, well, you’ve developed this approach to care, so how can we do it?'”
When Morrison shared Ward 5B’s model of care with healthcare professionals, he often heard excuses why the model wouldn’t work at other hospitals. It was just “too unique.”
The Ward 5B-Shanti collaboration developed what became to be known as the San Francisco Model of Care, a patient-centered care model that emphasizes interdisciplinary care with a team of doctors, nurses, social workers, case managers, psychiatrists, addiction specialists, nutritionists and so on.
“It wasn’t new, I didn’t invent it,” Morrison said. “It’s just maybe I’m one of the first people to pick it all up and put it together and see.”
April 30, 1983
Infant Diagnosed with AIDS Following Blood Transfusion
Lancet medical journal reports on the case of an infant who developed multiple opportunistic infections when 6 months old after he received multiple blood transfusions when he was just days old. The infant dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 17 months.
Learn More.
Between the age of 6-14 months old, the infant developed symptoms of hepatitis, thrush, Candida dermatitis, otitis media, and Mycobacterium avium intracellulare. Tests revealed raised immunoglobulin levels, decreased mononuclear-cell responses to allogeneic cells and mitogen, and a decreased T-cell ratio.
It was determined that a blood donor, who was well at the time of blood donation, had died of AIDS about 17 months after donating. The case study’s researchers find that the infant likely acquired AIDS (“a transmissible infectious agent’) from the blood transfusion.
* * * * * * Sources:
Lancet, “Acquired Immunodeficiency in an Infant: Possible Transmission by Means of Blood Products” by A J Ammann, M J Cowan, D W Wara, P Weintrub, S Dritz, H Goldman, H A Perkins; April 30, 1983
April 30, 1983
Circus Event Collects $250,000 for AIDS Organization
Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus holds a special one-night event to benefit the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, raising $250,000.
Learn More.
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.”
The Kaposi’s Sarcoma Foundation organizes the first AIDS Candlelight Vigils in New York and San Francisco, creating the first public demonstration with people living with AIDS and bringing global awareness to the epidemic.
Learn More.
Photos of the event are circulated around the world, revealing for many the growing health crisis. It is the first time that people with AIDS come together in a public demonstration.
5,000 Attend Candlelight March at Federal Building in Los Angeles
APLA sponsors a Candlelight March in Westwood attended by 5,000 people. Activists from the Los Angeles area do their part to bring awareness about AIDS to the community and the nation.
Learn More.
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.”
* * * * * * Sources:
APLA Health, “35 Years: A Collective Voice of Advocacy”
The Body, “AIDS Project Los Angeles | Public Policy and Communication”
May 1983
Daniel P. Warner Launches LA Shanti, Promotes Death with Dignity
Daniel P. Warner co-founds the non-profit LA Shanti Foundation, the first organization in Southern California to provide direct services for people with AIDS that also promotes death with dignity.
Learn More.
Located on La Brea Avenue, L.A. Shanti became a leader in quality volunteer-driven programs that provided information and emotional support using the Shanti model of compassionate presence.
Warner served as the organization’s first Executive Director.
“I have committed myself to helping the fight against the misconceptions and prejudices, which can overwhelm a person with this infection, by working as a health educator for the city of West Hollywood,” Warner would write to the Los Angeles Times in 1988.
Warner, who was HIV-positive, would receive Shanti’s first Commitment to Service Award in 1991. The same year, he would receive Los Angeles County’s Community Service Award and a certificate of recognition from the state Senate.* * * * * * Source:
Los Angeles Times, “Daniel P. Warner; AIDS Activist, Shanti Foundation Co-Founder,” June 15, 1993
May 18, 1983
Congress Passes Bill with AIDS Research Funding
The U.S. Congress passes the first bill with funding targeted for AIDS research and treatment — $12 million for agencies within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
20/20 on ABC Broadcasts In-Depth Story on AIDS Crisis
The news show 20/20 broadcasts the first investigative report on AIDS for network TV with reporter Geraldo Rivera.
Learn More.
The 17-minute story features footage of hundreds of activists in AIDS memorial marches in San Francisco, New York City and Houston, as well as interviews with persons living with AIDS Ken Ramsaur, Bob Cecchi, Ron Resio, and Bill Burke
Reporter Geraldo Rivera charts the history of AIDS, starting with the first AIDS cases appearing in New York City and San Francisco in 1979 and the early occurances with members of the gay population, intravenous drug users, and Haitian immigrants.
For the story, Rivera interviewed several people from the front lines of the AIDS crisis, including Marcus Conant, M.D., of the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, who warns that the “entire American public” should be concerned about the disease. Dr. Conant tells Rivera that AIDS will become a major health crisis in the U.S. if research funds are not quickly allocated to develop effective ways to prevent and treat the disease.
“And so the evil genie is out of the bottle,” says Rivera, adding that AIDS has been diagnosed in 16 states already.
Rivera also interviews Larry Kramer, co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York. In his characteristic animated fashion, Kramer criticizes The New York Times for failing to report on the AIDS crisis and expresses his frustration with the Centers for Disease Control for failing to add AIDS to its list of communicable diseases that public officials are required to report.
Rivera also includes footage of Rep. Henry Waxman in Congressional hearings, voicing criticism of the Reagan Administration for its lack of resources and action.
French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann identify the virus that “might be” responsible for AIDS, calling it “LAV” (lymphadenopathy associated virus).
Learn More.
The following year, U.S. researcher Robert Gallo announced he had found the “probable” cause of AIDS, the retrovirus HTLV-III. The two viruses — HTLV-III and LAV — turned out to be one and the same, and in May 1986 it became officially known as the human immuno-deficiency virus, or HIV.
Barre-Sinoussi made her discovery while under French virologist Luc Montagnier, and both would go on to win the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for identifying the AIDS virus. Barre-Sinoussi’s discovery ultimately led to the development of anti retroviral medications that have turned AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable chronic disease.
Barré-Sinoussi dedicated her career as a scientist and as an activist to halting the spread of AIDS. Being on the front lines of the AIDS devastation was, she admitted, “very tough psychologically.”
The pressure was so intense that, once antiretroviral therapy was discovered in 1996, Barré-Sinoussi fell into a depression, and pulled back from her public commitments. But she soon returned to the fight, often travelling around the world to meet with political leaders and healthcare providers seeking solutions to local epidemics.
“Like everybody, I have some times in my life when I’m pessimistic,” she said. “I wonder whether I should continue … Then I go and have a trip to Africa or Southeast Asia and have a small meeting with people affected by HIV, and I forget my mood. I say, ‘OK, let’s go on. Let’s continue. This is real life. Don’t think about yourself.'”
She currently directs the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit at the Pasteur Institute, which is still looking for a vaccine or a functional cure.
* * * * * * Sources:
The Nobel Prize, “Women Who Changed Science: Francoise Barré-Sinoussi”
CNN, “HIV discovery ‘will change your life forever’” by Jen Christensen, June 4, 2013
Nature magazine, “The discovery of HIV-1” by Sonja Schmid, November 28, 2018
PBS News Hour, “How the Discovery of HIV Led to a TransAtlantic Research War” by Dr. Howard Markel, March 24, 2020
Ken Ramsauer – First Person with AIDS on TV – Memorialized in Central Park
Ken Ramsauer, a businessman who was featured in reporter Geraldo Rivera’s investigative report for ABC’s 20/20, dies of AIDS-related illness in New York City. He was 29 years old.
Learn More.
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.
* * * * * * * Sources:
The New York Times, “1,500 Attend Central Park Memorial Service for AIDS Victim” by Lindsey Gruson, June 14, 1983
The New York Times publishes its first front-page story on AIDS, “Health Chief Calls AIDS Battle ‘No. 1 Priority’.” The article reports on the federal response to the growing AIDS epidemic.
Learn More.
By the time the article reaches newstands, 1,450 cases of AIDS have been reported and 558 of those individuals have died.
May 27, 1983
3,000 Marchers in LA Demand AIDS Research
A Candlelight March in Los Angeles brings 3,000 activists into the streets, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Learn More.
The event’s organizer and emcee, Matt Redman of AIDS Project Los Angeles, told the crowd, “Let’s put the screws to the Reagan administration.”
Redman blasted Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Edward Brandt for asserting that AIDS funding was adequate. “That’s bullshit!” he declared.
As reported cases in Los Angeles County jump from 19 in April 1982 to 81 in May 1983, activists mobilize to demand more AIDS research.
* * * * * * * Source:
Tell Me David, “Candles in the Wind” by David Hunt, February 6, 2016
June 1983
Chicago Hospital Opens Sable/Sherer Clinic for HIV/AIDS
The Sable/Sherer Clinic at Cook County Hospital is created to treat people with HIV/AIDS.
Learn More.
Doctors Renslow Sherer and Ron Sable opened their clinic at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital shortly after they encountered their first HIV/AIDS cases.
“I saw my first AIDS patient in 1982 at Cook County Hospital during my second month as a general physician,” Dr. Sherer told Windy City Times. “He was a young, gay, African American man who could no longer do his daily six-mile run. At first we weren’t exactly sure that it was AIDS, but then he had the Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, and the rest of his symptoms seemed to fit.”
At about the same time, his colleague, Dr. Sable, told him about treating two people with AIDS symptoms and that they should start preparing to treat a lot more patients infected by HIV.
When they initially launched the clinic, they didn’t refer to it openly as an AIDS clinic. They were concerned that the stigma surrounding AIDS would cause pushback from hospital administrators, others in the medical center and the surrounding community.
Instead, they quietly directed patients with HIV/AIDS symptoms to be treated at the clinic. In their first year together, Drs. Sherer and Sable worked with 141 patients.
The doctors not only co-founded Chicago’s first AIDS clinic, but they were also among the founders of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, which raised private funding for the clinic.
In 1993, Dr. Sable announced in a letter he sent to hundreds of friends and colleagues that he was HIV-positive, according to the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. He cut back on most of his organizational activities, and spent more time with his friends and his partner of 12 years, Jose Narvaez.
A large public event was held at the South Shore Cultural Center to celebrate Dr. Sable’s lifetime of achievements. He was weak, but managed 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.”
‘How to Have Sex in an Epidemic’ Hits the Streets of NYC
Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen publish How to Have Sex in an Empidemic: One Approach.
Learn More.
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.
* * * * * * Sources:
POZ magazine, “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: 30th Anniversary” by Joseph Sonnabend, M.D., May 17, 2013
Denver Principles Adopted after AIDS Forum Take-over
The Denver Principles are adopted after 11 gay men living with AIDS crash the stage at the National AIDS Forum and demand attention.
Learn More.
At the National AIDS Forum in Denver, about 400 gay and lesbian healthcare workers had gathered to share information about the new disease creeping across various populations in the U.S. Also in attendance were AIDS activists from New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Kansas City and Denver.
It was the first time activists from different U.S. cities convened in one place for the first time for the purpose of taking action. They found they had significant differences in their approaches to the AIDS crisis. In particular, the contingents from New York, led by Michael Callen, and San Francisco, led by Bobbi Campbell, dominated the discussion between the activists, lobbying for their different agendas.
“The West Coast cadre saw the epidemic in starkly political terms,” wrote France in his book How to Survive a Plague. “They rejected the phrases ‘AIDS patient’ and ‘AIDS victim’ as being reductive.”
In comparison, the NYC contingent was focused on the theory that widespread auto-immune disorders in the gay population had been caused by promiscuity and sexually transmitted disease. They were more concerned about getting this message out to the community and less concerned about how people outside the community viewed them.
The one area they could all agree on, according to France, was that “it was time for the sick to assert themselves.”
Led by Campbell, the activists crafted a statement on the rights of people living with AIDS which included the demands to be at the table when policy is made, to be treated with dignity, and to be called “people with AIDS,” and not “AIDS victims.”
After making copies of their statement, they attended the closing session of the conference and eleven of them siezed the stage, unfurling a banner that read Fighting for Our Lives.
“One by one, each of the eleven men declaimed one of the eleven points until the whote list of recommendations and responsibilities had been publicly uttered for the first time,” wrote France in How to Survive a Plague. “The last line was Callen’s to deliver. Looking from the dias, he saw that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. For many of the assembled delegates, representing parts of the country not yet touched by AIDS, seeing those doomed young men in that line was devastating.”
The statement became known as The Denver Principles, and it serves as the charter for the founding of the National Association of People with AIDS.
The AIDS Legal Referral Panel of San Francisco becomes the first legal services provider in the nation dedicated to meeting the needs of people with HIV/AIDS.
Learn More.
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.
Genesis of AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin is Launched
The Brady East STD Clinic responds to the emergence of HIV in other states by re-focusing its services and education programs around HIV and AIDS.
Learn More.
Some of the volunteers at the Brady East STD Clinic (BESTD Clinic) formed the Milwaukee AIDS Project (MAP) as a committee of the clinic and began preparing for the inevitable spread of HIV to the city.
When in 1985 concerns about the new disease were growing, BESTD Clinic President Nova Clite, MAP Director Sue Dietz, local business leader Marc Haupert, and community leader Don Schwamb decided to form a new organization, to be spun off from BESTD. The new organization was the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin (ARCW), and Sue Dietz became its Executive Director.
ARCW’s first home was an old residence near what was then St. Anthony Hospital, and later moved to a location at 315 W. Court St., just west of the old Schlitz Brewery complex (the same building that would years later house the Milwaukee LGBT Community Center).
During the early years of the epidemic, one of the most pressing needs was housing. One of the first major fundraisers was for the rent and renovation of a house in the Sherman Park neighborhood, near Sherman and Hadley, to provide a residence for people with AIDS who had no other place to live.
In 1993, ARCW would merge with an AIDS service organization located in the northern city of Eau Claire, which helped to establish a statewide presence. In 1996, ARCW would also merge with the Center Project in Green Bay and Appleton, Wisconsin. By 2007, ARCW would become the largest provider of medical care to people with HIV in Wisconsin.
The first AIDS case in Wisconsin was reported in 1983, and the number of cases reached 100 in 1986. By 1991, the number of cases exceeded 1,000. In 1995, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Wisconsin would peak with the cumulative number of HIV cases exceeding 3,000 and cumulative deaths exceeding 2,000.
Thanks largely to the quick response of BESTD Clinic volunteers, along with the state’s largely rural populations, the spread of HIV was more effectively controlled in Wisconsin than in most states.
Growing numbers of infants infected with AIDS in utero are abandoned in New York City hospitals, according to a New York Times article.
Learn More.
On Page 22, the Times gives its report on the alarming cases of babies and young children who are born with the AIDS virus and subsequently left at New York hospitals. The article carries no byline.
The article also exposes the discrepancy between the total number of pediatric AIDS cases nationwide being reported by the Centers for Disease Control (18) and the numbers of infants and children being treated by doctors in the NY metro area alone (more than 63).
In the article, New York pediatric immunologist Arye Rubinstein, M.D., blamed the CDC’s low case number on the federal government’s “unduly strict” definition of AIDS. Because of this narrow definition, the CDC counted only children who had a malignancy or opportunistic infections.
Dr. Rubinstein told the Times that he was treating several patients whose symptoms did not fall within the CDC definition but most definitely were indications of infection by the AIDS virus. The article cites Dr. Rubinstein’s pediatric AIDS caseload as consisting of 44 patients. James Oleske, M.D, of St. Michael’s Hospital and the Newark College of Medicine was cited with a caseload of 18 pediatric patients and six more suspected cases.
In the years to come, Dr. Rubinstein would become very vocal about CDC case totals being undercounted and the need for the CDC to broaden its definition of pediatric AIDS — and he wasn’t the only doctor in the field to do so. Finally in 1985, the CDC would broaden its defnition of AIDS, based on recommendations developed at the Conference of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, and the CDC would modify the definition again in 1987 and 1993.
The Times article also chronicled the plight of young children with AIDS who had been abandoned in NYC hospitals. Doctors said the children have been left in hospitals by mothers who had died or are dying of AIDS.
Since the City did not have a place to house parentless AIDS children, they were left in the hospitals that were treating their conditions. The Times reported that the City’s welfare agency, Special Services for Children, was seeking foster homes for the children, but no one would take them.
This article was among the first to focus on the heartbreaking situation of the population that would become known as “AIDS babies,” children born with the AIDS virus and then orphaned. In the 1980s, most of these children died within two years.
* * * * * * Sources:
The New York Times, “Young Victims of AIDS Suffer its Harsh Stigma,” June 17, 1984
National Institutes of Health, “Survival of Children with HIV in the United States has Improved Dramatically Since 1990s, New Analysis Shows,” December 18, 2009
June 19, 1983
Televangelist Jerry Falwell Claims AIDS is Punishment for Homosexuality
Conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, tells his followers that “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”
Learn More.
A notious homophobe and segregationalist popular with religious conservatives, Falwell continues the campaign of stigmatization against the LGBTQ community that he began in the 1970s with Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign.
The following month, Falwell’s organization, Moral Majority, would publish a report on AIDS titled “Homosexual Diseases Threaten American Families.” It featured a white couple with two young children, all wearing surgical masks, suggesting AIDS is a gay disease that can be spread casually. It also poses gay men as adverse to “families,” as if the two were mutually exclusive.
Many suspect that Falwell’s close ties to President Ronald Reagan directly contributed to the Administration’s refusal to address AIDS.
* * * * * * Sources:
The Milford Daily News, “Press: The Sad Legacy of Jerry Falwell” by Bill Press, May 18, 2007
‘I Will Survive’ Addresses Epidemic on Public Radio in Los Angeles
Produced for a gay audience, I Will Survive is broadcast on Los Angeles public radio station KPFK 90.7 FM as part of a day of programming celebrating gay pride month.
Learn More.
In the one-hour radio show, producer David Hunt examined “the conflicting currents of fear, greed, despair and denial that confronted the gay community in the early years of the AIDS epidemic.”
“For its time, the documentary is a fairly clear-eyed look at the emerging AIDS epidemic,” writes Hunt on his website Tell Me David. “It correctly emphasizes the medical consensus that a virus is the cause of the disease, and urges education, personal responsibility and collective action as the tools for fighting it.”
Hunt credits early activists with saving the lives of many people in the community in the early 1980s.
“Without the leadership of people like Larry Kramer, Randy Shilts, Harry Britt, Bobbi Campbell, Matt Redman and others, the suffering would have been far worse, the toll far greater,” he said. “I remember wondering in the early days, in 1981 and 1982, whether any of us would survive. Titling the documentary I Will Survive was an act of false bravado as much as it was a hat tip to Bobbi Campbell, who wore a button emblazoned with that message.”
* * * * * * Source:
Tell Me David, “I Will Survive” by David Hunt, May 1, 2015
June 23, 1983
Stars Align for KS Benefit in San Francisco
Movie actresses Debbie Reynolds and Shirley MacLaine head the lineup for the annual benefit for the Kaposi Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation, founded by Cleve Jones, Marcus Conant, Frank Jacobson, and Richard Keller.
Learn More.
“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.
The Pride LA, “Debbie Reynolds, Early Hollywood AIDS Activist” by Karen Ocamb, December 29, 2016
June 23, 1983
Reagan Staffer Patrick Buchanan Vilifies Gay Men in Op-Ed
Patrick J. Buchanan, President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, publishes an op-ed in the New York Post, writing: “The poor homosexuals — they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.”
Learn More.
In his op-ed in the New York Post, Pat Buchanan echoes the Moral Majority position that the AIDS epidemic was God seeking revenge against gay people.
Buchanan concluded his essay by saying homosexuals should be banned from food-handling jobs, and that the Democratic party’s decision to hold its 1983 convention in San Francisco will endanger delegates and their families.
Visitors to the city, he writes, will be at the mercy of “homosexuals who belong to a community that is a common carrier of dangerous, communicable and sometimes fatal diseases.”
* * * * * * Source:
ThinkProgress, “Flashback — Buchanan: AIDS is Nature’s ‘Awful Retribution’ Against Homosexuality” by Igor Volsky, May 24, 2011
June 23, 1983
NIH Researchers Share AIDS Data & Theories
Researchers from the National Institutes of Health convene at the Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland to receive an update on AIDS, led by Anthony Fauci, M.D.
Learn More.
Then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci led a presentation that summarized what was currently known about AIDS.
The presentation’s corresponding paper was co-authored by Dr. Fauci with Abe Macher, M.D.; Dan Longo, M.D.; H. Clifford Lane, M.D.; Alain Rook, M.D.; Henry Masur, M.D.; and Edward P. Gelmann, M.D. Among the conclusions the researchers made were:
– The cause AIDS was unknown but likely due to “a transmissible agent, most likely a virus.”
– AIDS was spread “by sexual contact, particularly homosexual activity.”
– Blood-borne transmission was “the other major recognized form of spread of the disease.”
– It was “highly likely” that the disease could not readily spread through casual, nonsexual, non-blood-borne routes.
The paper considers the possibility that the disease may kill all who are infected with it, and calls it “one of the most extraordinary transmissible diseases in history.”
* * * * * * Source:
Annals of Internal Medicine | American College of Physicians, “Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Epidemiologic, Clinical, Immunologic, and Therapeutic Considerations” by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Abe M. Macher, M.D., Dan L. Longo, M.D., H. Clifford Lane, M.D., Alain H. Rook, M.D., Henry Masur, M.D., Edward P. Gelmann, M.D., January 1, 1984
June 1983
Mark Feldman of ‘Phooey on AIDS Fund’ Dies
Mark Feldman, a board member of the synagogue Congregation Sha’ar Zahav who founded the “Phooey on AIDS” emergency fund, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 31.
Learn More.
An emerging leader in the Bay Area Jewish and gay communities, Feldman was director of admissions at New College and co-director of publicity for Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, a largely gay and lesbian San Francisco synagogue.
After he was diagnosed with AIDS and learned of others in the community who were also ill, Feldman asked the congregation’s Bikkur Cholim (outreach to the ill) Committee to start a “Phooey on AIDS” fund to support the financial needs of members and the community. This fund made annual gifts to the organizations providing direct care including Shanti, Project Open Hand, the San Francisco General Hospital Ward 86, and the Food Bank of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, according to Paul Cohen in My Jewish Learning.
After gay men were prohibited from donating blood, the women of Sha’ar Zahav organized a blood drive. Feldman gave every woman who donated blood a rose in appreciation, according to Rabbi Leslie Bergson.
Feldman was the first Sha’ar Zahav congregant to die of AIDS.
During the first years of the AIDS epidemic, Rabbi Allen Bennett served as Sha’ar Zahav’s spiritual leader.
“You were on call 24/7,” Rabbi Bennett told The Jewish News of Northern California “There was no easing up. Every day there were more casualties and, as things progressed, more fatalities. Until things started to taper off, I and an awful lot of my friends were losing, on average, a friend or acquaintance once a week for probably five years.”
“I remember the devastation of hearing the names on the Kaddish list of young people,” says Rabbi Eric Weiss, a Sha’ar Zahav member and executive director of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center (the Institute on Aging). “During the service, everyone stands, links arms and sings ‘Hinei Mah Tov.’ I remember the utter sadness when there were people we couldn’t put our arms around anymore.”
My Jewish Learning, “Remembering on World AIDS Day” by Paul Cohen, December 1, 2015.
Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, “40th Anniversary Shabbat,” drash by Rabbi Leslie Bergson, February 23, 2018
June 1983
Employer Puts AIDS Activist on Medical Leave Without Pay
Employed as a legal clerk, Michael Callen found himself put on medical leave without pay when his employer, a law firm, learned he was diagnosed with AIDS.
Learn More.
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.
* * * * * * Source:
July 1, 1983
Stanford Blood Bank Begins Screening Donations
Stanford Blood Center institutes the first blood testing program specifically intended to reduce the risk of transfusion transmission of AIDS.
Learn More.
Between July 1983 and June 1985, a total of 33,831 blood donations were screened by Standord. Of those donations, 586 were shown to have low CD4 counts and were discarded as possibly infected.
Stanford retained the serum samples from the 586 donations and years later, when a test became available, screened them specifically for HIV. Dr. Engleman found that 1.9% of these donations were HIV positive — which translates to approximately 33 HIV-infections that were avoided.
As the first blood bank in the U.S. to screen donated blood for HIV/AIDS indicators, the new policy eliminated donations from people with low CD4 T cells. The loss of CD4 T cells in AIDS is what renders patients susceptible to a wide range of infectious diseases. Thus, the screening was considered a surrogate test, not necessarily identifying the presence of HIV/AIDS but instead identifying indicators of possible HIV/AIDS infection.
The new screening system came about due to an increasing awareness in the San Francisco medical community of AIDS and a skeptical view toward existing blood protection practices. In the spring of 1983, Stanford Hospital treated two patients with AIDS. Both had received transfusions at Bay Area institutions and neither had been identified as being in a high-risk group.
“At this point, my colleagues and I at Stanford Blood Center felt that the presence of the presumed etiologic agent for AIDS in the local blood supply could not be ignored,” recalls Ed Engleman, MD, of the Stanford Blood Center. “Because of the potential lethality of this infection, we felt that self-deferral should not be relied upon as the sole means of protecting the blood supply.”
The self-deferral practice that Dr. Engleman refers to is the U.S. Public Health Service’s then-recommendation of relying on donors to voluntarily identify themselves as a member of a high-risk group. Blood centers around the country commonly implemented the PHS recommendation with an information sheet provided to prospective donors that described AIDS risk groups and requested that donors exclude themselves if they met the definition of risk.
“It was predictable that this approach wouldn’t work very well,” says Dr. Engleman. “First, it relied entirely on donor self-deferral. Second, the PHS definition of homosexual AIDS risk behavior was vague, making it possible for a prospective donor with a history of homosexual activity to feel that he personally was not at risk for AIDS and to proceed with blood donation.”
Stanford University Blood Bank’s screening procedure was costly and had to be performed manually, but Stanford found it relatively easy to implement because it was already conducting immunological research and had access to a flow cytometer and the appropriate laboratory setting.
Around this time, the American Red Cross, American Association of Blood Banks, and the Council of Community Blood Centers released a joint statement estimating the risk of getting AIDS from transfusion as “one in a million.” This was an overly optimistic view, it turned out.
Just a few years later, when the first HIV antibody test was made available in 1985, an estimated one in 700 units of blood donations in U.S. metropolitan areas were found to be infected with HIV. In San Francisco, the frequency was closer to one in 100.
“We estimate that the total number of transfusion-related HIV transmissions that occurred from 1983 to 1985 was at least 10,000-20,000,” Dr. Engleman says. “It seems evident that most of these cases could have been avoided had our test been used.”
* * * * * * Source:
July 5, 1983
Reverend Troy Perry Debates Jerry Falwell on TV
Metropolitan Community Church founder Rev. Troy Perry debates Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell on the subject of “the AIDS controversy” on national TV.
Learn More.
In the debate, Falwell calls for the mandatory closing of bathhouses, saying that AIDS is caused by homosexual promiscuity. Then he walks back his previous statement regarding AIDS as a punishment against homosexuality. He cites incorrect numbers regarding deaths and illness from AIDS.
The Rev. Perry responds, saying that diseases are the result of many variables, and that Falwell is dimishing the dangers of AIDS when he compares it with herpes. He goes on to tell the TV audience that the majority of members in the LGBT community are in loving relationships, and that is the norm.
The Rev. Perry founded the LGBTQ-inclusive Metropolitan Community Church in 1968 after recovering from an attempt to end his own life. He is well-known in the community for filing suit against the Los Angeles Police Department to clear the way for the city’s first Pride parade in 1970.
* * * * * * Source:
July 17, 1983
WeHo Gay Bars & Bathhouses Empty as Misinformation Spreads
Gay bars in West Hollywood and Los Angeles report a 20% drop in business, according to the Los Angeles Times. Six area bathhouses also report a 50% plunge in revenue.
Learn More.
Some community members, like Circus Disco owner Gene La Pietra, think the drop may be related to an earlier news article that erroneously reported AIDS can be spread through casual contact.
* * * * * * Source:
July 17, 1983
Soviet Disinformation about AIDS Published in Indian Newspaper
The Indian newspaper Patriot publishes an anonymous report claiming that the AIDS virus was created by the Pentagon as a potential biological weapon. The account, which was an entire fabrication, was part of a Soviet disinformation campaign.
Learn More.
In a letter to the editor published on the front page of the Patriot under the title “AIDS May Invade India: Mystery Disease Caused by U.S. Experiments,” the writer cited the involvement of U.S. special services and the Pentagon in the appearance and rapid spread of AIDS.
The writer claimed to be a “well-known American scientist and anthropologist,” but in fact, the source of the account was a disinformation campaign led by the KGB, the foreign intelligence agency of the Soviet Union which was engaged in the “Cold War” against the U.S.
The Patriot was “a known front for KGB disinformation,” according to the Wilson Center, a U.S. organization dedicated to non-partisan counsel on global affairs.
The letter claimed that the AIDS virus was developed at Fort Detrick, an Army-run biological warfare laboratory located in Frederick, Maryland. Because the U.S. military was allegedly conducting experiments in neighboring Pakistan, the letter’s claims inferred that AIDS could soon spread to India.
July 25, 1983
Ward 5B: Inpatient AIDS Ward Opens in San Francisco
San Francisco General Hospital opens Ward 5B, the first dedicated inpatient AIDS ward in the U.S. The ward consists of all-volunteer caregivers and staff.
Learn More.
Ward 5B is the answer to a petition organized by psychiatric nurse Cliff Morrison, demanding compassionate, holistic care for AIDS patients in San Francisco. By August, the ward’s 12 beds are fully occupied.
Run by Morrison and an all-volunteer team, Ward 5B allowed patients to create their own family made up of friends and partners. The nurses recognized that many of the patients were isolated from their families or had long-term, though not legal, partners.
The ward was one of the first units in the country that allowed visitors at any time.
* * * * * * Source:
August 1, 1983
UCLA Researchers Push for Discovery of AIDS Cause
At a UCLA medical conference, Los Angeles researchers urge the scientific community to focus their work on identifying the cause of “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.”
Learn More.
In a presentation to the conference led by Michael S. Gottlieb, M.D., the UCLA researchers highlighted critical issues surrounding new disease, including diagnosis methodology, screening of blood products, and treatment of opportunistic infections and cancers related to the illness. They emphasized that the prognosis for recovery in affected persons was dire, as there still was no effective treatment once the illness took hold.
Co-authoring the presentation with Dr. Gottlieb were Jerome E. Groopman, M.D.; Wilfred M. Weinstein, M.D.; John L. Fahey, M.D.; and Roger Detels, M.D.* * * * * * Source:
August 1, 1983
Congress Holds Hearings on U.S. AIDS Reponse
The Congressional Subcommittee on Government Operations holds hearings to examinethe federal response to AIDS. It would take another four years before the Reagan Administration finally acknowledges the demands of AIDS activists.
Learn More.
At the hearing, members of Congress heard testimony from researchers, heathcare officials, and three AIDS men with AIDS who described their personal experiences.
Here is the testimony of Michael Callen of New York: (born April 11, 1955, died December 27, 1993)
In December of 1981, I had some blood testing done by my private physician, and those tests indicated that I was immune deficient. In December of 1981, there was very little known about this disease, but there was in the gay press beginning to be reports of increased instances of very unusual diseases, and they outlined some of the symptoms. I was very concerned because I had some of these symptoms — fevers, night sweats, general lymphadenopathy, swelling of the lymph nodes, malaise, fatigue. So I had myself tested and, as I indicated, in December of 1981, I was told I was immune deficient.
The effect of being told that I was immune deficient was devastating. I called my parents and said, “I am going to die.”
I was not hospitalized until the summer of 1982, when I was diagnosed with cryptospordiosis, which is one of the qualifying opportunistic infections, according to the CDC definition of this syndrome.
I was hospitalized for over a week with what is known as the wasting syndrome. It was the lowest point of my life. I was convinced from everything I read and heard that I was going to die.
But I recovered from that specific infection, and I was rehospitalized in the fall of 1982. They suspected pneumocystis pneumonia. I had a bronchoscopy performed and other tests. It turned out to be bronchitis. But my story really illustrates one of the consistent stories for people who have this syndrome. So little is known.
When my doctor indicated to me in December of 1981 that I was immune deficient, I said, “What does that mean?”
And he said, “We don’t know.”
So now a lot of people who are being told they are immune deficient are simply waiting, waiting for the next infection.
Now, I have come to believe that I am going to beat this disease. I no longer think that I am going to die. But it is very difficult when you pick up newspapers or turn on the television, and you hear that no one has fully recovered from this syndrome, and that 80% of those diagnosed with the syndrome are dead after two years.
So I guess that is my story — waiting around for infections, checking myself every morning for Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions and waiting for information about this disease to be forthcoming.
Here is the testimony of Roger Lyon of San Francisco: (born September 30, 1948, died November 4, 1984)
I was diagnosed with Kaposi sarcoma on February 3 of this year. Prior to that time, I was having absolutely no AIDS-related symptoms whatsoever. On physical exam at that time, three lesions were found internally. Prior to that, I was being treated for an amoebic disorder, no real symptoms of AIDS.
February 3, basically 100, I think more exactly 180 days ago, I became aware I had a life-threatening disease. On February 4, I entered UC, I went to University of California without an appointment, at the suggestion of my doctor, and started what is called their staging process — a battery of tests to determine the extent of this disease.
At that time, I was basically numb. I had no feeling. I was just moving. UC has been — they have been very kind and helpful.
However, it is a matter of day-to-day waiting, waiting for something to happen, living in constant fear that I am going to wake up one morning to find lesions, waking up finding that I have some other opportunistic infection, cryptospordiosis, possibly pneumocystis pneumonia.
At this time, I am basically living in fear of what is to come. Other than that, it is a day-to-day wait-and-see process.
Statement of Anthony “Tony” Ferrara of Washington, DC to Congress (born in 1954, died June 4, 1984
The first idea there was something wrong with me was last summer. I had lymphadenopathy, swollen lymph glands especially around the jaws and throat and under the arms. That continued for a few months, but the whole time I felt quite good. I continued to run and jog, and I experienced no fatigue, no night sweats, no fevers. In fact, in November, I finished the Marine Corps marathon, when I was supposedly very, very ill.
The lymphadenopathy went away. So I thought nothing further of it. But all along, I had been reading about AIDS, and of course, as every conscious gay man should be, was very worried about it.
In February, I saw two small purple lesions, one on the inner aspect of each of my lower thighs, and I knew what they were, or I knew what they could be, and I said I would wait a month, and if they were still there in a month, I would seek treatment or seek a diagnosis. Well, in the beginning of March they were still there.
I belong to the George Washington University HMO. I went there and told them that they really should biopsy one of these lesions to see what it was, gave them my sexual history, and told them that there was a good chance I did have AIDS. They biopsied it, and the diagnosis was Kaposi’s sarcoma. That was March 8.
Obviously, the first day I was very, very upset, and I went into a deep depression for about a month. I came home that night and my significant other held me in his arms, and I said to him, “Why do I feel like Ali McGraw, it is just like a movie, it is really terrible, it is the most horrible thing that ever happened.”
My depression lasted a month, and I decided if there was any chance I was going to get over this, if I had any chance of surviving at all, I would have to have a more positive attitude and just continue on, live my life as best I can, and try not to worry about it too much.
I was very lucky. I had the choice of being treated at GW by a very good cancer specialist there, who instilled a great deal of confidence in me, or I had the choice of being treated at the National Institutes of Health.
I think it was an easy choice, because I think — NIH wanted me, because I was so healthy at that point. I was a good specimen for research I think. And also, I felt that if I have the disease and no one knows anything about it, the best place to be treated would be where they are doing the research.
* * * * * * Source:
August 3, 1983
Singer-Musician Jobriath Dies
Rock star Jobriath dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 36. He was the first openly gay pop singerto be signed to a major record label, and one of the first internationally famous musicians to die of AIDS.
Learn More.
Born Bruce Wayne Campbell and raised in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, Jobriath started his music career in the West Coast production of the musical Hair, receiving positive reviews in the lead role of Woof, a character implied to be gay. After leaving the production in 1969, he joined the folk-rock band Pidgeon as their lead singer and guitarist, followed by a two-album solo deal with Elektra Records in 1972.
His debut album Jobriath, released in June 1973, would feature an album sleeve design by photographer Shig Ikeda depicting a nude Jobriath as an ancient Greek statue. This photograph was used in an extensive publicity campaign for the album release.
Critical praise for the album followed the hype, and he was often compared with David Bowie, some critics contending that Jobriath had more talent than Bowie. But American music fans of the 1970s weren’t ready for a talent like Jobriath.
“At a concert at the Nassau Coliseum, chants of ‘faggot’ started from the minute he took the stage, along with rubbish thrown at him, and Jobriath was forced a flee the stage,” writes music historian Kevin Burke.
Elektra then rush-released Jobriath’s second album and ended its contract with him. Jobriath would spend the rest of the ’70s in a new identity, “Cole Berlin” (an amalgamation of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin), whose professions were nightclub signer and sex worker.
Jobriath had begun to feel ill in late 1981 but still managed to contribute to the Chelsea Hotel’s 100th birthday celebration in November 1982.
“A decade after his billboards hung in Times Square, Jobriath Boone died alone and abandoned in his rooftop apartment at the Chelsea Hotel,” Burke writes. “Sadly overlooking the New York skyline he once adorned, here his body lay decomposing for four days before it was found.”
* * * * * * Source:
August 6, 1983
Singer-Performer Klaus Nomi Dies
Klaus Nomi, a rare countertenor with an eccentric act, dies of AIDS at the age of 39. Although Nomi’s work had not yet met with national commercial success, he has a cult following in New York and in France.
Learn More.
Nomi is an important part of the 1980s East Village scene, a hotbed of development for punk rock music, the visual arts and the avant-garde. Born Klaus Sperber in Immenstadt, Germany, Nomi began his career in the 1960s, singing opera arias at the Berlin gay discothèque Kleist Casino. His distinctive performances featured his wide vocal range and an otherworldly stage persona.
In 1972, Nomi moved to New York and appeared in a camp production of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold at Charles Ludlam‘s Ridiculous Theatrical Company.
In 1978, he caught the attention of the NYC art scene with his performance in “New Wave Vaudeville.” Dressed in a skin-tight spacesuit with a clear plastic cape, Nomi sang the aria “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix” (“My heart opens to your voice”) from Camille Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson et Dalila. After that performance Nomi was invited to perform at clubs all over New York City.
Nomi would go on to create the Klaus Nomi Band, release albums, and perform in NYC’s top clubs. In 1979, David Bowie hired Nomi as a backup singer for his Dec. 15 appearance on Saturday Night Live. During the performance of “TVC 15,” Nomi and Joey Arias dragged around a large prop pink poodle with a television screen in its mouth.
In the last several months of his life, Nomi would change his focus to operatic pieces and adopted a Baroque era operatic outfit complete with full collar as his typical onstage attire. The collar helped cover the outbreaks of Kaposi’s sarcoma.
Nomi’s death at the Sloan Kettering Hospital Center in New York City is one of the first of many celebrity deaths from AIDS.
AIDS Activist Bobbi Campbell and his partner Robert “Bobby” Hilliard appear on the cover of Newsweek magazine for the story “Gay America: Sex, Politics and the Impact of AIDS.”
Learn More.
Campbell and Hilliard’s appearance on Newsweek’s cover is the first time two gay men are pictured embracing one another on the cover of a U.S. mainstream national magazine.
But by this time, Campbell was accustomed to being covered by the media. He was the first person living with AIDS to come out publicly after he became the 16th person to be diagnosed with an AIDS-related illness in San Francisco, according to Back2Stonewall.
After he launched a column in January 1982 for the San Francisco Sentinel disclosing his Kaposi sarcoma diagnosis and describing his experiences as a person living with AIDS, he was often invited to speak at conferences and other events. When someone quipped that he was the “AIDS poster boy,” he embraced the characterization by putting it on a t-shirt in bold letters.
A registered nurse, Campbell joined the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an activist performance group that uses drag and religious imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance, and took on the “sister” persona of Sister Florence Nightmare. He also co-authored the first San Francisco safer-sex manual, Play Fair!, which offered practical advice written in plain, sex-positive and often humous language.
Ever the prolific fighter for the cause, Campbell co-founded with another HIV-positive activist, Dan Turner, the People With AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement (or PWA Movement) in 1983. The movement promoted the right for those living with HIV/AIDS to “take charge of their own life, illness, and care, and to minimize dependence on others,” according to Back2Stonewall.
“The group had what then seemed like revolutionary ideas,” wrote Bill Lipsky, author of Gay and Lesbian San Francisco (2006). “It rejected the then-commonly used term ‘KS victim’ …
Almost a year after appearing on the cover of Newsweek, Campbell gave one of his last speeches 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.”
Campbell died of AIDS on August 15, 1984. Hilliard died of AIDS a few months later.
In 2014, a Castro Street History Walk plaque was installed to commemorate Campbell and his work.
Comedian Eddie Murphy Perpetuates Stigma in HBO Special
Comedian Eddie Murphy performs his comedy special “Delirious” on HBO with material that further stigmatizes gay men and HIV/AIDS. In the show, he makes jokes about AIDS, uses a gay slur multiple times, and tells the audience he is “afraid of gay people.”
Murphy would apologize in 1996 for the homophobic remarks in his performances after gay rights activists in San Francisco mount a protest during one of his film shoots. In a public statement, Murphy said that he deeply regretted “any and all pain” that he caused, adding, “Just like the rest of the world, I am more educated about AIDS in 1996 than I was in 1981.”
David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign Fund in Washington, D.C., would respond: “This statement certainly does sound as though Murphy recognizes the impact his past statements have had on the gay community. It’s important for people in the public eye like Eddie Murphy to recognize they set a tone for the general public.
* * * * * * Source:
August 28, 1983
Debbie Reynolds & Rip Taylor Perform at AIDS Benefit at Hollywood Bowl
Film star Debbie Reynolds appears with comic performer Rip Taylor at the first public AIDS benefit in Los Angeles, which takes place at the Hollywood Bowl.
Along with comedian Joan Rivers, singer-actress Rita Moreno, and actor Robert Guillaume, Reynolds is among the first Hollywood celebrities to appear in AIDS fundraisers at a time when HIV/AIDS is still a topic shunned by many.
* * * * * * Source:
August 1983
‘AIDS Memorandum’ Created for Research-Sharing
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases begins publishing an informal newsletter, the AIDS Memorandum, through which scientists can share unpublished research findings.
Learn More.
The publication lasts for two years, until mainstream scientific journals begin expediting publication for articles on AIDS.
* * * * * * Source:
September 2, 1983
AIDS Exposure Precautions Issued to Healthcare Workers
CDC publishes the first set of AIDS exposure precautions for healthcare workers.
Learn More.
In response to growing concerns about the potential for AIDS transmission in healthcare settings, CDC publishes occupational exposure precautions for healthcare workers and allied health professionals.
* * * * * * Source:
September 1983
Health Crisis Network Opens in Miami
Health Crisis Network (HCN) is formed to provide a response to the Miami area’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Learn More.
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.
September 9, 1983
CDC Rules Out AIDS Transmission by Casual Contact
In an MMWR article read around the world, CDC rules out transmission of AIDS by casual contact, food, water, air, or environmental surfaces.
The National Institute of Health hosts “A Workshop on the Epidemiology of AIDS” at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza in Rockville, Maryland.
Learn More.
At the workshop, researchers collaborated to develop recommendations for research on the epidemiology and natural history of AIDS, and exchange information and educate clinical investigators about epidemio logical study design.
Held over two days, the workshop featured several panel discussions and lectures, including “Summary of Epidemiological Research on AIDS Supported by the NIH” by Robert Edelman, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, University of Maryland School of Medicine.
* * * * * * Source:
September 25, 1983
Classical Pianist Paul Jacobs Dies
Paul Jacobs, the New York Philharmonic’s pianist and harpsichordist, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Manhattan home. He was 53.
Learn More.
Paul Jacobs was the New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s official pianist and harpsichordist, holding the post during the tenure of three music directors, according to The New York Times.
He was best known for taking on “the more forbidding works of the 20th Century,” according to Lon Tuck of the Washington Post. He was also widely recognized for his expertise with early keyboards, often performing on harpsichord with Baroque ensembles.
Born in New York City, Jacobs studied at the Julliard School and then moved to France in 1951 to work with composer and conductor Pierre Boulez at Domaine Musical in Paris.
He returned to New York in 1960 to teach at the Manhattan Music School and the Mannes College of Music. Two years later, the New York Philharmonic named Jacobs its official pianist and, in 1974, harpsichordist.
He gave solo recitals and played frequently for Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Jacobs recorded for several labels, including fifteen records for Nonesuch and a few for European labels.
For the last fifteen years of his life, he was Associate Professor of Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
In 1982, he was diagnosed with AIDS and informed he had only a few years to live. Faced with the decision of how best to use the months that remained to him, Jacobs decided to make one last record, which included the last compositions of Beethoven and Busoni and one of the last by Mozart.
Despite the deterioration of his eyesight, he managed to record the pieces, finishing the work in June 1983, about three months before he died. He completed the recording “on sheer determination,” Jacob’s doctor told Lon Tuck of the Washington Post.
About five months after Jacob died, on February 24, 1984, a memorial concert at New York’s Symphony Space drew the attendance of some of America’s most accomplished composers and musicians and many of his fans. The memorial program was tailored to reflect Jacobs’ musical tastes, according to Tuck. Composer Elliott Carter, the leader of America’s traditional musical avant-garde, delivered the eulogy.
After New York City physician Joseph Sonnabend is threatened with eviction from his office building for treating patients with AIDS, the state’s Attorney General and Lambda Legal join together to file the first AIDS discrimination lawsuit.
Learn More.
Dr. Sonnabend and five of his patients sued and won what became one of the first AIDS-related civil rights cases.
With others including AIDS activist Michael Callen, Dr. Sonnabend founded the AIDS Medical Foundation, the first AIDS research group and now known as the Foundation for AIDS Research.
* * * * * * Source:
October 4, 1983
AIDS Patient Flown from Florida to California & ‘Dumped’
A Florida hospital arranged for a private jet to fly a patient with AIDS to San Francisco, where he was left at a local AIDS foundation with $300 cash.
Learn More.
Morgan MacDonald, 27, of Vero Beach, Florida, was brought to San Francisco in a chartered Lear jet after being discharged from Shands Hospital at the University of Florida at Gainesville. MacDonald told Dr. Mervyn Silverman, San Francisco’s public health director, that he was transported to California against his will.
Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Florida, spent $7,000 for a private jet to fly MacDonald to San Francisco last week and leave him on a stretcher at the office of a city-funded AIDS foundation. He was immediately transferred to the AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital.
Dianne Feinstein, then-Mayor of San Francisco, sent a telegram to Gov. Bob Graham of Florida, asserting that a hospital there dumped an unwanted AIDS patient by having him flown to San Francisco. She called the incident “outrageous and inhumane.”
Gov. Graham’s press secretary said Florida’s Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services would investigate the matter.
Virginia Hunt, Shands’ public relations director, defended the hospital’s actions, saying MacDonald no longer needed hospital care and the hospital was unable to find a Florida nursing home for him. She contended that the AIDS Foundation in San Francisco agreed to give Mr. MacDonald 30 days’ free housing.
But Dr. Silverman said the Florida hospital had made contact with both the City of San Francisco and the AIDS Foundation and ”played us one off against the other.”
Silverman said MacDonald was free to return to Florida, but said his condition was acute and it was essential that he receive proper care.
MacDonald would die 21 days later at San Francisco General Hospital’s AIDS Ward. MacDonald was said to have no family. Before his hospitalization, he lived in a religious commune in Florida.
* * * * * * Source:
October 4, 1983
Russell Hartley, Performing Arts Archivist, Dies
Russell Hartley, curator of the Archives of the Performing Arts, dies of AIDS-related illness in a San Francisco Hospital at the age of 61.
Learn More.
In 1947, Hartley created the San Francisco Dance Archives, which is now known as the Museum of Performance + Design and includes 3.5 million items documenting the performing arts in the Bay Area.
By 1979, Hartley’s collection included 2,000 books, 8,000 periodicals, 4,000 slides, 5,000 negatives, 10,000 pieces of sheet music, 2,000 posters, 250 phonograph records, 25,000 historical photographs, 10,000 stills from the San Francisco Ballet, 10,000 movie stills, 12,000 theatrical prints, 500 artifacts, and 250 costumes, according to art critic Renée Renouf in Dance Chronicle.
“His unique confluence of personal artistry, a fund of personal anecdote and experience, and his single-minded devotion for the perpetuation of a collection commenced 40 years ago passes into its own special historical niche with Russell’s death,” Renouf wrote in 1983.
Born in 1924, Hartley attended Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California, which is located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Russell designed window displays for his father’s hardware store, according to the Museum of Performance and Design‘s Performing Arts Library. His artful window displays caught the eye of Ruby Asquith, a dance instructor who invited Hartley to visit the San Francisco Ballet studios and sketch dancers as they rehearsed.
Subsequently, he signed up for ballet classes and a year later, was given a part in Willam Christensen’s acclaimed production of Romeo and Juliet.
Early in his dance career, Hartley enjoyed success with the San Francisco Ballet in eccentric character roles between 1942 and 1949. In 1944, Christensen enlisted Hartley’s help in revising costume designs for Now the Brides, and this led to more significant work, including designing 143 costumes for the first production of the Nutcracker Suite in 1944, Pyramus and Thisbe, Coppelia, Swan Lake, Les Maitresses de Lord Byron, Jinx, Beauty and the Shepherd, and the Standard Hour television show.
Hartley’s art portfolio, Henry VIII and his Wives (1948), served as an inspiration for Rosella Hightower’s ballet by this name, which premiered in New York at the Metropolitan Opera House.
In the 1940s, Hartley became interested in collecting historical materials on local performers and dance and theatrical companies. He began combing antique stores for old dance and theatrical programs, photos, and ephemera, and these materials would become the start of his San Francisco Dance Archives.
In February 1946, Hartley, then almost 22 years old, and his friend Leo Stillwell, a 20-year-old artist, opened the Antinuous Art Gallery at 701 McAllister Street in San Francisco. Hartley began creating series of dance paintings and show windows in New York, leading to exhibitions of his paintings at the Feragil Galleries in New York, the Labaudt Gallery in San Francisco, and the Miami Beach Art Center, an exhibition on ballet at the De Young Museum, and features of his paintings in various one-man shows at galleries in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Stillwell worked furiously, creating 500 works of art before succumbing to an early death at the age of 22 following a case of measles.
Hartley carried on, executing costume designs for Balanchine’s Serenade, William Dollar’s Mendelssohn’s Concerto, Lew Christensen’s Balletino, and the San Francisco Opera Company’s productions of Aida and Rosenkavalier. He began studying the conservation of fine paintings with Gregory Padilla and carried out restoration projects for the Maxwell Galleries, the Oakland Museum, and Gumps. In 1960, he became a member of the International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works.
Dance Magazine hired Hartley to write a monthly column, which ran through the 1960s. He also contributed feature articles to After Dark Magazine, Opera and Concert, and The Trumpeteer.
He organized exhibitions on the history of the performing arts at the War Memorial Opera House and the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library with materials from his personal collection. In 1975, Hartley sought a permanent location for the Performing Arts Archive and was able to obtain a space in the basement of the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library.
His own archival collections, which had expanded to include materials on the history of the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco theaters, and the San Francisco Symphony, was supplemented by a dance library and other materials donated by local collectors. However, in 1981, budgetary cutbacks led to the closure of the archives and Hartley was forced to move the entire collection to his Mill Valley home.
At this time, Hartley’s health began to decline. In 1983, the archives were moved from Hartley’s home to the San Francisco Opera Chorus Room in the War Memorial Opera House and a Board of Directors was formed to ensure that Hartley’s legacy would carry on. Former San Francisco Ballet dancer Nancy Carter became the archives’ first executive director.
The archives are now known as the Museum of Performance + Design, which also serves as keeper of The Russell Hartley Collection, materials from Hartley’s early days as a costume designer for the San Francisco Ballet to his tenure as director of the Archives for the Performing Arts.
In 2016, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the story of Alan Perry, a retired truck driver who found in a dumpster 200 letters written to Russell Hartley by his friend Leo Stillwell, the promising artist who died at the age of 22. Perry and his wife, who subsequently learned about Hartley and Stillwell and appreciated the cultural value of the find, donated the letters to San Francisco State University, where the prolific young artist’s 500 works of art are housed.
October 1983
Nationwide Vigil Draws Attention to Federal Inaction
At the first National AIDS Vigil in Washington, D.C., speaker Bobbi Campbell urges President Ronald Reagan to appoint a federal task force on AIDS that includes people living with AIDS and start addressing the “national health emergency.”
Learn More.
“Let no one call us victims. We are citizens and some of us are dying,” Bobbi Campbell, 31, spoke to the crowd, who numbered about 1,500. Campbell told The Washington Post that he has not worked since physicians told him two years ago that he had AIDS.
“We need the government to recognize our legitimate rights to exist,” Campbell told the crowd. “We are dying to be free.”
The demonstration, which was organized with support of the National AIDS Vigil Commission, ended with a candlelight rally around the reflecting pool at the foot of Capitol Hill. Organizers said the march and vigil were “in memory of the approximately 1,000 people who have died of AIDS and the 1,500 who now have the disease.”
The commission that sponsored the event included Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Sen. Lowell Weicker (R-Conn.), D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, and San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein.
The next day, the Associated Press would report that memorial marches and services were held in cities across America, including Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Tampa and Denver.
“Thousands of homosexuals, their families and friends joined candlelight parades for whom they said were cast aside by an insensitive public scared of catching the deadly disease,” the AP would report.
* * * * * * Source:
October 13, 1983
3-year-old Sammy Kushnick Dies in Los Angeles
Samuel Jared Kushnick becomes the fourth premature baby in an eight-month period to die of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles. He was 3 years old.
Learn More.
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.
Helen Kushnick would go on to testify before Congress, advocating for the reform of policies and procedures governing the nation’s blood supply.
October 22, 1983
Keith Barrow, Soul Singer & Son of Civil Rights Champion, Dies
Keith Barrow, a singer and songwriter best known for the soulful “You Know You Wanna Be Loved” and the disco-beat-fueled “Turn Me Up,” dies of AIDS-related illness at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. He was 29 years old.
Learn More.
The only son of Chicago civil rights leader Rev. Willie Barrow (1923-2015), Keith Errol Barrow started singing as a teenager with the gospel group “Soul Shakers.” His mother told Windy City Times in 2004, “Keith had music in his bones and in his soul. He started writing music when he was eight.”
In 1973, Barrow released a self-titled gospel album at the age of 19 with Jewel Records, and his solo career began to gain traction with the popularity of one of the album’s singles, “Mr. Magic Man.” The major label Columbia signed him in 1976, and he left Chicago for New York and then Los Angeles. After a song he wrote for the Philadelphia R&B group Blue Magic rose in Billboard‘s Top 100 R&B hits, Barrow was invited to Philly’s famed Sigma Sound Recording Studios to work under legendary producer Bobby Eli for his first Columbia album.
The release of Barrow’s record was announced in a full-page ad in Billboard magazine for the week ending May 7, 1977. “Keith Barrow is why you should pay attention to this debut album,” the ad proclaimed.
“Though he’s not talked about much today, Keith was a true talent of his era, a singer’s singer whose velvety falsetto was on par with the finesse of Eddie Kendricks and the fancy of Sylvester,” wrote music critic S.E. Fleming Jr. in 2008. “When it was all said and done, Keith Barrow didn’t prove a huge hit, but it was a high quality effort that laid the groundwork for what would become his finest hour on record.”
Fleming says the best track on the album is Barrow’s performance of his own composition, “Teach Me (It’s Something About Love),” calling it “one of the most beautiful slow jams the singer ever recorded.”
“It was a perfect fit for a young man at a stage in his life where most people are finding their own voice, a lovely portrait of innocence and melancholy,” Fleming writes.
In 1978, Barrow switched to CBS Records, which produced his second album, Physical Attraction. Most of the material was co-written by producer Michael Stokes and songwriter Ronn Matlock, and they updated Barrow’s sound to include three disco songs.
Immediately, the seven-minute single “Turn Me Up” became a hit at dance clubs and broadened his fan base. Meanwhile, another song on the album, a smooth soul ballad titled “You Know You Want to Be Loved,” rose to #26 in Billboard‘s Top 100 R&B hits.
Barrow recorded a final album, moving to Capitol Records. Produced by Ralph Affoumado, Just As I Am (1980) was an ambitious work, but the dance sound that initially drew in fans was declining in popularity. Still, the album has a few gems, such as the seductive and funky “In the Light (Do It Better)” and “Tell Me This Ain’t Heaven,” which is reminiscent of some of his earlier work with Columbia.
Barrow tried to extend his career by performing live. While touring in Europe in 1983, he fell ill and called his mother, saying he was too sick to perform:
“He called me from Paris and said, ‘Momma, I don’t think I’ll be able to go on stage tonight. I really feel sick.’ I said, ‘Oh, you’ll be alright.’ I prayed for him and then he called again a couple of hours later and he said, ‘Momma, I can’t perform. I have to go; they have to take me to the hospital.'”
After returning to the U.S., Barrow moved back to Chicago and his mother tended to him as his health declined. After being admitted to Michael Reese Hospital, he was diagnosed with AIDS.
“I remember the first of the weekly reports that Keith was ill and the requests for prayers,” wrote Barrow’s childhood friend in 1007. “Keith’s mother is a fiery orator and fierce civil rights activist nicknamed ‘The Little Warrior,’ so it was hard to see her sadness and distress as his health declined.”
When Barrow died later that year, more than 1,000 people attended his memorial services. Barrow was one of the first people in the entertainment industry to die of AIDS, and the cause of his death was not reported in his obituary. But his mother openly talked about it in the years that followed, and she contributed a panel in memory of her son to the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
November 14, 1983
Stephen Lamb, Profiled in New York Times, Dies
Stephen Lamb, a man living with AIDS who was profiled in a widely-read New York Times article, dies of AIDS-related illness at New York University Medical Center. He was 40.
Lamb, his body overwhelmed with cryptococcal meningitis, tuberculosis of the bone marrow, and an intestinal infection, had until recently lived on the upper east side of Manhattan and worked as a travel consultant.
One of the few visitors at Lamb’s hospital bed was William Carroll, a volunteer from the Gay Men’s Health Crisis who two months before had been assigned to be Lamb’s “buddy.” According to the NYT article, Lamb and Carroll found that they shared a love of literature, and in Lamb’s final weeks, Carroll often read to him from books of poetry by John Keats and Andrew Marvell.
“Bill and I have grown to like each other,” Lamb told the reporter four days before he died. “I just needed some companionship.”
Lamb’s death was the 514th AIDS-related fatality recorded by the City of New York. At the time, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis had provided services to 420 people with AIDS, and was facing a surge in their caseload, according to Dowd’s article.
The organization had been receiving about 50 new cases every month, but in November, they noticed a dramatic increase in the number of people with AIDS (PWAs) who needed help. Some were gay men, but there were also intravenous drug users who were heterosexual as well as people who had received tainted blood transfusions.
The GMHC was running 20 therapy groups, organizing its volunteer-run “buddy” program, and operating a 24-hour hotline which received an average of 1,200 calls every week, according to the article.
The organization’s volunteers, which then numbered about 200, did whatever was needed, from taking orange juice to homebound PWAs to serving as intermediaries with the city’s social-service agencies.
“They clean apartments, do laundry, make dinner, pick up prescriptions, mail rent checks, walk dogs, take their patients to doctor’s appointments, and simply keep them company,” Dowd reported.
Many of the volunteers, she wrote, had horror stories about the terrible treatment of PWAs.
“They tell of government clerks who neglect AIDS cases, because they are afraid to be in the same room to fill out forms. They tell of nurses and orderlies in hospitals who are so loath to enter the rooms of AIDS patients that they let the food trays pile up outside the door, leave trash baskets overflowing, or neglect patients lying in their own urine or excrement,” wrote Dowd.
One volunteer, Diego Lopez, told the reporter that he went to visit a dying patient in the hospital, and discovered him with blood seeping from his nose and mouth. When he asked a doctor to help the patient, the doctor handed him some gauze and told him to take care of it himself.
“I was shocked, but I did it,” Lopez said. “Afterward, I looked at my hands and there was blood all over them. I realized I had to start being more careful. But when you see a person dying, you don’t think about finding some gloves to wear.”
Dowd closed her article with a conversation she had with Larry Kramer, co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Kramer told Dowd of how the AIDS crisis had deeply affected him. Already, 37 of his friends in New York were dead from the disease.
“I heard about Vinny on Saturday,” Kramer said. “Ron is a Black actor I know. Paul, a pianist. Gayle went to Yale with me. Ron Doud, the designer of Studio 54. Mark, I was involved with a long time ago. Peter, an architect.”
“Can’t something be done?” he asked, clenching a small green notebook he used to record the names of his dead friends. “The rest of the city, my straight friends, go on with life as usual — and I’m in the middle of an epidemic.”
November 1983
Pediatric AIDS Cases Presented to NY Academy of Science, and Rejected
Dr. Arthur J. Ammann presented case reports of immunodeficiency in infants as evidence of AIDS infecting children — but the medical community largely refused to accept the idea that a disease spread among gay men was being found in babies.
Learn More.
Dr. Arthur J. Ammann traveled from San Francisco to New York City for an immunology conference hosted by the New York Academy of Science to report his research on pediatric AIDS patients, which discovered that HIV/AIDS can also be transmitted in utero – from mother-to-infant, and through blood transfusions.
Some conference attendees responded to Dr. Ammann’s presentation with indifference and rejection. Dr. Ammann said, “People just don’t want AIDS to affect infants, they just don’t believe it.”
Included in the nay-sayers was his former mentor, Robert A. Good, M.D., who had served as president of the American Association of Immunologists and more recently as director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.
“Bob Good got up and said that he didn’t think that we were seeing AIDS in children, that he had seen this immunodeficiency with CMV [cytomegalovirus virus] before,” Dr. Ammann recalled for the San Francisco AIDS Oral History Series. “I quickly responded, because I had looked up all the literature. I said, ‘If it’s been seen before, no one’s ever reported it.'”
Dr. Ammann said his early theory about pediatric AIDS was reinforced by a meeting he had with Arye Rubinstein, M.D., a New York City immunologist working with pediatric patients, who told him that he was receiving the same immediate resistance to his own case reports.
As the lead pediatric AIDS practitioners on the West Coast and East Coast, respectively, Drs. Ammann and Rubinstein did not let the initial rejection from the medical community deter them from their work. In fact, both would be later recognized for their important discoveries.
Dr. Ammann would serve as director of research for the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, a board member and President of amfAR, and on the Presidential National AIDS Task Force on Drug and Vaccine Development. In 1997, he would found Global Strategies for HIV Prevention to address the inequity of HIV prevention services provided around the world.
In a 1988 article for TheSan FranciscoChronicle, Dr. Ammann would draw nationwide attention to the issue of pediatric AIDS when he predicts that at least 20,000 children will contract AIDS in the next four years. Sadly, his prediction would be borne out. By 1992, about 5,000 cases of pediatric AIDS would be reported to the CDC, with the actual number of HIV-infected children to be estimated at about 20,000.
By 1985, Dr. Rubinstein would estimate that he had treated about 100 children with the AIDS virus at his practice based out of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
At the time, New York public health policy dictated that pediatric AIDS patients be confined to hospitals, so misunderstood was the nature of the virus. So Dr. Rubinstein decided to open a day care center at Albert Einstein College for the families of pediatric AIDS patients, and successfully petitioned the City of New York for the funding to build it.
He would take personal risks to come to the defense of his pediatric patients’ parents, many of whom had a history of drug use and sex work, and were not equipped to navigate the backlash of fear and anger directed at them.
“I was almost assaulted after testifying in court in Brooklyn,” recalled Dr. Rubinstein in an 2011 edition of Einstein Magazine. “The parents in one school wanted to remove children who were infected, but I testified that HIV was not transmitted through casual contact. The parents got very upset, to the point where I had to be hauled out of the courtroom through a back door.”
In 1986, Dr. Rubinstein and colleagues would show that IV gamma globulin helps prevent infections and T-cell attrition in children with AIDS, significantly improving survival rates. Later the same year, he would demonstrate that in pregnant women with HIV, transmission of the virus often occurs in utero and not just at delivery or through breast-feeding.
In the April 1987 edition of Pediatric Research, he would co-author a paper about the increase in AIDS cases of women whose only known risk factor was heterosexual contact with HIV-positive men. In another pediatric publication, he would report that the leading cause of death in 1987 for women between the ages of 24 and 35 was AIDS.
In 1989, Dr. Rubinstein would launch a summer camp in the Catskills for children with HIV and their families (many more similar camps would open in the 1990s). He currently is chief of the Division of Allergy & Immunology at Children’s Hospital in Montefiore and Professor of Pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
November 22, 1983
WHO Brings Global Eye to Pandemic
The World Health Organization (WHO) holds its first meeting to assess the global AIDS situation and plan the international surveillance of the disease.
Learn More.
WHO’s meeting in Geneva marked the first time health officials representing countries from around the world met to share knowledge on risk factors, possible causes, and the clinical and immunological picture of potential spread of the new disease. Up until that point, only regional meetings of surveillance groups and researchers had convened in the U,S, and Europe to assess the problem and to exchange information, according to The Fourth Ten Years of the World Health Organization.
From the inaugural meeting on AIDS, preliminary recommendations were issued for prevention, diagnostic and screening tests, and clinical management of cases. Health officials also proposed areas of research and agreed to open a WHO center in Paris to coordinate global surveillance of the disease.
Following the meeting, WHO began reporting on AIDS cases and shared information through its publications about disease patterns, the risks of acquiring the disease, and methods of prevention and control.
December 5, 1983
San Francisco Chronicle Exposes Delay in AIDS Funding
Reporter Randy Shilts of the San Francisco Chronicle writes that federal health officials were forced to pull funding from other projects to support important AIDS research in the spring of 1983 due to the lack of federal funding.
Learn More.
Top officials in the Department of Health and Human Services were pleading for more federal funds from the Reagan administration for AIDS research in early 1983, all while publicly saying that no more money was needed, according to Shilts’ reporting in The Chronicle.
Reporting from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Shilts wrote that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta ultimately were forced to divert millions of dollars from other important health projects in order to conduct AIDS research.
Dr. James Curran, director of AIDS research at the Atlanta center, said 2,513 cases had been reported to the CDC as of Oct. 17, 1983, and 1,048 people had died, reflecting a fatality rate of 41%.
“It has now reached the point where important AIDS work cannot be undertaken because of the lack of available resources,” wrote Edward Brandt, assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in a May 13, 1983 memo.
In that memo obtained by Shilts, Brandt listed a number of important health areas other than AIDS in which work was “postponed, delayed or severely curtailed” because the center was diverting money to AIDS research.
But according to The Chronicle, Brandt also publicly supported the Reagan administration’s position just days before, testifying May 9 to Congress that extra funds to fight AIDS were “unnecessary.”
Dr. William Foege of the Centers of Disease Control sent Brandt a 12-page request for funds in early May, but two weeks later, Thomas Donnelly, Assistant Secretary for Legislation, wrote a Senate staff member that “we are not in favor of additional appropriations” for AIDS research. The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Legislation serves as the primary link between the Department of Health and Human Services and Congress.
December 1983
Activist Morris Kight Starts Aid for AIDS in Los Angeles
Gay activist Morris Kight and a small group of friends create Aid for AIDS to help those devastated by AIDS who have been evicted, fired or unable to pay for food, rent or utility bills.
Learn More.
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.
December 15, 1983
FDA Hosts Conference to Consider Protections of Blood Supply
The CDC and FDA would convene a meeting of blood services organizations to discuss screening options for HIV/AIDS. This is the CDC’s second attempt to address the need for blood screening as a means to safeguard to the country’s blood supply.
Learn More.
At the December 15-16 meeting, the FDA’s Blood Products Advisory Committee facilitates a discussion of the options for HIV surrogate marker tests. This conference is a follow-up to the one held in January 1983, where blood bank scientists remained unmotivated to begin blood screening.
After the January meeting, an American Red Cross interoffice memo stated, “CDC is likely to continue to play up AIDS. It has long been noted that CDC increasingly needs a major epidemic to justify its existence.”
In the year between the two meetings, blood banks would continue to collect donations from unscreened members of the public. The initial resistance by blood banks to implement the CDC’s donor screening measures is now viewed as a critical failure on their part in the effort to limit transmission of HIV early on in the epidemtic.
At the December 1983 meeting, industry representatives proposed the creation of a task force to deliberate the details of a recommendation made at the meeting by Dr. Dennis Donohue, director of the FDA’s Division of Blood and Blood Products. Dr. Donohue proposed that hepatitis B anti-core testing be incorporated for routine plasma screening, since it would identify 90% of all potentially infectious or high-risk donors.
While Dr. Donohue was not enthusiastic about the task force approach, which was generally seen as the industry’s way to delay screening requirements, he agreed to it.
December 21, 1983
TV Medical Drama Tackles Subject of HIV/AIDS
NBC’s St. Elsewhere airs the episode “AIDS and Comfort,” with a story about a former councilman diagnosed with AIDS.
Learn More.
In the episode, the presence of a person with AIDS at St. Elygius Hospital triggers the fears and prejudices of various hospital staff.
However, by depicting the patient with AIDS as a white, heterosexual, well-off character who is the victim of an ill-timed affair and the subsequent confusion about whether the patient is straight or gay once he is diagnosed, the viewers are presented with the message that “gay = AIDS,” reinforcing the stereotype stigmatizing the gay community.
February 4, 1984
San Francisco Actor-Singer John Ponyman Dies
John Ponyman, an off-Broadway actor who migrated to San Francisco, dies of AIDS- related illness at the age of 41.
Learn More.
Ponyman regularly appeared in shows at Theatre Rhinoceros. His final project was a solo show titled “Sawdust,” featuring several of his own songs.
Blood Supply Task Force Opposes Test for Screening Virus
The task force created at the December 1983 FDA/CDC conference with the blood services community issues a report with a majority opinion that opposes the implementation of incorporating hepatitis B anti-core testing into the routine screening of plasma, presenting another roadblock to the protection of the country’s blood supply.
Learn More.
The task force reviewed several pilot tests performed at blood banks in areas with donors at high risk for hepatitis B core antibody (anti-HBc), which appears at the onset of symptoms in acute hepatitis B and persists for life. Scientific data suggested that anti-HBc was found commonly in HIV-infected individuals.
Data showed:
5-18% of blood and plasma donors had a positive test for anti-HBc;
84% of homosexual males tested positive for anti-HBc; and
96% of IV drug users tested positive for anti-HBc.
The discussion at the December BPAC meeting had stipulated that ”cost-benefit analysis and disease prevalence must be considered in the decision regarding whether or not to use the test,” However, the task force could not agree upon the true cost of the test, with estimates as low as $2.50 per test for plasma collectors and as high as $12.00 per donation for whole blood collections
Additional costs were the blood that would be discarded and the recruitment of new donors. With the task force unable to agree on the costs and the benefits of using the anti-core test as a surrogate for high-risk donors, the majority decided to oppose the adoption of screening procedures.
March 26, 1984
TV Producer Philip Mandelker Dies
Philip Mandelker, who produced the television show The Dukes of Hazzard and 17 made-for-TV movies between 1974-1984, dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles. He was 45.
Learn More.
When Mandelker was diagnosed with AIDS in 1983, the first person he called was his friend Rob Eichberg, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist active in the LGBTQ+ community.
“His family was very dedicated to him and they insisted on people knowing Philip died of AIDS,” Eichberg told the Los Angeles Times.
“The day Philip died, I cried,” said Mandelker’s sister, Jane Makowka. “But I had cried my tears for months before. I knew a long time before anybody ever said it was AIDS that it was.”
Makowka said that her brother had a passion for living life to its fullest, which allowed him to bring a special quality to his television shows.
“Most important was his love of people and love of nature. He tried to bring that, something of quality to television, something people would remember,” she said. “He was very fortunate to have been as successful as he was in that short of a lifetime. You wonder what he might have done if it hadn’t been cut short.”
March 30, 1984
Canadian flight Attendant Gaëtan Dugas Dies
Gaëtan Dugas dies of AIDS in Quebec City at the age of 32. A few years later, Dugas would be erroneously vilified as “Patient Zero” due to the CDC’s labeling of his case as “patient O” (as in the letter O).
Learn More.
In 1987, three years after the death of Dugas, journalist Randy Shilts would publish the best-selling book And the Band Played On, an influential work on HIV that would help shame the U.S. Government into properly funding research.
In the book, Shilts would identify “patient zero” as Dugas, who had a home in Los Angeles and travelled to many cities, and implied that he was the first-known source of the HIV spread in the U.S.
The media would erupt: Dugas’ hansome face would be pubished everywhere, and he would be characterised as a kind of “typhoid Mary” who callously spread the virus in the early 1980s.
Flash-forward to 2016, when this would be scientifically disproven by a group of researchers led by evolutionary biologist Dr. Michael Worobey. Worobey’s team conducted a genetic study of blood samples taken from gay and bisexual men in 1978 and 1979 as part of a hepatitis B study, and based on the results of the data, concluded that Dugas was not the source of the virus in the U.S.
“On the family tree of the virus, Dugas fell in the middle, not at the beginning” Worobey concluded. “Beliefs about Patient Zero are unsupported by scientific data.”
Worobey’s paper, published in Nature in October 2016, finds neither biological nor historical evidence that Dugas was the primary case in the U.S.
It is also important to note that Dugas was particularly helpful and transparent with the CDC in tracing his network of partners, providing names and addresses for many of them (which was further expanded because others remembered his distinctive name).
Performer Bill Kendall, who received rave reviews for his portrayal of “Mr. Peanut” in the long-running San Francisco production of Beach Blanket Babylon, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 35.
Learn More.
Beach Blanket Babylon was the world’s longest-running musical revue at the time. The show began its run in 1974 at the Savoy Tivoli and later moved to the larger Club Fugazi in the North Beach district of San Francisco.
Kendall was in the production’s original 1974 cast and continued to be a featured performer through 1982, playing the roles of Superman, John Travolta Sat Night Fever, and The Original Mr. Peanut.
Beach Blanket Babylon was created by Steve Silver, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1995. The San Francisco Chronicle described the show’s roots as a combination of “Vegas lounge acts, the Follies Bergere, God Rush-era extravaganzas, English music halls, a child’s birthday party gone mad and dopey beach party movies.”
Dennis Yount, a Marine who served in the Presidential Honor Guard at President Kennedy’s bier in the Capitol Rotunda, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 43.
Learn More.
Yount was born in North Carolina and attended North Carolina University at Columbia before joining the Marines. In 1970, he moved to New York City and became a favorite bartender at the Village bar Trilogy. He moved to San Francisco in 1980 and began tending bar at the Eagle.
Once relocated to the Bay Area, Yount pursued his long-held interest in acting and performed in local stage productions of Delivery and Sunsets.
Chicken Soup Brigade Starts Caring for PWAs in Seattle
Tim Burak, an employee of the Seattle-King County Health Department, founds the Chicken Soup Brigade to help people living with AIDS.
Learn More.
Brigade members transported people with AIDS to doctor appointments, brought meals, cleaned apartments, helped care for pets, and provided companionship. Burak and his friend Josh Joshua received referrals from physicians, clinics, and patients, and were assisted by volunteers Tom Speer and Will Jones.
In early 1987, Carol Sterling joined the Brigade as its first paid staff member, and quickly grew the organization’s volunteer pool to 80 people and its budget to $35,000. AIDS cases were growing rapidly in the Seattle metro area, and CSB expanded to meet the need in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A self-described “loud-mouthed lesbian,” Sterling continued to bring in new volunteers, nearly 50% of them women. According to Washingtonian Nick Rousso of historylink.org, AIDS had claimed 727 lives in King County by 1990, and thousands more were living with HIV. Eventually, AIDS would claim more than 8,000 lives in Washington state..
In 2001, the CSB would merge with another AIDS service organization, the Northwest AIDS Foundation, to form the Lifelong AIDS Alliance (now known simply as Lifelong).
– – – – – – –
Source: HistoryLink.org (an online encyclopedia of Washington state history)
https://www.historylink.org/file/22555
April 23, 1984
Dr. Robert Gallo Identifies Retrovirus as Cause of AIDS
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler announces that Dr. Robert Gallo and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute have found the cause of AIDS, a retrovirus they have labeled HTLV-3.
Learn More.
Heckler also announces the development of a diagnostic blood test to identify HTLV-3 and expresses hope that a vaccine against AIDS will be produced within two years.
Dr. Gallo and his research colleagues developed a process to mass-produce the retrovirus for the purpose of developing the tools needed to identify, treat and cure the disease that has afflicted more than 4,000 Americans to date.
The announcement follows the announcement by the Pasteur Institute in Paris of its discovery of LAV, which they say causes AIDS.
Heckler said she thought the two viruses ”will prove to be the same.”
May 6, 1984
Theatre Rhinoceros Founder Allan Estes Dies
Allan Estes, the founding artistic director of Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 29. His final project, “The AIDS Show,” would become the first work by a theater company to deal with the AIDS epidemic.
Estes came to San Francisco from Boston in 1977 with one goal: to establish a theater where the gay community could go to make and see theater which reflected the realities and joys of homosexual life.
From 1977 until 1984, Estes and Theatre Rhinoceros produced works by gay New York writers that included Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick, Lanford Wilson, Terrence McNally, and Harvey Fierstein, as well as several San Francisco playwrights including C.D. Arnold, Robert Chesley, Cal Youmans, Philip Real, and Dan Curzon.
In the early 1980s, Allan began transforming the Rhino from a gay men’s theater into a lesbian and gay theater, and invited lesbian screenwriters to stage their plays.
In 1984, he conceived the production Artists Involved with Death and Survival (“The AIDS Show”), which was brought to fruition by director Leland Moss (who would die from AIDS at age 41) and included the works of 20 Bay Area playwrights. “The AIDS Show” became the first work by a theater company to deal with the AIDS epidemic.
In 1987, “The AIDS Show” and its touring company became the subject of a PBS documentary by Rob Epstein and Peter Adair and brought the Rhino national attention.
Bay Area dancer Charles “Charlie” Butts, who performed with Carlos Carvajal’s Dance Spectrum from 1876 to 1980, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 31.
Learn More.
Butts also danced with Xoregos Dance Company in San Francisco, Ballet Trocadero de Monte Carlo in New York, and Valerie Huston Dance Company in Santa Barbara
Born in Mississippi, Butts grew up in Los Angeles and studied dance at the University of California Irvine. He performed both locally (in San Francisco and Santa Barbara) as well as in company tours to South America and Japan.
CAL-PEP Founded to Provide HIV/AIDS Services for Bay Area Sex Workers
Gloria Lockett founds California Prostitutes Education Project (Cal-PEP) and begins pioneering HIV/AIDS prevention strategies and testing outreach for sex workers in the San Francisco Bay area.
Learn More.
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.”
“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.”
June 4, 1984
Early AIDS Activist Tony Ferrara Dies
Anthony “Tony” Ferrara, who came forward with two other Persons With AIDS in 1983 to testify before Congress at a special hearing, dies at the National Institutes for Health in Bethesda at the age of 30.
Learn More.
Ferrara twice testified before Congress to urge the federal government to increase funding for AIDS research and social services for people with AIDS.
The focus of Ferrara’s activism was often targeted at the critical need for financial support for those needing medical treatment.
“I think part of the problem is the drugs involved are so extremely expensive, the experimental drugs,” Ferrara told Congress in 1983. “If any of them work, what my fear is is that, one, it is going to be too expensive to be widely disseminated, and two, the experimental status of the drugs may cause insurance companies to avoid paying for them.”
He returned to testify again before a Congressional hearing on AIDS in April 1984, just several weeks before he died. And again, he stressed the need for the government to make healthcare and medication affordable.
“I implore you to remember the needs of these people beyond adequate funds for research,” Ferrara said. “Unless you have looked into the tortured face of a person with AIDS and seen the terror, not only at the thought of dying, but at the thought of being tossed out of their home because they haven’t the money to pay their rent, or of having their phone service, electricity, or heat terminated because they cannot work … you cannot fully appreciate the tremendous need that exists with regard to this aspect of the disease.”
Ferrara was being treated by the NIH and volunteered to be the first person to undergo massive doses of Alpha Interferon as part of his treatment, according to his partner Michael Farrell.
So dedicated was he to help the NIH in its research into AIDS treatment, Ferrara also underwent a month-long experimental protocol of plasmapheresis, an exchange of blood plasma that takes five hours per session, and was one of the first recipients of Gamma Interferon and natural Interluken II.
Ferrara’s memorial mass was held at St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on Capitol Hill, where hundreds gathered to mourn and pay their respects.
June 13, 1984
Portugese Pop Star António Variações Dies
Singer-songwriter António Variações, Portugal’s first gay superstar, dies of AIDS-related illiness in Lisbon, Portugal at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Variações made his TV debut in 1981 during the Sunday variety show on Portugal’s sole broadcaster, recounts Pedro João Santos in his Guardian profile.
“He sang a punk metaphor about pills while a dancer dressed as a giant aspirin threw Smarties at the dumbfounded audience,” writes Santos. “Nothing so transgressive had ever graced Portugal’s airwaves.”
His 1983 bestselling debut album, Anjo da Guarda (Guardian Angel), features Variações’ Portuguese folk-style singing set to new-wave music. His follow-up album, Dar & Receber, fused disco-rock with synthpop.
In May 1984, Variações was admitted to hospital due to illness, according to The AIDS Memorial. Except for his family and close friends, he received few visitors during his hospital stay. A month later, the media reported that his health had deteriorated and rumours began to circulate that he had AIDS.
The initial cause of Variações’ death would be reported as bilateral bronchial pneumonia. At his funeral on June 15, 1984, the coffin would be sealed shut by order of the Portugese government.
June 25, 1984
French Philosopher Michel Foucault Dies
Michel Foucault, one of the most influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War II period, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 57.
Learn More.
A day later, French newspaper Libération would include in the obituary the rumor that the cause of Foucault’s death was AIDS. In response, Le Monde would issue a medical bulletin cleared by his family that makes no reference to HIV/AIDS.
On June 29, Foucault’s la levée du corps ceremony would be held, during which his coffin was carried from the hospital morgue to the cemetery at Vendeuvre-du-Poitou. Hundreds attend, including activists and academic friends, and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave a speech that included excerpts from Foucault’s ground-breaking work The History of Sexuality.
The son and grandson of physicians, Foucault was born to a bourgeois family. He enrolled at the age of 20 to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1946, and established a reputation as a sedulous, brilliant, and eccentric student.
After graduating in 1952, Foucault travelled Europe, issued monographs of his work and, in 1969, published L’Archéologie du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge), which won him attention as one of the most original and controversial thinkers of his day.
A year later, he was awarded a chair position at the Collège de France, the country’s most prestigious postsecondary institution, and began conducting intensive research.
Between 1971 and 1984 Foucault wrote several works, including Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison); three volumes of a history of Western sexuality; and numerous essays.
Foucault continued to travel widely, and as his reputation grew he spent extended periods in Brazil, Japan, Italy, Canada, and the U.S. He became particularly attached to San Francisco, where he was a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley for several years.
Although Foucault reportedly despised the label “homosexual,” he was openly gay and occasionally praised the pleasures of sadomasochism and the bathhouse. Foucault died while he was working on the fourth volume of his history of sexuality.
Foucault’s partner Daniel Defert would go on to found the first HIV/AIDS organization in France, AIDES; a play on the French language word for “help” (aide) and the English language acronym for the disease.In 1986, two years after Foucault’s death, Defert would publicly announce that Foucault’s death was AIDS-related.
CDC Cites IV Drug Use & Needle Sharing as AIDS Transmitter
U.S. Centers for Disease Control pubishes research demonstrating that avoiding injection drug use and reducing needle-sharing would help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
August 1, 1984
Charley Miller, of Turtle Creek Chorale in Dallas, Dies
Charley Miller, a tenor with the Turtle Creek Chorale in Dallas, becomes the first of many in the group to die of AIDS-related illness. He was 30 years old.
Learn More.
Charley Miller first performed with the Turtle Creek Chorale in July 1981 and he continued to sing with the group through June 1984. During that time, he was featured in the following productions:
Showtime ’81 (July 1981) – “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” from Cabaret as part of a Quartet
The Music of America (July 1982) – Texas Medley in a Septet and “I’ve Got Rhythm” as a member of the Showstoppers
Wintersong (December 1982) – “Cantata 142 – Un ist ein Kind geboren – Air” as a solo
Sing Gloria! (November 1983) – “Satin Doll,” “Java Jive,” “Dream,” “Georgia On My Mind,” and “Save the Bones for Henry Jones” as a member of the Turtle Creek Jazz
Sing We Nowell (December 1983) – “The Three Kings” as a part of a sextet
Of Three We Sing (June 1984) – “Credo” as a Duet, “Agnus Dei” as a solo
The Turtle Creek Chorale was founded in early 1980 by Don Essmiller, Phil Gerber, and Rodger Wilson over drinks at The Crews Inn, a gay bar in Dallas, according to Michael Sullivan in The Dallas Way. They named the group after the small stream that passed through the queer-friendly Dallas neighborhood of Oak Lawn.
“In some cities, the newly-formed choruses boldly chose to use the word ‘gay’ in their name, but in the buckle of the Bible Belt, the founders of just such a chorus in Dallas decided against it for what seemed obvious reasons,” Sullivan wrote in 2017.
Chief among those reasons was the fact that many of the singers were public school teachers, and the local superintendent was a notoriously homophobic man who threatened to fire openly gay teachers.
The group first rehearsed in February 1980 with 39 singers. On June 24, 1980, 70 members of the Chorale gave its first formal concert at the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By the end of its first season, the group had grown to 83 members.
By 1985, the Chorale was heavily impacted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As members began to get sick and die, the group transformed to become a space for its members to grieve and heal through performance and community, according to the University of North Texas’ 2017 exhibit Threads of Remembrance.
In its 1987 holiday performance, the Turtle Creek Chorale placed a poinsettia on the piano to honor the memory of those who had died of HIV/AIDS. When the number of fatalities reached 20, the tradition evolved into having a poinsettia placed at the front of the stage for each individual.
In April 1994, PBS would televise the documentary After Goodbye: An AIDS Story, which looked at the impact of AIDS on the Turtle Creek Chorale. The film followed the group through rehearsals and performances of When We No Longer Touch: A Cycle of Songs for Survival, a choral rendition of the stages of grief that was composed by composer-in-residence Kristopher Anthony.
At the time it was filmed in 1993, the Chorale had already lost more than 90 members to AIDS. Among them was Anthony, who died on June 26, 1992 at the age of 38.
By 2013, the AIDS death toll at the Chorale would reach 197. Still to this day, during its holiday performances, the group places on the stage a field of poinsettia plants, one for each Chorale member who has passed.
Calvin Hampton — Organist for Calvary Episcopal Church — Dies
Calvin Hampton, the organist and choirmaster at Calvary Episcopal Church in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood from 1963 to 1983, dies of AIDS-related illness near his parents’ Florida home. He was 45.
Learn More.
Known nationwide as a leading organist and sacred music composer, Hampton presided over the popular “Fridays at Midnight” organ recital series, which ran from 1974 to 1983. He also composed music for the church and the concert stage.
In 1974, he composed music for Walter Leyden Brown’s production of Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities, which was produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City.
Erik Routley, an authority on church music, called Hampton “the greatest living composer of hymn tunes.”
“An iconoclastic performer with distinctive ideas, he often incorporated organ transcriptions of 19th-century orchestral music into his programs,” wrote Tim Page of the New York Times. “Mr. Hampton was a prolific and eclectic composer, utilizing such diverse elements as rock, gospel hymns, synthesizers and quarter tones in his works.”
Hampton stopped working at the church in 1983 to concentrate on composition and organ consulting for several important classical organs in the U.S. He contracted AIDS but remained active until the final few weeks of his life, composing the massive Alexander Variations for two pipe organs while largely bedridden.
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.
In an article written by Evan Thomas and titled “The New Untouchables,” Time magazine reports on how public anxiety about AIDS is resulting in school boycotts and the ostracization of anyone suspected of being infected with HIV.
Learn More.
The magazine reported that parents of students in Queens were keeping their children at home, because it was disclosed that an unidentified second-grader enrolled at one of the city’s 622 elementary schools had the AIDS virus.
“That evening, hundreds of anxious parents gathered in the school’s airless auditorium,” Evans wrote. “They chanted, ‘Two, four, six, eight, no AIDS in any grades!’ and waved placards proclaiming OUR CHILDREN WANT GOOD GRADES, NOT AIDS!”
At the meeting, local politicians only added to the misinformation being spread about the disease.
State Assemblyman Frederick Schmidt said, “There is no medical authority who can say with authority that AIDS cannot be transmitted in school. What about somebody sneezing in the classroom? What about the water fountain? What about kids who get in a fight with a bloody nose? They don’t know!”
The article also reported on the following incidents:
In Miami, a highly successful caterer and floral designer named David Harrison was ruined when word spread that he had AIDS.
In Anaheim, California, a church bishop distributed a pastoral letter to counsel the “cautious person” who fears catching AIDS by drinking wine from a common cup. (Eating bread was deemed adequate Communion.)
In San Antonio, a county judge arraigned a prisoner who tested positive for AIDS while the man was in his jail cell, in an attempt to prevent the courtroom and staff from contamination by the AIDS virus.
When an AIDS task force in New Orleans began to be contacted by local citizens afraid of HIV-spreading mosquitoes, Dr. Louise McFarland, the agency’s chair, expressed her exasperation to the Time reporter.
“If that were true, the whole city of New Orleans would have AIDS,” Dr. McFarland said.
September 23, 1984
Vulnerable Leather Community Defends SoMa Territory with Street Fair
In a San Francisco neighborhood known as “South of Market” (or SoMa), people from different parts of the community band together to create a street fair to celebrate the distinct flavor of the locale. The event is the first of what would become to be widely known as the Folsom Street Fair.
Learn More.
“Dianne Feinstein was mayor, Mondale’s Democratic Convention had just blown through town, and the ‘gay cancer’ that had stirred genuine fears of a government conspiracy against the LGBT population had recently been dubbed AIDS and connected to sexual activity,” wrote Joe Kukura in SFist. “It was against this backdrop that Feinstein — who had just refused to march in the Pride parade — was waging an ‘urban renewal’ campaign intended to evict a large number of SoMa’s bathhouses and gay bars and replace them with high-rises, on the claim that SoMa was a mess of urban blight.”
The street fair was created by local activists Kathleen Connell and Michael Valerio to create a counter-narrative and demonstrate that the neighborhood was thriving, noteworthy and rich in culture and counter-culture. While the street fair did not start off as a leather community-focused event — that would come a few years later — it was from the start a celebration of all things South of Market, including the area’s leather and BDSM culture.
Event co-founder Michael Valerio was a SoMa “leatherman” whose day job was as an affordable housing coordinator at the still-existing nonprofit TODCO. His event partner, Kathleen Connell, also worked at TODCO, but they met at a meeting of the South of Market Alliance, a community advocacy group contesting the decisions being made by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) and the city’s Board of Supervisors. Inspired by the Castro Street Fair, Valerio and Connell worked with Harry Britt, Harvey Milk’s replacement on the Board of Supervisors, to arrange for SoMa streets to be closed from 12th Street to 7th Street between Howard and Harrison, with Folsom at the center.
On the day of the street fair, dubbed “Megahood,” some attendeees wore leather and other free-spirited outfits, while others wore more typical festival clothing.
Valerio and Connell smartly designed the event to promote the neighborhood’s small businesses and unique culture. But they also built in another goal: helping to fight for the survival of the LGBT communities as the AIDS epidemic devasted many of its members.
The leather communities in major cities were hit particularly hard by HIV, and none hit harder than San Francisco’s SoMa leather community. In HIV in the Leather Community: Rates and Risk-Related Behaviors(2011), a study showed that Leathermen were 61% more likely to be HIV-positive than non-Leathermen, and that decreased condom use found in HIV-positive Leathermen (relative to HIV-positive non-Leathermen) was a potential factor contributing to heightened HIV rates.
Among its 37 booths were those from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Shanti Project, conducting community outreach to fairgoers. In recent years, the number of booths at the Folsom Street Fair has grown to 200 and the number of attendees to over 400,000, making it the third largest street event in California.
October 9, 1984
NYT Article Erroneously Suggests AIDS Transmission via Saliva is Possible
The New York Times reports that new scientific evidence has raised the possibility that AIDS may be transmissible through saliva . It will be another two years before proof emerges that this is false.
Learn More.
Epidemiologic studies to date point to sexual contact as well as transfusions of blood or blood products as the major risk factors leading to AIDS.
”Right now epidemiological studies do not point to saliva as the key mode of spread of AIDS and data show that close contact is much more important,” Dr. Robert C. Gallo, a leading AIDS researcher, told The New York Times.
Even so, this article spread fear among the public and further stigmatized those living with AIDS.
October 10, 1984
San Francisco Closes 14 Bathhouses
The City of San Francisco orders 14 bathhouses closed due to reports of high-risk sexual activity occurring in these venues.
Learn More.
“It has been established that the bathhouses contribute to the spread of AIDS and they ought to be closed,” Mayor Dianne Feinstein said. Frustrated with gay rights groups that were blocking her two-year campaign to close the bathhouses, Feinstein decided on a different approach: closing them one by one.
Under Mayor Feinstein’s direction, the City hired private investigators to go undercover into baths and other venues that were known to serve the gay community and report on anything considered by them to be an unsafe sex act.
The city’s Director of Public Health, Dr. Mervyn Silverman, did not approve of these tactics, but when the investigators submitted an 85-page report that listed the types of sexual activity taking place at these venues, he felt compelled to respond, according to Randy Shilts’ book And the Band Played On.
At a news conference, Dr. Silverman ordered the closure of baths and several other establishments identified in the report as places where gay men partook in unsafe sex, citing them by name, stating, “These 14 establishments are not fostering gay liberation. They are fostering disease and death.”
Within six hours of the order, two would re-open. An additional 10 re-opened within 24 hours.
The controversy over gay bathhouses and sex clubs and the roles they play in the spread of AIDS was not limited to San Francisco. Every major city with a significant gay population was struggling with this issue. Even within the gay community, members debated each other over which was more important — public health or gay civil liberties.
But it was in San Francisco where political debates first broke out. New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Seattle and Portland followed, with local policy approaches varying from a citywide closure of all bathhouses to collaborations between health agencies and community members to introduce education and precautions for patrons.
Why were bathhouses the focus of so much intense debate? Because, to the gay community in the 1970s and 1980s, they were places that took decades of social evolution to establish.
“Early American bathhouses evolved out of traditional 1920s and ‘30s Turkish and Russian baths, which offered communal hot tubs and showers to all men,” according to Stephan Ferris in Out of the Tubs, and Into the Streets! Tracing the history of bathhouse regulations in San Francisco, CA “Gay bathhouses, in contrast, distinguished themselves from these venues by permitting sex among
members and by offering food, entertainment, and private rooms.”
Bathhouses catered to a mixed male clientele, serving those seeking social networking as well as providing a space for anonymous sexual encounters. Membership was driven by a common desire to engage with other members.
“They are not for taking baths,” the Washington Post stated in its reporting of “The Bathhouse War.” “Some of the houses have steam rooms, or saunas, or more lavish facilities that include jacuzzis and swimming pools, but that is not why men pay their $5 or $10 for a locker or a tiny private room in a dimly lit San Francisco bathhouse. Men use them to meet other men, to engage sometimes in what the clinical language calls ‘multiple, anonymous sexual contacts.'”
But for many gay men, the bathhouses of the 1980s represented much more; they were a refuge.
“We were paying money to get in there, and sometimes it was too much, but we weren’t paying for sex. We were paying for the territory — to get in there,” San Francisco historian Allan Be’rube’ told The Post. “They have a tremendous symbolism.”
In 1984, Be’rube’ submitted a historical brief to the California Superior Court that provided evidence on the social and cultural importance of bathhouses. He also described the potential role the venues could play to educate the community about AIDS prevention. A year later, when the City of New York was immersed in a similarly stormy debate, Be’rube’ updated his legal brief and submitted it to the NY Supreme Court.
Be’rube’s defense of the bathhouses stressed the right of gay men “to use them for associational purposes that were sexual as well as social and political.” A version of this historical brief was later published in 1996 in Policing Public Sex, edited by the scholar-activist group Dangerous Bedfellows.
November 4, 1984
Early AIDS Activist Roger Lyon Dies
Roger Gail Lyon, famous for being among the first three Persons With AIDS to testify before Congress about the epidemic, dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 36.
Learn More.
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.
The spread of AIDS worldwide is accelerating, researcher Anthony Fauci, M.D., tells clinical staff gathered at an internal conference at the National Institutes of Health.
Learn More.
Dr. Fauci, who previously reported that the disease struck primarily gay men, tells his colleagues: “There is increasing evidence, particularly from Zaire, that the virus can be spread by heterosexual contact.”
Dr. Fauci’s presentation is accompanied by a paper co-authored with Henry Masur, M.D.; Edward Gelmann, M.D.; Phillip Markham, Ph.D.; Beatrice Hahn, M.D.; and H. Clifford Land, M.D.
In the paper, the scientists summarize the results of their research into the treatment of opportunistic infections.
“Attempts at immune reconstitution with lymphocytes and lymphokines have resulted in some transient improvement in immune function but without clinical effect, indicating the need for specific antiretroviral therapy in combination with immune reconstitution,” the paper states.
November 29, 1984
West Hollywood is Born with LGBT-Majority Council
Hundreds gather in a drafty auditorium to attend the first City Council Meeting for the newly chartered City of West Hollywood.
Learn More.
A county sheriff’s deputy led the new mayor, Valerie Terrigno, through the crowd to the stage.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Terrigno’s family members sat in the front row. Attendees in the packed auditorium (a space which fire marshalls restricted, leaving scores of additional people outside in West Hollywood Park) included a composite of the city’s residents: elderly Russian-Jewish renters, members of the LGBTQ community, and plenty of activists.
The meeting started with the council officially appointing Terrigno to the office of mayor.
“I’ve worked to become a leader of our dreams and our future, and I know with power comes great responsibility,” she told the crowd. “It’s a responsibility I eagerly accept … Our dreams are a sound investment. Don’t let them waver.”
The Council then moved to adopt a ban on sex-orientation bias, and moratoriums on new construction, rent increases and evictions. Councilmembers voted to roll back rents to August 1984 levels.
The new city was created out of the unrest and fear of rising rents and housing insecurities in the early 1980s, set to the backdrop of a new disease that was spreading among members of the gay community. An area populated primarily with renters, West Hollywood established itself as a safe place for gays and lesbians. As a result, many of its residents were living with AIDS and involved in AIDS activism.
In the months that follow, Mayor Terrigno would receive letters from fans and admirers.
On crumpled yellow legal stationery, a woman from Missoula, Montona, wrote to her: “I’ve always been a dreamer, always wanting to find a utopia and always without much luck. I envy you finding yours, Ms. Valerie.”
From Tahiti, a vacationing Frenchwoman named Vera sent a postcard saying she would stop in West Hollywood before returning to Paris. The card read: “Felicitation for your victory. You are an escample for a French people homosescule.”
And from Turkey, a teacher afraid to give his name sent a rambling two-page letter. “Homosexuelity is completely forbidden,” he wrote. “Please, please, help me, take me near you — dear my friend, my sister.”
Each week, dozens of such letters arrived at Terrigno’s office in West Hollywood’s temporary City Hall. They continued to come for months, missives from gay men and women who read about the new city and saw Terrigno as a symbol of the pride they still struggled to achieve.
Before the West Hollywood election, there had been only 13 openly gay elected officials in the country. Now there were three more. In the summer of 1985, Terrigno would go on a hectic three-month cross-country speaking tour, appearing before somber audiences of upwardly mobile gay business leaders and parading before cheering masses at gay-pride events.
But within a year, Terrigno would be charged and convicted of embezzling $7,000 in federal funds during a previous job with a job-referral agency. Her trial in March 1986 would last three days, and the jury would convict her after just four hours of deliberation. She was sentenced to 60 days in prison or in a halfway house, five years’ probation, restitution and 1,000 hours of community service.
Terrigno would tell the LA Times: “A situation like this shakes your sense of what life is about. I feel sad about everything. I have no idea where to pick up from this point. I just hope this won’t change peoples’ attitudes about the city or the gay movement.”
December 6, 1984
Lawrence ‘La-La’ Beach — Owner of SF’s Balcony — Dies
Lawrence ‘La-La’ Beach, one of the founders and principal owners of the San Francisco bar The Balcony, dies of AIDS-related illness at the San Francisco Hospice at the age of 42.
Learn More.
In 1977, Beach opened The Balcony on the north side of Market Street with co-owners Lee Harington and Terry Scott. Commonly referred to as “The Baloney” after the “c” in the signage was dislodged, the venue earned a reputation as one of the most outrageous gay bars on the west coast, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
Born in Oneida, New York, Beach was born in 1942. He received a Bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin College and a law degree from Duke University. He joined the Navy and was stationed at Treasure Island, where he served as a legal adjutant.
After being discharged from the Navy, Beach held a series of corporate jobs, and then changed the course of his career when he took a job as floor manager of The Ambush Bar on Folsom Street. It was at The Ambush where Beach met his future co-owners, Harington and Scott.
The Balcony would close in March 1982. Beach would become an early casualty of the AIDS epidemic.
December 7, 1984
AIDS Conference Held in Irvine, California
Researchers and health officials convene on Dec. 7-8 in Irvine, CA for the International Conference on AIDS Associated Syndromes.
Learn More.
The conference brought together AIDS researchers conducting studies on the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which was then a new discovery.
At the time, no effective antiviral drugs for HIV/AIDS existed and research subjects typically died of AIDS-related illnesses within 10 years of infection with the virus. Researchers worldwide were scrambling to find a way to stop the AIDS virus from replicating within the body, according to the National Institutes of Health’s website for its Cancer Research Center.
The 1983 discovery of the AIDS virus by Luc Montagnier, M.D. at the Pasteur Institute in Paris (which was confirmed in 1984 by Robert Gallo, M.D. of the U.S. National Cancer Institute) had researchers all over the world searching for an effective treatment and cure to counter the quick spread of the new disease. Still more scientists were engaged with developing a vaccine for HIV — something that still eludes them to this day.
In December 1984, scientists at the forefront of this research gathered in southern California to try to answer the life-and-death questions of the day:
Was HIV alone responsible for AIDS, or was it activated by a combination with other factors in the way that other viruses — like Epstein-Barr virus or Cytomegalovirus — did.
What was the relationship of HIV to Kaposi’s sarcoma (since Kaposi’s sarcoma in AIDS could not be explained on the basis of the underlying immune deficiency)?
Where and how did the virus originate?
What were the clinical, cellular, and/or serological markers that determined the outcome of HIV infection?
Conference presentations also included work on identifying characteristics of early-stage AIDS and various treatment theories, and the specific ways in which HIV and AIDS exhibited in infants.
CDC Updates AIDS Definition & Issues Guidelines for Blood Screening
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) revises the AIDS case definition to note that AIDS is caused by a newly identified virus. CDC also issues provisional guidelines for blood screening.
Learn More.
The report includes the following “recommendations for the individual” judged most likely to have an HTLV-III infection:
1. The prognosis for an individual infected with HTLV-III over the long term is not known.
However, data available from studies conducted among homosexual men indicate
that most persons will remain infected.
2. Although asymptomatic, these individuals may transmit HTLV-III to others. Regular
medical evaluation and follow-up is advised, especially for individuals who develop
signs or symptoms suggestive of AIDS.
3. Refrain from donating blood, plasma, body organs, other tissue, or sperm.
4. There is a risk of infecting others by sexual intercourse, sharing of needles, and possi
bly, exposure of others to saliva through oral-genital contact or intimate kissing. The efficacy of condoms in preventing infection with HTLV-III is unproven, but the consis
tent use of them may reduce transmission.
5. Toothbrushes, razors, or other implements that could become contaminated with
blood should not be shared.
6. Women with a seropositive test, or women whose sexual partner is seropositive, are
themselves at increased risk of acquiring AIDS. If they become pregnant, their offspr
ing are also at increased risk of acquiring AIDS.
7. After accidents resulting in bleeding, contaminated surfaces should be cleaned with
household bleach freshly diluted 1:10 in water.
8. Devices that have punctured the skin, such as hypodermic and acupuncture needles,
should be steam sterilized by autoclave before reuse or safely discarded. Whenever
possible, disposable needles and equipment should be used.
9. When seeking medical or dental care for intercurrent illness, these persons should
inform those responsible for their care of their positive antibody status so that ap
propriate evaluation can be undertaken and precautions taken to prevent transmission
to others.
10. Testing for HTLV-III antibody should be offered to persons who may have been infect
ed as a result of their contact with seropositive individuals (e.g., sexual partners, per
sons with whom needles have been shared, infants born to seropositive mothers).
January 28, 1985
Dennis Parker — Disco Star & Soap Opera Actor — Dies
Dennis Parker, a New York actor who performed on the daytime television show The Edge of Night after starring in several adult films in the late 1970s, dies of AIDS-related illness. He was 39.
Learn More.
Parker joined the cast of The Edge of Night in 1979 as Police Chief Derek Mallory, and he appeared in more than 500 episodes before he became too sick to continue with the show.
Born Dennis Posa in 1946, Parker grew up in Freeport, Long Island and attended the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, where he had his first taste of acting. He left college and returned to New York to pursue a career as a stage actor.
Becoming frustrated with the difficulty of landing good roles, he took on work as a carpenter and also as an illustrator for Jiffy Simplicity, a company that sold sewing patterns. He also started posing nude for art classes.
In the mid-1970s, he met the love of his life in another aspiring actor, Joey Alan Phipps. Eleven years Parker’s junior, Phipps soon moved into Parker’s rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s East 38th Street and introduced him to a new career path as a model for gay porn magazines, according to “The Story of Wade Nichols and Dennis Parker” in the Rialto Report..
In 1975, Parker appeared in his first adult film, Boy ‘Napped, under the name Wade Nichols, created from his middle name and his father’s first name. This was followed by 26 additional adult films, all released between 1976 and 1979.
Around this time, Parker met Jacques Morali, a French music producer who was about to become famous for launching The Village People.
“Jacques was instantly attracted by this sexy and handsome guy,” said Henri Belolo, Morali’s creative partner. “He was always attracted to a good-looking mustache.”
Parker moved into Morali’s luxury apartment in the East 50s, but continued to see Phipps “when he could,” said Parker’s friend Tip Sanderson. Morali initially offered Parker a role in his new music group — The Village People — but then decided to change direction and wait until he could arrange for Parker a career as a solo act, Sanderson said.
In 1978, Morali made good on his promise by securing a record deal for Parker with Casablanca Records. He assembled a selection of songs, singling out the two strongest, “Like an Eagle” and “New York By Night.” Morali’s partner Belolo became the executive producer of the singles.
“Before the recording sessions, Jacques made Dennis prepare intensively, taking singing lessons and practicing a lot,” Belolo said. “He really made Dennis work hard.”
Parker went to Sigma Sound to record the album, which was titled Like an Eagle after the song they thought was the most likely to become a hit. According to Belolo, he and Morali tapped their top creative resources for the project.
“We had the best musicians and arrangers,” he said. “In fact, we used the same rhythm section that was featured on the Village People records.”
“Jacques Morali contacted me, and told me to come down to play on his boyfriend’s record,” said bass player Alfonso Carey, who remembered Parker as easy-going and friendly. “I’m the bass player that played on all the Village People hits, from ‘YMCA,’ ‘Macho Man,’ and the rest. I also wrote the song ‘Why Don’t You Boogie’ for Dennis.”
Like an Eagle was released in 1979 under the artist name “Dennis Parker” to sever ties with his adult film career and his other identity, Wade Nichols.
Parker’s brother, Richard Posa, said that he remembered asking Parker if the new album release meant that he would stop making adult films.
“Dennis said yes, but he was pleased with the work he’d done nevertheless,” Posa said. “He also mentioned that Screw magazine had voted him ‘Man of the Year’ in 1978 – and he got a kick out of that.”
Parker went to Europe to promote the album. Afterward, Parker and Morali’s’ relationship started to cool, according to “The Story of Wade Nichols and Dennis Parker” in the Rialto Report. Ultimately, Parker returned to his apartment on East 38th Street and invited Joey Alan Phipps to come back.
Parker also returned to another old love – acting. He leveraged his disco fame to land him auditions for mainstream parts. On a casting call for a role as an extra on the crime-themed soap opera The Edge of Night, Parker caught the eye of the producer and was offered a recurring role as the local police chief.
He would play the role of Chief Derek Mallory in more than 500 episodes between 1979 and 1984. He settled easily into his new life as a television actor and embraced all that it entailed, performing at fundraisers for local non-profits and scoring points for The Edge of Night softball team.
“There were a lot of very athletic guys on the crew and in the cast,” said castmate Sharon Gabet. “Dennis would show up in these tight shorts … and an ascot. He would be there swinging a bat – with his ascot. It was hilarious.”
In the spring of 1984, Parker told his brother that he was experiencing night sweats and prolonged bouts of fatigue. He took some time off The Edge of Night, and when he returned, it was apparent to the cast and crew that he had lost a lot of weight and could not move well.
“They were careful to shoot around his frailty,” Parker’s brother said. “They had him sitting at desks. They did their best to cover up his physical deterioration.”
Meanwhile, Phipps tended to Parker throughout his illness and took him to appointments at Cabrini Medical Center in mid-town Manhattan.
“Now when I look back, it’s pretty evident to me that the man was dying,” said castmate Sharon Gabet. “He would just have enough energy to give his lines, and then you would find him asleep in the chair or laying on one of the couches. He just couldn’t do it anymore. They kept cutting his part back.”
His last episode aired on October 18, 1984, just 12 days shy of his fifth anniversary on the show.
After Parker’s death in late January 1985, Phipps moved to Palm Springs, California. In the early 1990s, he contracted AIDS and tried to manage his illness with new treatments that had become available. Unfortunately, Phipps had an additional health issue that caused his body to reject the new drugs, and he died of AIDS-related illness on December 6, 1996.
March 1, 1985
CPAC Member Proposes ‘Extermination of Homosexuals’
Talking to reporters covering the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington DC, anti-gay propagandist Paul Cameron says: “Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals.”
Learn More.
Founder of anti-gay hate groups such as the Committee to Oppose Special Rights for Homosexuals, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality, and the Family Research Institute, Cameron attended the conference of conservative extremists hoping to frighten its members with his ideas about gay men and AIDS.
In the CPAC convention halls, Cameron told anyone who would listen that “it looks as if mosquitoes may be able to transmit AIDS,” according to the Associated Press
Cameron presented himself to politicians and media representatives as a man of science, but his biased research and unethical claims had caused the American Psychological Association to expel him as a member in 1984, according to The Pink Community: The Facts by Christina Engela. Still, he managed to insert his homophobic rhetoric into the minds of influential policymakers and judges.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Cameron was conducting “psychological studies” that drew false conclusions about homosexuality, such as that it was a “curable condition” and that it was linked to pedophilia. And this was before the AIDS crisis hit.
Once gay men began dying of AIDS-related illnesses, Cameron doubled down on his anti-gay messaging and fabricated research, claiming that the only way to stop the spread of HIV was to quarantine gay men and criminalize gay sex acts, according to the Associated Press. He also pushed for the closure of all gay bars and baths, and a ban on international travel for all gay men.
For many years, Cameron would find a place for himself amongst the far-Right, pushing outrageously false claims about why gays and lesbians were “unfit parents” and “more likely to molest children” — falsehoods that some people still believe today.
March 2, 1985
Blood Test for HIV Becomes Available
The U.S Food and Drug Administration licenses the first commercial blood test, ELISA, to detect HIV. Blood banks begin screening the U.S. blood supply.
Learn More.
A positive result on ELISA (an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) must be confirmed by a second test for a person to receive a definitive diagnosis of HIV infection.
Today, many single-test options are available to test for HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), including an FDA-approved, at-home test called OraQuick. Approved in 2012 for sale to anyone age 17 and older, the OraQuick In-Home HIV Test tests fluid from the mouth and delivers results in 20 to 40 minutes. The kit does not require sending a sample to a lab.
HIV screening is covered in the U.S. by health insurance without a co-pay, as required by the Affordable Care Act. Some testing sites offer free tests for those without medical insurance coverage.
The FDA still regulates the tests that detect infection with HIV. An estimated 1.1 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV, and about one in seven don’t know they have it, according to the CDC.
The CDC recommends that everyone between the ages of 13 and 64 years old be screened for HIV at least once as part of their routine health care. More frequent testing is recommended for people who have a higher risk of infection because of behaviors such as having sex without condoms, having sex with multiple partners, or injecting drugs using shared needles.
March 1985
HIV+ Inmates in Alabama Challenge Segregation Policies in Prison
In a legal first, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) files a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Alabama state prisons’ policy of segregating HIV-positive prisoners.
Learn More.
In its suit against the State of Alabama’s Department of Corrections, the ACLU’s National Prison Project charged prison officials with creating a “leper colony” for inmates living with HIV, including those who didn’t exhibit any symptoms associated with the disease. The suit was the first involving prisoners as a class, rather than case by case, in a challenge to incarceration policies and procedures regarding HIV-positive inmates.
One of the 139 inmates represented by the ACLU’s lawsuit was 30-year-old Carmen Harris, who upon her arrival at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama, received the news that she had tested positive for HIV. Harris told The Washington Post that the prison first put her in solitary confinement and then moved her to the facility’s Death Row.
“It was like they were punishing me not for my crime but for my diagnosis,” Harris told WaPo.
Another HIV-positive inmate was Michael Marsh, a 40-year-old convict confined to Dorm 7 at the Limestone Correctional Facility in Capshaw, Alabama. Dorm 7 was where Alabama housed the majority of its inmates who were living with HIV, regardless of whether they exhibited any HIV-related symptoms.
Limestone was a minimum-to-medium security prison, but state officials also transferred into Dorm 7 violent offenders who tested positive for HIV, grouping them with less dangerous inmates. In contrast with Limestone’s general population, Dorm 7 inmates were restricted from educational, vocational and recreational activities, including those that would allow them to earn credits toward early release. The very fact of their segregated status made it known to other inmates that they were HIV positive, making impossible any attempt to keep their condition private.
J.D. White, Limestone’s warden, defended the segregation policy to the NY Times.
”It boils down to whose civil rights get violated,” White said. ”Do you violate the rights of 132 people who test positive, or do you violate the rights of the 12,000 who don’t?”
The lawsuit was the first of many filed against state prison systems across the U.S., seeking to end discriminatory practices against HIV-positive inmates. This lawsuit would fail, be appealed, and then brought to the U.S. Supreme Court. But in January 2000, the Justices would decline to hear the case.
It would take until 2012 before a federal judge would decide that Alabama’s policy of segregating HIV-positive inmates violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
March 20, 1985
Musical Director James Thomason-Bergner Dies
James Thomason-Bergner, musical director and conductor for the San Francisco production of Beach Blanket Babylon, dies of AIDS-related illness on his 40th birthday.
Learn More.
Thomason-Bergner was also a vocal coach and headed the musical theater program at Lone Mountain College. He had been musical director for the Theatre of Music in Santa Fe, as well as for the Santa Fe Community Theater.
Originally from Austin, Texas, Thomason-Bergner graduated from the University of Texas and then moved to San Francisco to attend Lone Mountain College.
His younger brother, Charles “Charlie” Bergner, had died in late 1983 of AIDS-related illness at the age of 34. Both James and Charles were valued members of their local churches, James attending the Santa Fe Unitarian Church and Charles attending Washington Square United Methodist Church in New York City.
“I knew that Charles was interested in healing and prayer and meditation,” wrote fellow congregant Nancy A. Carter in 1985. “I asked if he would like me to do healing work with him. He said, ‘Yes.’ I explained therapeutic touch, a type of laying on of hands that I would use with him.”
Carter recalled that when she worked on Bergner, he experienced “vivid, colorful imagery … in the form of a windmill.”
“He said that the windmill was standing on parched land, but the wind was blowing and the windmill was drawing up water from beneath the earth and was nourishing the dry land,” Carter wrote. “The image of the windmill became very important to us. Most every time I worked with Charles, the windmill appeared to him.”
As she provided care for her friend, she said she realized that if his death was inevitable, at least she could assist with his spiritual healing.
“Charles suffered with AIDS, but he did not suffer the way that some do. He had love and he had courage which sustained him. God was with him. Charles reached out to friends and friends reached out to him,” she said.
On Sunday, December 25, 1983, the congregation telephoned Bergner to sing Christmas carols to him as he lay in a hospital bed, battling pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. He died the next day, with his partner David and his sister at his side.
Carter recalled how in 1983, Washington Square Church began providing pastoral services to all persons living with AIDS. The church also made available space for support groups affiliated with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to use for meetings.
“We were one of the first churches to go into HIV/AIDS ministry,” Carter said.
More than 2,000 researchers gathered at the conference to share information and assess prospects for controlling the disease, not yet realizing that the worst was yet to come.
The Atlanta conference featured 392 presentations and generated considerable excitement among participants eager to learn about how this new disease was playing out within specific populations in the U.S.
Much of the news was discouraging, however, as presenters introduced new data that showed that many of those dying in 1985 had been infected before 1981, and that within especially vulnerable populations, the epidemic was becoming entrenched.
At a side meeting before the day the conference opened, gay activists protested Reagan administration proposals to implement mandatory HIV testing policies, arguing that this would do little to halt the spread of the disease and would only intensify discrimination against vulnerable groups.
April 8, 1985
Chicago Theater Actor J Pat Miller Dies
James Patterson Miller, a Chicago actor known professionally as J. Pat Miller, dies of AIDS-related illness in Chicago at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Miller was nominated for Jefferson Awards for playing the title role in Peter Handke’s Kaspar and for his performance as Antonin Artaud in the Victory Gardens Theater production of Artaud.
Miller made his theatrical debut in Whores of Babylon, the debut production of the Godzilla Rainbow Troupe, cofounded by Gary Tucker and Tommy Biscotto.
“Most vividly, I remember the actor whose performance [a theater critic] praised without naming the artist who delivered it. He was J. Pat Miller, making his Chicago stage debut,” wrote Albert Williams in the Chicago Reader.
Miller went on to become one of Chicago’s most popular and respected actors with performances at the Goodman, Organic, Victory Gardens, and Wisdom Bridge, as well as a celebrated European tour of Waiting for Godot.
In May 1985, Season of Concern would launch the Biscotto-Miller Fund, named in memory of Miller and another luminary of the Chicago theater world, Tommy Biscotto. The fund was created in tandem with the benefit performance event, Arts Against AIDS at Second City to raise money for medical care, food, housing, and other basic needs to Chicago theater artists with HIV/AIDS.
Over the next few years, this volunteer effort expanded into Season of Concern — a full-time, professional operation that raises money for local direct-care organizations serving community members fighting AIDS and other catastrophic illnesses. The Biscotto-Miller Fund continues as an emergency fund, offering direct cash grants to individuals in need.
CDC removes Haitians from the list of those at increased risk for AIDS, because scientists can no longer justify including them on statistical grounds,
Learn More.
The CDC, which began investigating the mysterious and often-fatal disease in 1981, initially identified Haitian immigrants, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and homosexual or bisexual men as groups at high risk for HIV/AIDS.
The CDC’s weekly reports of AIDS statistics included all four groups, but starting in April 1985, Haitians were no longer included as a separate listing.
The April 1985 report cited a total of 9,405 cases of AIDS reported in the U.S. Of those cases, 285 (about 3%) were Haitians, said Dr. Walter Dowdle, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases. Previously the rate for Haitians had been as high as 5%. By contrast, about 75% of the cases were of males who identified as homosexual or bisexual.
”The Haitians were the only risk group that were identified because of who they were, rather than what they did,” he said.
April 22, 1985
‘The Normal Heart’ Opens at the Public Theatre
AIDS activist Larry Kramer’s autobiographical play, The Normal Heart, opens Off-Broadway at the Public Theater.
Learn More.
The play covers the impact of the growing AIDS epidemic on the NYC gay community, highlighting growing rifts between those — like the play’s protagonist, Ned Weeks (Kramer’s alter ego) — who are desperately banging on the doors of government and science in an attempt to stave off the annihilation of gay men, and those who focus instead on building new institutions that will care for the sick and the dying.
“The blood that’s coursing through ‘The Normal Heart,’ the new play by Larry Kramer at the Public Theater, is boiling hot,” said New York Times theater critic Frank Rich.
“In this fiercely polemical drama about the private and public fallout of the AIDS epidemic, the playwright starts off angry, soon gets furious and then skyrockets into sheer rage.”
The plot focuses on a gay couple who have broken up — but when one of them develops AIDS, his ex-partner comes back to take care of him — “as is.”
The play gets excellent reviews and runs for 285 performances.
“Strange as it may sound, Mr. Hoffman has turned a tale of the dead and the dying into the liveliest new work to be seen at the Circle Repertory Company in several seasons,” said New York Times theater critic Frank Rich.
May 10, 1985
AIDS Infections Reach 10,000, per CDC Headcount
The Center for Disease Control reports that as of April 30, 1985, the number of AIDS cases in the U.S. has increased substantially. Of the 10,000 reported cases, 9,887 are adults and 113 are children.
Learn More.
Since the initial reports of AIDS in the spring of 1981, the number of cases reported each half-year has increased significantly, with more than half of the 10,000 cases being reported within the last year.
Of the 10,000 reported AIDS cases, 4,942 are known to have died (49% of the adults and 69% of the children). About 75% of patients diagnosed before January 1983 are known dead.
The CDC report states that 90% of adult patients are 20-49 years old, and 94% are men. The racial breakdown of the cases are: 60% white; 25% black; and 14% Hispanic.
The report also notes that the proportion of AIDS cases in transfusion recipients has increased significantly.
At this point, AIDS has been diagnosed in patients from 46 states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories. Among cases reported before May 1983, 47% of the adults were residents of New York. As the virus spread geographically between 1984 and 1985, the proportion of adults reported with AIDS from New York decreased to 34%.
Among the 113 pediatric patients, 58% percent were under 1 year old at diagnosis; and 72% came from families in which one or both parents had AIDS or were at increased risk for developing AIDS, 13% had received transfusions of blood or blood components before their onsets of illness, and 5% had hemophilia.
Pediatric cases were reported from 17 states; 82% were from New York, New Jersey, Florida, and California. Of the 81 pediatric patients with a parent with AIDS or at increased risk for AIDS, 69 were residents of New York, New Jersey, or Florida.
May 10, 1985
San Francisco Commission Releases Report on AIDS Discrimination
Research by the AIDS Discrimination Reporting Project finds that gay men living with AIDS are being terminated from their jobs because of their illness.
Learn More.
The study also finds that some employers are requiring gay men to present medical documentation proving that they do not have the AIDS virus, and that gay men are experiencing verbal harassment that is generated by AIDS paranoia and ignorance.
A coalition effort of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the Shanti Project, and the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Aids Activities Office, the AIDS Discrimination Reporting Project released a report of its study of AIDS-related discrimination complaints. Participants in the survey were largely gay men, some of whom were living with HIV/AIDS and some of whom were not but still experienced AIDS-related discrimination.
“Discrimination ranged from employers requiring a physician’s statement denying that an employee had AIDS to actual termination and eviction,” the report stated.
The report was authored by Chris van Stone and Jackie Winnow of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.
May 27, 1985
Mark Spaeth, Austin Councilmember and Ex-husband of Gunsmoke Actress, Dies
Mark Spaeth, an Austin City Councilmember who was the former husband of Gunsmoke star Amanda Blake, died of AIDS-related illness at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin. He was 45.
Learn More.
Mark Spaeth is remembered most as the politically ambitious Austin City Councilmember who married “Miss Kitty” of Gunsmoke.
As a Florida teenager, Spaeth left high school before graduating to join the U.S. Coast Guard. He began working in real estate in Miami, and then moved to California to continue working as a real estate developer. He moved to Austin, Texas in 1971 and opened a rental agency. On a plane trip in the late 1970s, Spaeth befriended Amanda Blake, who starred as Miss Kitty on the long-running television show Gunsmoke (1955-1975). They began a friendship, even though Spaeth lived in Austin and Blake lived in Phoenix.
In 1983, Spaeth decided to run for Austin City Council, campaigning on the promises to provide tax breaks for the elderly, improve local traffic flow, and improve childcare options for working families. He was also known as a champion for human rights and a supporter of the gay community, according to This Week in Texas (TWT).
Although he did not seek an endorsement from the Austin Lesbian/Gay Political Caucus (he sent his campaign manager to ask the group not to endorse him, fearing backlash), Spaeth courted votes by visiting Austin’s gay bars and his campaign was ultimately a success, according to activist and writer Troy Stokes.
At his inauguration, Spaeth presented Blake with a dozen red roses and said, “It’s not often that a man can publicly say ‘I love you’ to his best friend.”
On April 28, 1984, they were married at Cisco’s Bakery & Bar in Austin. According to TWT, it was Spaeth’s third marriage and Blake’s fifth. TWT editors and others in the LGBT community speculated that Spaeth’s marriage was “the beginning of laying the groundwork” for his plans to run for Austin’s mayoral seat.
But Spaeth did not publicly disclose that he had tested positive for HIV and he was, in fact, experiencing the early symptoms of AIDS (fevers, malaise and dizziness, which he attributed to “a mystery virus” that had confounded his doctors). As his health deteriorated, he spent long months in Dallas seeking treatment, which caused him to miss his council meetings, according to United Press International. He announced that he wouldn’t seek a second term.
Spaeth also decided to end his marriage, filing for divorce from Blake on the eve of their first anniversary. By that time, Spaeth was living full-time in Dallas and Blake had returned to Hollywood to pursue television projects.
Spaeth’s cause of death was initially reported by hospital officials as pneumonia, but later reports indicated that the pneumonia was AIDS-related. About five years later, Blake would die of AIDS-related illnesses at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento.
June 22, 1985
David Goodstein, Publisher of The Advocate, Dies
David Goodstein, former publisher of The Advocate who missed the chance to turn his national publication into a much-needed resource during the early years of the AIDS crisis, dies at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego of colon cancer. He was 53.
Learn More.
Goodstein published The Advocate from 1975 to 1978 and again from 1982 until 1985. He was the owner of Liberation Publications, the parent company of The Advocate that also distributed other magazines.
Because Goodstein was slow to understand the seriousness of the threat posed by AIDS, he missed an opportunity to use his popular national magazine as a clearinghouse of information for a population starved for information about HIV and AIDS, according to the LGBT Archives.
In a letter to his readers in 1983, Goodstein wrote: “So far, no one knows with certainty what causes the fatal ‘new’ diseases. Heterosexuals, one person in a monogamous relationship and not the other, even infants have succumbed. Yet many cases are centered in the gay men’s community, especially in New York City. Most of us who know a lot of gay men also know one or more who have died. Living with this situation feels a bit like it must have felt to be alive when the plague was decimating the population of Europe.”
Born in 1932 into a wealthy Denver family, Goodstein was afflicted with scoliosis and was subjected to a lonely childhood. He received his undergraduate education at Cornell University and then earned a law degree from Columbia University. He practiced law as a criminal defense attorney for several years in New York City.
In 1970, he moved to California, and in 1975 he bought The Advocate, which was then a small publication that served the Los Angeles gay and lesbian community. He moved the magazine to San Mateo, near San Francisco, and under his ownership, transformed The Advocate into the most widely-read LGBT news magazine in the country.
Goodstein’s tenure as publisher began with the firing of the entire editorial staff, according to Lionel Biron in the literary magazine Gay Sunshine (1976). Among those who Goodstein fired was columnist Arthur Evans, one of the founders of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in New York. The GAA would become a frequent critic of The Advocate over the years, accusing Goodstein of making the magazine “a show place of white, middle-class gay America.
Goodstein forbid the mention of certain LGBT activists and organizations that he believed had undermined him in some way. When in 1978, Los Angeles-based activist Morris Kight challenged Goodstein’s control of the Committee for Sexual Law Reform, Goodstein assigned Randy Shilts to do an exposé on him, according to the LGBT Archives. Realizing that there was nothing to warrant a negative story on Kight, Shilts decided to resign from The Advocate, and famously went on to become the first openly gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronical.
Goodstein also leveraged his power in positive, constructive ways. In 1977, he was among the founders of Concerned Voters of California, an organization formed to oppose the Briggs Initiative. Named after California State Senator John V. Briggs, the Briggs Initiative sought to bar gay men and lesbians from teaching in public schools. In a major victory for the gay rights movement, the Briggs Initiative was defeated in November 1978, thanks largely to the campaign coordination by the Concerned Voters of California.
Also, shortly after Anita Bryant’s successful 1977 campaign to repeal the gay rights law in Florida’s Dade County, Goodstein met Werner Erhard, founder of Erhard Seminars Training (better known as “est”).
“The meeting convinced Goodstein that the real problem facing the gay movement was not political but emotional,” wrote John Gallagher in The Advocate in 2001. “Goodstein complained that there was ‘an awful lot of a syndrome I have defined as toilet mentality — that is, a willingness to accept second-rate status as human beings, expecting to lose rather than win, and a constant involvement in petty right-wrong games.'”
In March 1978, Goodstein launched “The Advocate Experience” with about 100 people at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco. With psychologist and author Rob Eichberg, Goodstein articulated a vision that by the year 2000, homosexuality would be accepted by everyone in society, and this would happen by raising the self-esteem of gays and lesbians. . Over the next 23 years, about 50,000 people participated in Experience workshops; the program was discontinued in February 2001.
The Advocate remains a leading national source of LGBTQ+ news. Goodstein’s legacy also includes the 1988 founding of Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection, which was funded by a generous gift from Goodstein. The collection includes Goodstein’s personal papers and memorabilia.
August 1985
‘From the Pines with Love’ Raises $200k for AIDS Medical Foundation
Singer Peter Allen, comedienne Anne Meara, Broadway’s Dorothy Loudon, singer Ellen Foley and musical group Gotham provide the entertainment at “From the Pines with Love,” the first major Fire Island event to raise money for AIDS healthcare.
Learn More.
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.
August 27, 1985
Ryan White Refused Entry to School
Ryan White, an Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS through contaminated blood products used to treat his hemophilia, is refused entry to his middle school.
Learn More.
James Smith, the school district superintendent issued a statement saying that 13-year-old Ryan White would not be allowed to join his seventh-grade class because he had AIDS, according to the Kokomo Tribune. Smith’s decision conflicted with a recently released set of guidelines from the state Board of Health that recommended that school-age AIDS patients who felt well enough should be able to attend class.
A state health official confirmed to the Tribune that it was White’s case that prompted the state to issue the guidelines. The boy’s mother, Jeanne E. White, accused the school administration of “running around a problem they thought they wouldn’t have to deal with.”
The White family’s protracted legal battles to protect a student’s right to attend public school brought nationwide attention to the issue of AIDS and public schools. In the years that ensued, the teenager became an AIDS activist, speaking out publicly on the need for AIDS awareness among education officials and employees.
August 31, 1985
Pentagon Announces Testing of Military Recruits
The Pentagon announces that, beginning October 1, it will begin testing all new military recruits for HIV infection and will reject those who test positive for the virus.
Learn More.
Two Pentagon officials, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition they not be identified, said the new directive was promoted most vigorously by top Army officials, out of concern about the potential high cost of treating soldiers who are found to have the disease. Pentagon officials said about 50 soldiers are being treated in military hospitals for the disease.
The U.S. military does not universally test potential recruits for any other disease or disorder as a condition of enlistment, although new recruits are usually tested for syphilis and German measles soon after they enlist.
The announcement was condemned by the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which asserted that the testing would unfairly stigmatize many people who have been exposed to the virus but who do not have the disease.
Timothy Sweeney, executive director of Lambda Legal, also contended that military testing for HIV might become a precedent for AIDS screening in private industry.
In about four years, Newsday will publish a story by Laurie Garrett that states that the DOD’s policy of screening recruits and active service members for HIV came at the urging of Major Robert Redfield, of Rockville, Md., chief scientist for the Army’s AIDS research effort
“The reason we have done what we have done is that we think it’s good medicine — and it’s medicine that might work in the civilian sector, as well,” Maj. Redfield would tell Newsday.
In 2018, President Donald Trump would appoint Redfield to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) would write a letter to President Trump asking him to reconsider the appointment due to Redfield’s history of “ethically and morally questionable behavior” as an Army doctor.
September 1985
Inpatient Unit for HIV/AIDS Opens in Chicago
Unit 371 opens in Chicago’s Illinois Masonic Hospital and becomes the first inpatient care unit dedicated to HIV/AIDS in the Midwest.
Learn More.
Dr. David Blatt and Dr. David Moore — known in the Chicago medical community as “the two Davids” — founded Unit 371. The HIV/AIDS unit became renowned for its compassionate approach to care.
Dr. Moore modeled Unit 371 after San Francisco General Hospital’s Unit 5A. During a visit to Unit 5A, he noticed that AIDS patients were “clustered” in one unit of the hospital, which allowed the patients to receive treatment and care from professionals trained in their specialized needs.
Dr. Moore thought this was a novel and efficient approach to HIV/AIDS healthcare, and much better than the standard approach of having to educate healthcare professionals in individual units across the hospital about how to care for AIDS patients.
In October 1982, Dr. Moore was still new to practice when he saw his first patient, a personal friend who had come to him with the symptoms of AIDS. What followed were, in his words, “13 years of slow-motion carnage,” according to Health ENews of Advocate Aurora Health.
A gay man himself, Dr. Moore and his medical and life partner, Dr. Blatt, decided to spearhead what would be the first dedicated AIDS unit in the Midwest.
“It was a different time. There was so much fear then,” Dr. Blatt says. “The news media was calling it the ‘gay cancer’ and there was very little knowledge or education on what it was or how it was transmitted. There was a lot of panic and discrimination.”
Dr. Moore says they felt compelled to do something.
“This was us. This was our community and neighborhood. We were in this risk group. It was affecting our friends, our patients and we needed to take action,” he said.
For Unit 371, Drs. Moore and Blatt also incorporated the policy of San Francisco’s Unit 5A of allowing partners, family, and friends unlimited visitation time with patients, according to America 250.
“Within the Illinois Masonic Medical Center, Unit 371 became the preferred unit for HIV-positive patients who did not need to be admitted to the intensive care unit,” wrote Jade Ryerson in America 250.
The unit started with 23 beds, with nine rooms dedicated to hospice care. But when the AIDS crisis worsened and the number of patients swelled, many of the single rooms were converted to accommodate two patients. Staff reserved private rooms for patients who were dying or could pass on an infection.
“But what really set Unit 371 apart were the personal relationships between staff and patients,” according to Ryerson. “It was common for Unit 371 staff to sit on patients’ beds, offer hugs, joke around, or become friends and socialize outside of the unit. This closeness was especially meaningful for patients who were rejected by family and friends after being diagnosed.”
Drs. Blatt and Moore, who met while doing their residencies at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, continued to oversee Unit 371 for about fifteen years.
Straight from nursing school, M.K. Czerwiec became a Unit 371 nurse in 1994.
“The death rate on Unit 371 was higher than any other hospital unit because, for so long, AIDS was a fast-moving, terminal disease,” Czerwiec told Windy City Times in 2011. “In a month, we could lose 30 patients.”
In 2017, Czerwiec would publish a graphic novel, Taking Turns, about her experiences working at Unit 371.
September 7, 1985
KGB Telegram Reveals AIDS Disinformation Campaign
The Soviet Union sends a telegram to Bulgarian security officials that references its disinformation campaign purporting the AIDS virus was developed by the U.S. military as a biological weapon.
Learn More.
The KGB, the foreign intelligence agency of the Soviet Union, directed its media channels and the intelligence services of the Soviet bloc to spread the thesis internationally that HIV was genetically engineered by the Pentagon as part of biological weapons research in the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
We are conducting a series of active measures in connection with the appearance in recent years in the USA of a new and dangerous disease, ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – AIDS,’ and its subsequent, largescale spread to other countries, including those in Western Europe. The goal of these measures is to create a favorable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control.
In 2016, Christopher Nehring, an intelligence historian based in Europe, uncovered the KGB telegram from the Bulgarian State Security archives and passed it along to U.S. historian Douglas Selvage.
Selvage recognized the artifact as the earliest conclusive evidence that the Soviets and others were engaged in a international disinformation campaign targeting the U.S. According to Selvage, the confusion and panic around AIDS in the early 1980s made the U.S. a ripe target for disinformation.
“The KGB simply picked up on existing conspiracy theories in the U.S, added a new element that conformed to its disinformation goals (i.e., the exact location of HIV’s construction, Fort Detrick), and spread the resulting conspiracy theory internationally to its own ends,” Selvage said in an interview with the MIT Press Reader.
Once the Soviet campaign was underway, it took on a life of its own.
“A cycle of misinformation and disinformation arose in which the KGB cited U.S. conspiracy theories, and U.S. conspiracy theorists, in turn, began to cite texts associated with KGB disinformation,” Selvage said
Before long, people around the world came to believe, falsely, that the U.S. government was responsible for AIDS.
“The KGB happily noted that foreign journalists, without any prompting on its part, were also picking up on the claims and reporting them,” Selvage said, adding, “Officials from the Reagan Administration were perturbed that Dan Rather reported the Soviets’ accusations about AIDS and Fort Detrick on the CBS Evening News in 1987 without requesting a U.S. government response.”
Selvage said that it was very likely that the KGB had initiated the disinformation campaign against the U.S. as early as 1983.
September 9, 1985
Chicago House Formed to Provide Shelter to PWAs
Chicago House is founded as a nonprofit organization to provide housing for Chicagoans living with AIDS.
Learn More.
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.
September 17, 1985
President Reagan Finally Mentions ‘AIDS’ in Public Remarks
President Ronald Reagan mentions AIDS publicly for the first time, calling it “a top priority” and fending off criticism that funding for AIDS research is inadequate.
Learn More.
By the end of 1984, AIDS had already ravaged the United States for a few years, affecting at least 7,700 people and killing more than 3,500. Scientists had identified the virus that caused AIDS and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified all of its major transmission routes.
Exchanges between the Reagan administration and journalists in the early 1980s demonstrate that Reagan and his staffers didn’t take the epidemic very seriously, for which the Reagan administration is still heavily criticized.
Reagan’s successors in the White House eventually acted, albeit often very slowly, on the crisis — leading to much more research, programs like the Ryan White CARE Act that connect people to care, and the development of antiretroviral medication that increases the life expectancy of a person living with HIV by decades.
September 25, 1985
WHO: AIDS is ‘Major Public Health Problem’ around the World
Health officials from the AIDS Centers set up by the World Health Organization (WHO) affirm that the disease was now a major public health problem in several countries of the developed and developing world.
Learn More.
At a two-day convening in Geneva, Switzerland of representatives from WHO’s global centers on AIDS, health officials reviewed the epidemiologic status of AIDS world wide: more than 15,000 cases were reported in 40 countries, with 13,000 of the cases coming from the U.S.
WHO officials estimated that the number of cases in the U.S. would double to 26,000 in 1986, according to the Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on November 8, 1985.
WHO organized the meeting to review information presented at the International Conference on AIDS, held in Atlanta in April 1985, and assess the global implications.
According to The Fourth Ten Years of the World Health Organization, a key outcome of the WHO meeting was the decision to develop a comprehensive AIDS program in which WHO’s AIDS-focused collaboration centers would take an active part. WHO officials attending the meeting also decided to set up additional collaborating centers that focused on AIDS, in an effort to lay the surveillance groundwork needed for the proposed program.
WHO Director-General Halfdan Mahler expressed concern regarding AIDS, but in separate comments to the media, he said he considered other diseases to be top priority outside the U.S.
“AIDS is not spreading like a bush fire in Africa,” Mahler said in widely reported accounts. “It is malaria and other tropical diseases that are killing millions of children every day.”
October 2, 1985
Film Legend Rock Hudson Dies
When movie star Rock Hudson dies in Beverly Hills of AIDS-related illness at age 59, the media attention causes public perceptions about the epidemic to shift.
Learn More.
As the first major U.S. public figure to publicly acknowledge AIDS diagnosis, Hudson brought attention to an epidemic sweeping the U.S. Hudson’s public disclosure also helped to dismantle the stigma associated with the disease.
Hudson would inspire Elizabeth Taylor, who became friends with Hudson on the set of the film Giant, to become an AIDS activist like none other, rallying the Hollywood community to raise millions for research. Upon his death, Hudson left $250,000 to help set up the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), which was chaired by Taylor in the organization’s early years.
Tall, dark and handsome, Hudson was one of Hollywood’s most popular leading men during the 1950s and 1960s. Making more than 60 films during his career, Hudson presented the image of a “lady-killer” before the camera, but he had a sexual preference for men. According to People magazine, his friends and often his colleagues on film and TV knew that Hudson was gay.
“We all knew Rock was gay, but it never made any difference to us,” actress Mamie Van Doren told People in 1985.
She said that she often accompanied Hudson on studio-arranged dates. “Universal invested a lot of money in Rock.”
Fearing exposure in Hollywood, Hudson would often visit San Francisco to frequent gay discos unrecognized, according to People. While in Los Angeles, he maintained a low public profile, preferring instead to entertain friends at his Beverly Hills home.
In the 1970s, Hudson moved from film to television to star in McMillan and Wife. From 1984 to 1985, he had a recurring role on Dynasty. Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS on June 5, 1984.
In July 1985, Hudson agreed to appear as the first guest on the new talk show of Doris Day, his friend and frequent co-star in 1960s romantic comedies. Day said afterward that she was shocked by how steeply Hudson’s health had declined since she had last seen him a few years before, according to the Los Angeles Times. Despite needing rest, Hudson insisted on taping the show, Doris Day’s Best Friends.
Later that month, Hudson traveled to France to seek AIDS treatment that wasn’t available in the U.S. and was hospitalized there. In response to rabid media speculation, Hudson issued a press release on July 25 stating he had AIDS.
With that announcement, Hudson became the first major celebrity to go public with an AIDS diagnosis, according to A&E’s History.
Doris Day’s Best Friends would premiere in October 1985, just days after Hudson’s death was announced in the media. The episode opened with an introduction by Day, her voice emotional as she relayed something that Hudson told her: “The best time I’ve ever had was making comedies with you.” Day told her audience that she felt the same way.
The House Appropriations Committee also urges President Reagan to appoint a coordinator for the AIDS effort, “in other words, an AIDS czar.”
“Nine agencies have been engaged in this effort. … What we need is a well-coordinated, well-planned effort, with one person running the show,” said Rep. Silvio Conte, (Mass), the senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee.
The National Institutes of Health would receive $140.6 million, the Centers for Disease Control would receive $45.6 milion and $3.5 million would go to the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration.
During debate on the appropriations bill, the House accepted an amendment by Rep. Robert Dornan (R-Calif.), that would allow the surgeon general to use some funds to close bath houses “that may be responsible for transmitting AIDS.”
October 1985
New City of West Hollywood Launches AIDS Response
About one year after West Hollywood is officially incorporated as an independent city, it begins actively addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Learn More.
HIV/AIDS had a significant impact on the City of West Hollywood due to the disease’s elevated infection rate among gay men, which caused a devastatingly high number of deaths among the city’s population.
Following the City of West Hollywood’s incorporation as a city on November 29, 1984, elected officials and city staff begin working on a plan to address the epidemic in their own backyard.
In October 1985, the city launches an AIDS awareness campaign, one of the first in the country. The City of West Hollywood also becomes one of the first government entities to create a program for awarding social services grants to local HIV/AIDS organizations. The city’s response to the AIDS crisis would go on to be recognized as a model for other cities, nationally and globally.
Also during its first year of cityhood, West Hollywood would adopt landmark legislation to establish rent control and prohibit the discrimination against people with HIV and AIDS. Today, many of the city’s landmark ordinances have been duplicated and have become mainstream policies nationally and globally.
October 12, 1985
B-52s Guitarist Ricky Wilson Dies
New-wave rock musician and founding member of the B-52s, Ricky Wilson dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 32.
Learn More.
The B-52s become popular for their dance tunes — “relentless, rhythmic songs built around Ricky Wilson’s scratchy, one- and two-chord guitar riffs, Kate Pierson’s throbbing keyboard bass lines, and Keith Strickland’s propulsive drumming,” writes James Henke in a 1980 feature in Rolling Stone.
“At first, The B-52s did not have a bass player, so Wilson invented his own tunings on a guitar, grouping the strings into a bass course,” Rutledge says. “It was quite an original sound. It was a sound that I still continue to really dig. I had some major fun on the dance floor in the late 1970s-early and 1980s, courtesy of the B-52s.”
In the beginning, the Athens, Georgia-based band would scrape together the resources to take trips to New York City to perform at Max’s Kansas City, CBGB’s and Club 57.
“My parents lent us their station wagon,” Ricky tells The Rolling Stone in a 1980 interview, “and we borrowed Keith’s parents’ charge card.”
By the winter of 1978, The B-52s would become the hottest club band in New York, and everyone would be trying to get a copy of their independently produced single, “Rock Lobster.”
“At a time when an overwhelmingly straight, male punk scene ruled, The B-52s’ knowingly kooky aesthetic, along with their hilariously surreal lyrics in songs like ‘Quiche Lorraine,’ read as queer to those with the eyes to see it,” writes Billboard reporter Kera Bolonik.
Much of queer aesthetic came from Wilson’s songwriting.
“I remember seeing him write some music and laughing to himself,” says band member Cindy Wilson, who was Ricky’s sister. “I said, ‘What are you laughing at?’ He said, ‘I just wrote the stupidest riff.’”
It would be for their first single, “Rock Lobster,” which became an instant hit with East Village audiences but wouldn’t reach mainstream listeners until the mid-1980s. Wilson would go on to become the principle songwriter for the band’s first four albums.
“We were writing [fourth album] Bouncing Off the Satellites, and Ricky just got thinner and thinner,” band member Kate Pierson recalled in an interview years later. “And we suspected, but we didn’t know. One day he wasn’t there at rehearsal. The next day, Keith [Strickland] called me and said, ‘Ricky’s dying of AIDS.’”
Wilson had confided in band member Strickland about his illness, but wanted to keep it a secret — even from his sister Cindy — so no one would worry about him or fuss about it. Just a few days later, Wilson would die, Kate says.
The band would wait almost a year to release their fourth album. In 1988, still mourning the loss of his close friend, Stickland isolated himself in the upstate New York countryside and began working on new songs.
“Eventually, he called Kate and me to see if we were interested in working on new music,” Cindy Wilson would tell Classic Pop. “When we started jamming, it felt like Ricky was in the room with us. I was having a really hard time with the grieving and sorrow, but creating this music was such a wonderful thing. Ricky’s spirit was there and it was amazing.”
For Cosmic Thing, the first album without Ricky Wilson, band members reject the idea from industry professionals that they find a new guitarist. Instead, Strickland would learn how to play guitar in Wilson’s unique style.
Inspired by Wilson, the band’s song “Roam” is “a beautiful song about death,” Cindy says. “It’s about when your spirit leaves your body and you can just roam.”
Televangelist Tammy Faye Interviews PWA Steve Pieters
Tammy Faye Bakker, a televangelist with a nationwide following, interviews AIDS activist and ordained pastor Steve Pieters on her show Tammy’s House Party, becoming one of the very first nationally broadcast, longform interviews with an HIV-positive gay man.
Learn More.
Rev. Pieters, who agreed to the interview with Bakker on the condition that it be broadcast live so that it could not be edited or taken out of context, presented Christian TV fans with a novel viewpoint, one that never had been heard from outside the LGBTQ community.
At the time, homophobic rhetoric dominated televangelist TV shows, according to Religion & Politics,an online news journal from the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.
“As a pastor, [Rev. Pieters] stood in sharp contrast to the often-vitriolic rhetoric about AIDS from conservative Christian spokespeople,” wrote Emily Johnson, author of This Is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right and a professor specializing in the U.S. histories of gender and sexuality. “While others quoted the Bible to condemn people with AIDS, Pieters drew on his faith and his theological training to make sense of his diagnosis and to preach about hope and community.”
Although weakened by his illness, Dr. Pieters was a highly capable interview subject. He had been pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church, which was founded in Hartford, Connecticut by activist Troy Perry as a place for people from the LGBTQ commuity to worship God.
“There were some virulently anti-gay groups,” Dr. Pieters wrote in a 2022 article for The National Geographic. “I would find myself on TV arguing with homophobic priests or ministers that I would later see in the gay bars in Hartford around the same time. So I learned early on how to handle myself in the media around issues of being gay.”
In his interview with Bakker, Rev. Pieters talked about his life as a gay man and his own battle with AIDS. During the broadcast, Bakker sat in a studio with a monitor streaming Rev. Pieters from San Francisco. At that point, Rev. Pieters had been living with AIDS for three years and had survived a near-death experience two weeks earlier.
“She’d say on air that I was having chemotherapy, and that I was being interviewed from Los Angeles because the journey would be ‘too hard on me.’ I think she thought this was true, maybe,” Dr. Pieters wrote in The National Geographic. “What I heard later was that they were afraid that I might not be treated well, that the camera crew wouldn’t work if I was in the studio.”
After two years battling various illnesses and infections, Rev. Pieters was diagnosed with stage-four lymphoma and Karposi’s sarcoma in April 1984, and given eight months to live.
“I wasn’t actually diagnosed with AIDS; I was diagnosed with GRID — gay-related immunodeficiency — which is what they were calling AIDS back then,” he told Religion & Politics in a 2022 interview. “In 1982 and 1983, I was sick with hepatitis, thrush, pneumonia, mono, herpes, shingles, and a variety of awful fungal infections.”
However, one of his doctors believed that if he could stay alive, there still was hope that doctors could find a way for him to manage his condition.
“So I set out to do everything I could to take care of myself and create the conditions for healing in my body,” he said.
During his interview with Bakker, Rev. Pieters also talked about how his faith in God helped him survive.
“When I was finally diagnosed with AIDS, after this long period of feeling abandoned by God and my friends … I fell apart. I absolutely lost my sense,” he told Bakker. “My chaplain, my pastor, Nancy Radcliffe, was with me, and she held me, as did several other friends, as I sobbed and cried my despair, cried out for God.’
“Do you know something? In that deepest, darkest moment, that’s when I found God. When God touched me, and I realized that my life was not yet over, that I still had time, that God was with me against this disease — not having given me this disease — but was with me against this disease.”
When word of the interview spread, many in the gay and lesbian community became Bakker’s fans. She, in turn, continued to openly support the LGBTQ community, preaching compassion and risking her standing within the world of conservative Christian televangelism.
Her obituary in The New York Times noted that she attended LGBTQ pride events. In 1996, Tammy Faye partnered with openly gay actor Jim J. Bullock (Too Close for Comfort,ALF) on the talk show The Jim J. & Tammy Faye Show, but left the show after just a few months when she was diagnosed with colon cancer. Bakker (who later changed her surname to Messner) died in Kansas City in 2007 at the age of 65.
The Bakker-Pieters interview was recreated in the 2021 biographical drama The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Jessica Chastain, who portrays Tammy Faye Bakker in the film, won an Oscar for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role” and a BAFTA Award for “Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role.”
The Public Health Council resolution went beyond recommendations made by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and State Health Commissioner David Axelrod by defining “high-risk sexual activity” to include oral sex.
Mayor Edward I. Koch announced that the new regulation takes effect immediately and is to be enforced by NYC Health Department inspectors who will enter bathhouses in uniform and undercover.
The National Gay Task Force opposes the regulation, citing discriminatory practices.
“This appears to be an unequal application of law” because many experts say AIDS can be transmitted by heterosexual activity, said Ron Najman, a spokesman for the National Gay Task Force. “They are concentrating on the homosexual aspect.”
October 28, 1985
Michael Felton, Mississippi Teen Who Contracted HIV from Transfusion, Dies
Mississippi teenager Michael Felton, who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion, dies of AIDS-related illnesses. He was 14.
Learn More.
Michael Felton was being treated for hemophilia when he became infected with HIV from contaminated factor VIII blood. Much like Ryan White, his white counterpart in Indiana, Felton wanted to live a normal teenage life — going to school, hanging with friends, collecting comic books and participating in sports — but his HIV status came with stigma and discrimination from the local school district.
When Felton was diagnosed with HIV, he was one of only six people in Mississippi with HIV or AIDS, and one out of only 164 children under 13 nationwide, according to Change the Pattern, an initiative of the National AIDS Memorial, Southern AIDS Coalition and Gilead Sciences.
Felton died less than a month before Bolivar County officials were scheduled to meet to decide if the 14-year-old would be allowed to attend his freshman year of high school.
In September 2022, Felton’s panel on the National AIDS Memorial Quilt was one of select panels brought to Mississippi for an exhibit honoring Black and Brown lives lost to AIDS. The exhibit, representing the largest display of the Quilt in Mississippi to date, was part of Change the Pattern‘s program to use the power and beauty of the AIDS Memorial Quilt as a call to action to disrupt systemic issues that impact health equity and continue to disproportionately impact communities of color and marginalized populations.
In Mississippi, new HIV diagnoses have remained high year after year with the state having the sixth-highest rate of HIV in the country.
November 6, 1985
Daytime TV Star Joel Crothers Dies
Joel Crothers, who was twice nominated for a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor for his role on ABC’s The Edge of Night, died of AIDS-related illness at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 44.
Learn More.
Joel Crothers performed on stage and TV, with several roles on daytime soap operas. He became a fan favorite for portrayal of Dr. Miles Cavanaugh on The Edge of Night, which he played for eight years until the show went off the air in 1984. He had just begun a new role in the NBC show Santa Barbara when his health began to deteriorate.
“I was privileged to be one of the people he called to say goodbye during his final days,” said Sharon Gabet, Crothers’ co-star from Edge of Night. “He was hilarious, sweet, direct and loving during that phone call – the same as always. One can only imagine what Crothers was going through. Rhodes scholar, stunningly handsome, a zest for life. A gentleman in the finest sense of the word. I adored him.”
Crothers began his TV career at 9 years old, performing in the CBS show Lamp Unto My Feet, which led to other roles for the young actor. He also performed on Broadway at the age of 12 in The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker at the Coronet Theatre, which starred Burgess Meredith.
He put his professional acting career on hold to attend Harvard University, and he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1962. He returned to acting in 1966 to join the touring production of the Broadway hit Barefoot in the Park. Simultaneously, he joined the cast of ABC’s gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, filming during the day.
In 1969, Crothers took the role of scoundrel Ken Stevens on the long-running soap opera The Secret Storm, and in 1974, he moved on to Somerset, a spinoff series from Another World, where he played newspaper editor Julian Cannell.
From 1977-1984, he grew his fan base on The Edge of Night with his portrayal of Dr. Miles Cavanaugh, for which he was nominated as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series at the Daytime Emmy Awards in 1979 and 1984.
A few years into his tenure at the soap opera, Crothers was cast in the 1981 production of Torch Song Trilogy, Harvey Fierstein’s three-act play set in the 1970s. This came about through a mutual friend, author Felice Picano, who knew Fierstein was looking for an established actor to take on the role of Ed, the central character’s bisexual lover and friend (“thirty-five and very handsome”).
Picano described in his book Art and Sex in Greenwich Village how he was able to convince Crothers to audition for the role. The next day, Fierstein called Picano and gushed, “Where did you ever find this creature? He’s gorgeous! He’s Olympian! He’s Apollo!”
In October 1981, Torch Song Trilogy opened at the Richard Allen Center on West 62nd Street. Soap fan came in droves to see Crothers perform in the show (which, incidentally, also included Fierstein, Matthew Broderick and Estelle Getty), and soon they needed a bigger venue. On January 15, 1982, the production moved to the 170-seat Actors’ Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where it ran for 117 performances.
Meanwhile, The Edge of Night had its final show on December 28, 1984. By then, Crothers had been diagnosed with HIV and his health had begun to decline. Still, he sought new acting roles, and soon found a new home in the NBC show Santa Barbara, which had premiered the previous summer. The veteran actor was cast in a dual role: playboy attorney Jack Stanfield Lee and his villainous cousin Jerry Cooper. However, Crothers had to be written out of the show when illness prevented him from working.
When he died about a year later, newspapers initially reported the cause of his death to be “cancer complicated by pneumonia,” a reflection of the stigma commonly associated with HIV and AIDS at the time.
November 30, 1985
CIA-AIDS Rumor Spreads in U.S.
Quoting a “prominent physician” in the U.S., the New York Amsterdam News reports that the spread of AIDS in Africa could be traced to experiments conducted there by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Learn More.
Dr. Nathaniel S. Lehrman, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, accused the CIA of spreading the AIDS virus in Africa by conducting biochemical experiments. He also claimed in the Amsterdam article that similar experiments were being conducted in the U.S. on gay men, drug users, and Black people.
The doctor’s alarming but unsubstantiated accusations came at a time when the Soviet Union’s KGB and East Germany’s Stasi were conducting a widespread disinformation campaign around the origins of the AIDS virus.
“It is not known whether Lehrman developed his conspiracy theories on his own, or whether he was influenced, knowingly or unknowingly, by the KGB as part of the operation,” wrote global health scholar Anders Jeppsson, PhD. in the Journal of the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care.
In his article titled “How East Germany Fabricated the Myth of HIV Being Man-Made,” Dr. Jeppson notes that East Germany’s intelligence agency circulated documents from Dr. Lehrman in East Berlin scientific circles.
Dr. Lehman’s accusations of a CIA-AIDS connection were repeated and cited throughout the U.S. as well, including among LGBTQ writers.
Charles Shively (1937-2017), a gay liberation icon and poet who founded Fag Rag magazine, shared Dr. Lehman’s theories and other rumors with his publication’s largely gay readership. In a 1987 article for Gay Community News, Shively quoted heavily from a 1986 report about the origin of AIDS crafted by Jakob and Lilli Segal, German scientists who had been recruited by the KGB to spread disinformation about the disease.
The 1980s was a time of widespread confusion and rumors about AIDS.
“Rumors about HIV/AIDS proliferated throughout US society: only gay people can get AIDS; you can catch it from a doorknob, a toilet seat, or a swimming pool; flying insects can transmit it; women are tricking men into having sex with them so they can give them AIDS; AIDS was developed by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill off African Americans and gays; it’s not caused by a virus at all,” wrote sociologist Jacob Heller, PhD. in 2015 for the American Journal of Public Health.
In 1987, the New York Times would publish a letter from Dr. Lehrman that criticized AIDS awareness campaigns for “helping legitimize homosexuality and its culture” and undermining “stable families and societies which are based on … the sacred love of husband and wife.”
Three years later, Dr. Lehrman would be charged, along with the partner of his psychiatric practice, with $1.3 million in Medicaid fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison. He died at his home in Port Washington, New York in 2020.
The LA County Board of Supervisors introduced new county regulations that could put patrols inside bathhouses to ensure that patrons don’t participate in sex acts considered to be unsafe.
“If someone showed me data substantiating a correlation of the spread of this disease and my club, I would deliver the keys to City Hall tomorrow. But so far it’s only been speculation, hysteria and panic, ” Silver Lake bath house owner Steve Downard told the Los Angeles Times.
“The sexual activity at the club is the same as at the Biltmore Hotel, but there are no health posters, no monthly health screening and no free condoms at the Biltmore.”
Under the new County rules, unsafe sex is defined as anal and oral intercourse between men, with or without a condom. Clubs with repeated violations could face closure.
The fact that the county rules make no mention of heterosexual acts, which also can spread AIDS, is proof, Downard says, that homophobia, not health concerns, are behind the regulations.
December 6, 1985
CDC Issues Precautions to Prevent Mother-to-Infant Transmission
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report recommends that HIV-infected women delay pregnancy until more is known about the risks of transmission, and advised new mothers to avoid breastfeeding.
Transmission of the virus during pregnancy or labor and delivery is demonstrated by two reported AIDS cases occurring in children who had no contact with their infected mothers after birth.
With studies on the subject of pediatric AIDS just beginning, the rate of perinatal transmission of HIV from infected pregnant women is unknown and the limited amount of available data suggests a high rate.
However, the report contends that perinatal transmission (from an infected mother to her newborn) is not inevitable.
Of three children born to women who became infected with HIV by artificial insemination from an infected donor, all were in good health and negative for antibody to the virus more than 1 year after birth. Another child, born to a woman living with AIDS, was HIV-negative and healthy at birth and at 4 months of age.
In December 1985, a total of 217 cases of AIDS have been reported among children under age 13, and 60% of them have died.
December 13, 1985
Infant Dwight Burk Dies
Dwight Burk , aged 20 months, dies of AIDS-related illness in Cresson, Pennsylvania. He was the first child of a hemophiliac known to be born with AIDS.
Learn More.
Dwight’s case prompted the National Hemophilia Foundation in April 1985 to advise hemophiliacs to postpone having children until scientists can develop a technique to kill the AIDS virus in blood clotting concentrates.
Dwight’s father, 27-year-old Patrick Burk, was infected with HIV from his hemophiliac treatment of blood clotting concentrates. More than a year before learning he had HIV, he passed the virus to his wife, Lauren, who became pregnant with Dwight. Doctors believe Dwight most likely contracted the disease in utero.
Patrick Burk told the Associated Press that an autopsy was to be performed at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and that the body would be used for medical study. Patrick Burk would die on March 18, 1987.
After the death of her son and husband, Lauren Burk would continue to stay informed about the latest developments in HIV/AIDS research and treatment. She would manage her own condition, which was diagnosed as “AIDS-related complex,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
“When Dwight died, there was somebody here. We were here for each other,” Lauren Burk told the LA Times. “When Patrick died, you go to bed and you cry and there’s just nobody to hold you or say it’s OK.”
France Sues U.S. for Credit for Discovery of AIDS Virus
The Pasteur Institute files a suit against the U.S. Government in the U.S. Court of Claims in Washington, DC., seeking recognition that French researchers were the first to discover the virus that causes AIDS.
Learn More.
The long-simmering transatlantic feud over who will receive royalties on a test for the AIDS virus has erupted into a legal battle, with French scientists seeking recognition in the U.S. courts for their claim that they discovered the virus before their American counterparts.
The Pasteur Institute ‘s suit also seeks the right to grant permission to sell the blood test without being sued by the U.S. for counterfeiting, and the right to share in royalties collected by the U.S. for sales of blood tests by U.S. licensees.
The French scientists were the first to publish a paper on the virus, said Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the U.S. scientist credited with discovering HIV. But he asserts in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “I was the first to suggest it was a retrovirus.”
“We had this virus in 1982. We didn’t publish on purpose because we didn’t understand it well enough to stick our necks out. To me, ‘discovery’ is a complicated word. Who first reported discovery of a virus? They did. But if the idea comes first — that was us.”
In July 1994, U.S. health officials would concede for the first time that American researchers used a virus obtained from French competitors to make the first American AIDS test kit. At that time, the U.S. would announce the signing of an agreement that would give the French a bigger share of royalties from worldwide sales of AIDS tests.
The contract would end the long-standing and sometimes acrimonious dispute that strained relations between the two countries.
December 19, 1985
LA Times Poll Indicates Americans Support AIDS Quarantine
An Los Angeles Times poll contends that a majority of Americans favor quarantining people who have AIDS.
Learn More.
The LA Times poll found that more than half of its respondents support quarantining AIDS patients, nearly half would approve of ID cards for those who test positive for AIDS antibodies, more than a third would be willing to pay a one-cent national sales tax to finance greater research, and one in seven would favor such radical action as tattooing those with the disease.
The poll results came from interviews with about 2,300 across the U.S. — a very small pool of respondents — yet the announcement of the poll results garnered considerable attention nationwide with little regard to the small number of Americans involved in taking the survey.
In its article about the poll results, the LA Times also stated that most responents were adverse to electing homosexuals to office and were disinclined to support candidates who espoused homosexual causes.
“Even a whisper of suspicion about homosexuality was enough to turn almost 60% of the voters against a candidate for the office of President,” stated the LA Times article written by political reporter John Balzar.
“Respondents in the poll were given characteristics of make-believe candidates,” Balzar wrote. “When a rumor of homosexuality was included in the descriptions, support for a make-believe candidate dropped from 70% to 11%.”
December 1985
Global Scope of Epidemic Becomes Evident
The United Nations announces that at least one HIV case has been reported in each region of the world, indicating that the epidemic is becoming a global issue.
Learn More.
By the end of 1985, there were more than 20,000 reported cases of AIDS, with at least one HIV case in every region of the world. The CDC would report that 1985 saw an 89% increase in AIDS diagnoses in the U.S. from 1984, and predicted that the number will double in 1986.
AIDS Hospice Founder & Publisher Charles Lee Morris Dies
Charles “Chuck” Lee Morris, former owner and publisher of the San Francisco Sentinel, dies of AIDS-related illness in Denver at the age of 42. Morris is also the co-founder of two AIDS hospice programs in California.
Learn More.
Believed to be one of the longest-living victims of AIDS, Morris reportedly had been seriously ill since April 1978, but he wasn’t diagnosed with AIDS until 1982
Morris was a confidant of Dianne Feinstein, often advising the then-Mayor of San Francisco on issues affecting the city’s gay community. Elected officials such as Senator Edward M. Kennedy, President Jimmy Carter, and Vice President Walter F. Mondale sought out Morris’ political endorsements.
In the early 1980s, Morris helped found two hospice programs in California for those dying of AIDS.
Morris and his partner moved to Denver in the spring of 1984. Dr. Charles Kirkpatrick, Morris’ physician and an AIDS researcher at National Jewish Hospital, said Morris survived four to five times longer than most AIDS patients. He said at the time that the average survival time of someone with full-blown AIDS was 12-18 months.
The CDC report states that, on average, people diagnosed with AIDS die about 15 months after the disease is diagnosed. The report also shows:
Between 6/1/1981 and 1/13/1986, there have been 16,458 cases of AIDS (16,227 adults and 231 children) reported in the U.S. Of these, more than half of the infected people have died.
The number of cases reported each 6-month period continues to increase.
Cases have been reported from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories.
“One million Americans have already been infected with the virus, and this number will jump to at least 2 million or 3 million within 5 to 10 years,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci tells The New York Times.
January 18, 1986
Dionne Warwick ‘and Friends’ Sing for amFAR
“That’s What Friends Are For” — recorded by Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Gladys Knight — becomes #1 on the Billboard charts, eventually raising about $3 million for the American Foundation for AIDS Research.
Learn More.
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.
Chicago House welcomes the first residents to its new two-flat housing facility in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago.
Learn More.
Two months later, the facility would reach capacity with all eight places filled. Residents were provided with access to volunteers trained in providing emotional support.
Chicago House continued to plan for additional facilities and support services to meet the growing need. Later in 1986, the agency acquired administrative office space and began to transition from volunteer support to paid program staff.
March 4, 1986
Award-winning Lyricist Howard Greenfield Dies
Howard Greenfield, the 20-year songwriting partner of Neil Sedaka, dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 49.
Learn More.
The first Greenfield-Sedaka hit would be ‘‘Stupid Cupid,” recorded by Connie Francis in 1958. Later collaborations with Sedaka included ”Calendar Girl,” ”Oh! Carol” and ”Next Door to an Angel.”
Born in 1936, Greenfield grew up in the same Brighton Beach apartment building as Sedaka, who was three years older than Greenfield.
“After Howie’s mother Ella had seen me, he came ringing my doorbell,” Sedaka would tell Goldmine magazine years later. “I was playing Chopin, and he said, ‘My mother heard you play and thought we could write a song together.'”
Greenfield was openly gay at a time when it was particularly courageous to do so. His companion from the early 1960s until his death was cabaret singer Tory Damon.
The two lived together in an apartment on East 63rd Street in Manhattan before moving to Los Angeles in 1966. Damon would die of AIDS-related illness just 26 days after Greenfield’s death.
Greenfield’s and Damon’s bodies are interred side-by-side at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Damon’s epitaph reads: Love Will Keep Us Together…, and Greenfield’s epitaph continues: … Forever.
March 18, 1986
National Review Founder William F. Buckley Proposes AIDS Tattoo
William F. Buckley, seen by many as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes in a New York Times op-ed that people diagnosed with HIV should be tattooed with a warning on their arm and buttocks.
“Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”
Buckley, founder of National Review magazine, also proposes that everyone seeking a marriage license must “present himself not only with a Wassermann test but also an AIDS test.”
He goes on to write that the couple could marry only after “the intended spouse is advised that her intended husband has AIDS, and agrees to sterilization.”
Looking back at this time, Michael Spector would write in The New Yorker in 2021, “Several years into a harrowing epidemic, gay Americans were told that an act of consensual sex could not only infect them with a fatal disease; it could also, at the will of a state, send them to prison. The fears of internment were not easily dismissed as hysteria.”
Buckley would later withdraw the proposal, because “it proved socially intolerable.”
At the time of his death in early 2008, Buckley would no longer be considered a journalist of any repute, although conservative circles would continue to champion his ideas. When he died, he was working on a book about President Ronald Reagan.
April 1, 1986
Film Actor Barry Robins Dies
Barry Robins, best known for his portrayal of troubled teenager “Cotton” in the 1971 film Bless the Beasts & Children, dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 41.
Learn More.
In New York Times article, “The Gay Film That Changed My Life,” actor John Cameron Mitchell credits Robin’s portrayal of “Cotton” as having a profound impact on him as a boy.
In particular, Mitchell is moved by the scene in which Robin’s character saves another character, a “delicate, blond shiksa” named Gerold, from a gang of bullies.
“The mean boys part for Cotton as he reaches a hand out to the boy,” Mitchell recalls. “Branded on my 10-year-old brain was Gerold’s heartbreaking expression when he realizes that for the first time there is someone he can trust and, just maybe, love.”
Mitchell adds, “It was sad to hear that Robins succumbed to AIDS in 1986. If we’d met, I would’ve thanked him for helping me out of the pond.”
“When Barry got really sick, he stopped seeing people, including me. I was devastated. I remember going by his apartment, knocking on his door, and he would not answer it. He would tell me, ‘Go away. It’s better that way.’ I respected his wishes. To this day I regret that.”
Stephen Stucker, the scene-stealing comic performer in the Airplane! movies, dies from AIDS-related illness at the age of 38.
Learn More.
Stucker was known for zany portrayals in comedies, notably the manic air traffic controller Johnny in the 1980s Airplane! movies.
Created by the directing-writing team of Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker, the Airplane! movies featured Stucker in a non-essential role that wasn’t crucial to the plot. But in a movie with established stars, larger-than-life performances and endless jokes, Stucker managed to steal every scene he’s in with his comic performance.
Some may see the character as an offensive stereotype that hasn’t aged well, but Stucker’s performance can also be viewed as progressive for its time, a character that is unapologetically gay in an era where that was still taboo. Johnny is never harassed or bullied by the over-the-top manly-men characters (played by Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, and Leslie Nielsen) that dominate Airplane! Instead, Johnny turns the joke around on them and provides the perfect foil to their authority, gruffness, and self-importance. The screenwriters developed the character specifically for Stucker, who wrote his own lines for the part and ad-libbed many of them.
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Stucker moved with his family to Alameda, California, where he attended Lincoln School. During his school days Stephen was known as both an accomplished pianist and a class clown with a dry wit. Stucker made his film debut in 1975 as a crazed asylum escapee in Delinquent School Girls (also released as Carnal Madness).
He went on to perform in the 1977 earthquake-disaster comedy Cracking Up, alongside Fred Willard, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer. Stucker had been a scene-stealing member of the cast of the Madison, Wisconsin Kentucky Fried Theater sketch comedy troupe founded by Abrahams and the Zucker brothers and, in 1977, he appeared in the film based on the troupe’s comedy sketches. The Airplaine! movies soon followed.
Stucker was diagnosed with AIDS in July 1984, and was one of the first celebrities to go public with his diagnosis. He appeared on talk shows like Donahue, where his unrestrained and acerbic personality sometimes bumped hard against an audience ignorant and fearful of AIDS.
Scientists Discuss Safety of Blood Products at WHO Meeting
About 160 scientists attended a meeting in Geneva hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss the safety of blood and blood products and antibody screening issues in relation to AIDS.
Learn More.
The meeting’s main conclusion was that the risk of transmitting HIV by factor VIII or factor IX concentrates, commonly used to treat hemophilia, could be reduced or eliminated with proven methods of screening for HIV antibodies and inactivation, according to The Fourth Ten Years of the World Health Organization.
The meeting, which included scientists from 15 countries, also presented goals for WHO’s Program on AIDS, including the creation of a global surveillance system to monitor HIV infection as well as deaths from AIDS-related illness.
Representing the U.S. were Kenneth J. Bart, M.D., the health director for the U.S. Agency for International Development; William C. Bartley, the international health attaché for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations; and Walter R. Dowdle, Ph.D., director of infectious disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the meeting report.
April 25, 1986
Dancer-Choreographer Ed Mock Dies
Dancer and choreographer Ed Mock — who fused modern dance and jazz dance, acting, improvisation and mime in his work — dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 48.
Learn More.
As the founder of the West Coast Dance Company (1974-1979), Ed Mock Dancers (1980-1985), and the Ed Mock Dance Studio, Mock’s dance style and teaching influenced future generations of dancers and artists.
Brontez Purnell, Director of the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock, states, “I believe Ed Mock is the missing choreographic link between Alvin Ailey, Anna Halprin, and Bill T. Jones. He is my direct predecessor, creatively. We – artists, black queers, Bay Area dancers, gay men – have to extract our collective past and create the historical record.”
Born in Chicago, Mock performed as a boy in his family’s pool hall, tapping out steps for customers. Athletic in high school, he chose to pursue dance because, as he would tell the San Francisco Examiner in 1980, “I just love body movement, it was all just movement for me, and sports was just a function of that. I just was always aware of my body in a sort of a dance sense. I never try to tell anybody it’s an easy life, but not a day has ever gone past that dancing didn’t make me feel good emotionally and spiritually.”
Mock would teach and perform taught and performed up until weeks before his death. In 1988, he would posthumously be elected to the Bay Area Dance Coalition Hall of Fame.
The International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses announces that the virus that causes AIDS will officially be known as “Human Immunodeficiency Virus ” (HIV).
Learn More.
An international committee of scientists is proposing that the AIDS virus be called by a new name: human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.
Until now, the closely related variations of the virus have been most frequently referred to as HTLV-3, for human t- cell lymphotropic virus type 3, or LAV, for lymphadenopathy associated virus.
HTLV-3 is the designation given by Dr. Robert Gallo and colleagues at the National Cancer Institute, co-discoverers of the virus and leaders in the American research effort. LAV is the name used by Dr. Luc Montagnier and associates at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, also credited as discoverers of the virus.
May 20, 1986
Herman George — Costume Designer for ‘Babylon’ — Dies
Herman George, the first in-house costume designer for the long-running stage show Beach Blanket Babylon, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 46.
Learn More.
George also designed costumes for the San Francisco Opera and Charles Pierce. For Pierce’s New York production of “The Crazy Ladies,” George created the costumes for Pierce’s various numbers in which he impersonated prominent female celebrities, according to the New York Public Library.
But it was for Beach Blanket Babylon, a stage show in North Beach known for its camp aesthetic and over-the-top costumes, that George found the opportunity to create outrageous, one-of-a-kind ensembles for the stage, often based on sketches from Babylon producer Steve Silver.
Beach Blanket Babylonclosed in 2019 after an epic 45-year run, and many of the costumes remain today in a 6,000-foot San Francisco warehouse. But some of the pieces are being sent to various museums for historical preservation, including The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park, according to Jo Schuman Silver, who took over the show when her husband died in 1995 of AIDS-related illness.
During its historic run, the show toured to Las Vegas and London, and opened the Academy Awards. ; Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, David Bowie, Liza Minnelli and Robin Williams were among its fans.
May 30, 1986
Fashion Designer Perry Ellis Dies
Top fashion designer Perry Ellis dies of AIDS-related illness at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. He was 46.
Learn More.
Both women and men adored Ellis’ fashion sense for its clean-cut, all-American look. What the designer did best was take elements of classic American style — like stadium coats, tweed jackets, and homey sweaters — and adapt them to suit the consumer passion for gender-neutral, high-quality separates, according to Love to Know.
Ellis presented his first collection under his own name on Seventh Avenue in 1979 and almost immediately achieved star status.
His design aesthetics earned him accolades — including the Coty Award for his first show in 1979, which he would go on to win eight more times, and the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Designer of the Year Award in 1982. And in 1984, he became the head of the CFDA, extending his influence on designers worldwide.
In November 1984, a daughter was born to Ellis and Hollywood TV writer and executive Barbara Gallagher. Tyler Ellis was only 18 months old when her father died.
At the time, the cause of Ellis’ death was listed as viral encephalitis, but rumors of Ellis’s HIV-positive status made news after it came to light that his lover and business partner, Laughlin Barker, died earlier in the year of Kaposi’s sarcoma.
In a controversial move, some media organizations mentioned the rumor that Ellis was HIV-positive in his obituary. While the vast majority of newspapers omitted mention of the rumor, the Washington Post, USA Today, Newsday and the San Francisco Examiner decided to publish it. Among the news magazines, Newsweek mentioned the AIDS rumor, and Time did not.
This started a conversation among media professionals worldwide about whether media outlets should mention AIDS as a cause of death if AIDS can be proved or is openly acknowledged — as was ultimately the case with actor Rock Hudson. Or, they posited, should they mention AIDS if it is only widely believed but neither acknowledged nor proved?
Disclosure of HIV-positive status was a very sensitive subject, involving matters of privacy — medical and sexual — since many media consumers automatically assumed someone was gay if he had AIDS.
But many close to Ellis, including top industry professionals, already knew the fashion designer was ill.
“What really, truly, abruptly woke up the entire fashion industry was Perry walking out at the end of his last fashion show,” fashion designer Michael Kors recalled. “He barely could walk, and here was someone young, talented, great-looking, full of charm and life, and suddenly this was a shell of a human being.”
The show took place on May 8, and afterward Ellis checked himself into New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, where he died 22 days later.
Ellis’ daughter, Tyler, decided to carry on her father’s fashion legacy. After graduating from Boston University, she moved to New York and interned with Michael Kors. In 2011, she decided to launch her own handbag line, which caters to stars of the entertainment world and fans of luxury accessories.
The World Health Organization convenes a second meeting of its AIDS task force in Geneva to strategize a global response to the spread of the disease.
Learn More.
With representatives from 27 countries attending, the meeting focused on a review of the Global WHO Strategy for the Prevention and Control of AIDS: Projected Needs for 1986-1987, a proposed plan to address the AIDS crisis on a global scale, according to The Fourth Ten Years of the World Health Organization.
Attendees agreed that AIDS and HIV infection represented a mounting international health problem and neither a vaccine nor a therapy effective against HIV was likely to become available for at least several years. Therefore, a global strategy for AIDS and HIV control was needed, according to the meeting report.
WHO’s plan of action, which was based on recommendations from its network of collaborating centers on AIDS, put forth a series of global responsibilities for AIDS prevention and control, as well as activities that individual countries needed to adopt in order for the plan to be effective.
Dr. Halfdan Mahler, WHO’s director who had previously dismissed the immense global implications of AIDS, attended the meeting in its entirety, according to the meeting report.
Following this meeting, WHO took concrete steps to strengthen its activities, including a reallocation of financial and personnel resources to support the new strategic plan. The first meeting of WHO’s AIDS task force was held on April 21-22, 1986 in Geneva.
June 30, 1986
U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Georgia Sodomy Law
Bowers v. Hardwick was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld, in a 5–4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults.
Learn More.
The majority opinion, by Justice Byron White, reasoned that the Constitution did not confer “a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.” A concurring opinion by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger cited the “ancient roots” of prohibitions against homosexual sex, quoting William Blackstone’s description of homosexual sex as an “infamous crime against nature,” worse than rape, and “a crime not fit to be named.”
The case arose on August 3, 1982, when a police officer who had been admitted to the home of Michael Hardwick in Atlanta witnessed him and a male companion in a bedroom engaging in sex. The officer had been executing a warrant for Hardwick’s arrest for failing to appear in court on a charge of public drinking (it was later determined that the warrant was invalid because Hardwick had already paid the $50 fine). The officer promptly arrested both men for violating Georgia’s antisodomy statute.
In its decision, the Court ruled that while the “right to privacy” protects intimate aspects of marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, and child rearing from state interference, it does not protect gay sodomy because “no connection between family, marriage, or procreation on the one hand and homosexual activity on the other has been demonstrated.”
The Supreme Court decision would stand for 17 years until 2003, when Lawrence v. Texas would overturn Bowers.
July 11, 1986
Leading Ballet Dancer Charles Ward Dies
Charles Ward, one of America’s leading ballet and theatrical dancers, dies at his home in Downey, California of AIDS-related illness. He was 33.
Learn More.
Ward became a soloist with American Ballet Theater in 1974 and worked his way to principal dancer in 1976, becoming the partner of many of the leading ballerinas of the time, according to the Los Angeles Times. With ABT, he performed in Swan Lake and ballets by Antony Tudor and Fredrick Ashton.
In 1978, Ward left ABT to star in Bob Fosse’s Broadway musical Dancin’, which earned him a nomination for the Drama Desk Award. He then moved to Los Angeles and danced in the films Staying Alive (1983) and The Turning Point (1977) and in the TV movie Pippin: His Life and Times (1981), again with Fosse. He also performed in shows with Lily Tomlin, Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters, Raquel Welch, Rodney Dangerfield and Lynda Carter.
Ward grew up in Downey, California and started dancing at the age of 18. Shortly after high school, he joined Houston Ballet and then, in 1972, moved to New York to dance with the Corps de Ballet at American Ballet Theater.
National Minority AIDS Council is founded at the conference.
Learn More.
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.
August 2, 1986
Notorious Lawyer Roy Cohn Dies
Roy Cohn, best known for his role as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s investigation of alleged Communist sympathizers, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 59.
Learn More.
A graduate of Columbia Law School at the age of 20, Cohn quickly made a name for himself in his first job with the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, prosecuting cases of people with alleged ties to the Communist Party.
Impressed with Cohn’s performance at the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for spying, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover would recommend that Cohn be hired as chief counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy, who chaired the panel, hired the 24-year-old Cohn in January 1953.
“People born in the 1940s or earlier remember Cohn and his master performing on television,” writes Mary Ellen Clark in her 1988 book The Snarling Death of Roy M. Cohn. “They remember coming home to be hushed by a mother or aunt who was watching the hearings; they remember a father’s opinion, expressed at the family table when families still ate together.”
“For younger people, however, Roy Cohn was simply another name for a très smart lawyer, for Disco Dan, for the international, I-go-by-private-plane man,” writes Clark.
Throughout his later life, Cohn was well known for his lavish Washington parties, with wealthy and famous friends among his guests.
“He was a figure very tough and in on things, a champion of the underdog, though definitely running with the overdog pack,” Clark writes. “He nested on the nighttime radio call-in shows; he spread his wings over Koppel on Nightline. He appeared to be able to avoid all taxes and all penalties, maybe because he was connected, or on the A list, or known to the headwaiters and hostesses of New York.”
Cohn would be indicted four times from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s — for stock-swindling, obstructing justice, perjury, bribery, conspiracy, extortion, blackmail, and filing false reports. He is acquitted in three of the cases, and in the fourth, he would escape with a mistrial. This experience would give him “a kind of sneering, sinister sheen of invulnerability,” writes Michael Kruse in Politico.
Cohn would be diagnosed with HIV in 1984 after having a doctor examine a small cut from shaving that wouldn’t stop bleeding. During the visit, the doctor would remove two suspicious growths and the tests would reveal Cohn is HIV positive.
Cohn’s lover Peter Fraser, a New Zealander roughly half Cohn’s age, reported that, “When he found out, he didn’t cry but a couple of tears.”
Cohn would publicly deny that he was HIV positive and would keep his sexuality closeted for the rest of his life. According to Robert E. Bauman, who says he first meets Cohn on the day McCarthy dies in 1957, Cohn paradoxically had a reputation for “fag bashing” and loudly opposed laws that protected gays from discrimination.
In his last months of life, Cohn would be disbarred from law practice in New York for old fraud charges and he would lash out at the bar ethics committee, calling members “a bunch of yoyos.”
Cohn once said he wanted the first line of his obituary to read: “Roy M. Cohn, who served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.”
Way Bandy, one of the fashion world’s best-known makeup artists and a best-selling author, dies of AIDS-related illness at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center at the age of 45.
Learn More.
Considered the “greatest makeup artist in the world” by Vogue fashion editor Polly Allen Mellen, Bandy was in high demand throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. He worked with hundreds of celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor, Raquel Welch, Catherine Deneuve, Lauren Hutton, Farrah Fawcett, Barbra Streisand, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Cher.
He worked closely with top photographers, such as Scavullo, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Horst, Hiro and Victor Skrebneski. In 1977, he authored a bestselling makeup manual entitled Designing Your Face, and followed this in 1981 with another manual, Styling Your Face.
Born in 1941 in Birmingham, Alabama, Bandy pursued childhood interests that included sewing, music, painting and movie magazines. His family moved to Tennessee, where he graduated from high school. He returned to Birmingham to attend college for two years and then dropped out to model for department stores. He later earned a degree in education at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute, and became an English teacher in Alabama. He married, but separated from his wife shortly after visiting New York City for the first time in 1965.
Bandy moved to New York, changed his name (from Ronald Duane Wright) and enrolled at Christine Valmy’s makeup school. Within a few months, he was heading the salon there.
Bandy was one of the first to use color and texture innovatively. For example, he recommended blending moisturizer with a little water and “red-colored fluid” and “spreading all over the face for a rosy glow.” This was decades before the use of red liquid cheek stains became popular.
A pioneer of contouring, Bandy instructed his subjects to “reveal to our mirror only our best angles and most flattering illusions of reality, as seen through blurred vision and whatever other tricks we have at our disposal.”
Bandy’s techniques sought to create what he referred to as a “Personal Sculpture Portrait” through contouring with “light and dark.”
The opening paragraph of Designing Your Face contains this piece of advice: “I was bored for most of my youth because I tried to do not only what was expected of me, but also many other things I did not enjoy. One day I realized that when you do something with your whole being simply because you love to do it, you experience life as it should be lived. It was then I decided to be free and to do something I loved doing – creating beauty.”
Bandy’s makeup techniques continue to inspire generations of beauty pros and consumers.
August 24, 1986
San Francisco Actor-Musician Chaz Watson Dies
Charles “Chaz” Watson, a musician who also acted in Bay Area stage productions, dies at the age of 37.
Learn More.
Watson played the french horn and also was a drum major for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band.
“The roster of Bay Area artists who have died from AIDS over the past 25 years carries a poignant double message. It reminds us of all the light these men and women brought — and how much more they had to give when the shadow fell,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle arts and culture critic Steven Winn in 2006. “Death came, in most cases, when these artists were just reaching their prime.”
Cuban Government Imposes Quarantine on HIV-Infected People
Cuba becomes the only country in the world to impose a policy of universal HIV testing and mandated quarantine of all virus carriers.
Learn More.
The Cuban government opened the first of its fourteen sanitariums in Santiago de Las Vegas, located outside the major Cuban city of Havana. It also launched a widespread HIV testing campaign and sent anyone found to be HIV-positive to the sanitarium for life.
By the end of 1988, Cuban authorities would report that 240 people living with HIV — 171 men and 69 women — have been quarantined to date in the facility, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In 1988, the LA Times would report on a U.S. delegation invited by the Cuban government to visit the Santiago de Las Vegas quarantine center.
“We were shown groups of nondescript apartments that looked like typical Cuban suburban housing,” said Ronald Bayer, associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Public Health, in an interview with the LA Times. “It was neither barracks-like nor dungeon-like, although I have to assume we were shown the best.”
Bayer was one of a team of seven colleagues from Columbia University and the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center who were the first Americans to receive a first-hand glimpse of Cuba’s HIV quarantine system. Their host was Cuba’s deputy minister of public health, Hector Terry.
Bayer said he continued to be disturbed by Cuba’s policy of forcing HIV-positive people into quarantine.
“Even if it all looked as good as what we saw, it does not resolve the moral justification of incarceration based on supposed future behavior,” said Bayer, a medical ethicist whose specialty was HIV/AIDS healthcare and policy.
At the height of Cuba’s quarantine program, around 10,000 people with HIV would be isolated in facilities.
In 1991, Eduardo Martinez tested positive for HIV and was sent to the Santiago de Las Vegas sanitarium. Martinez had been a well-known designer in Cuba, creating costumes for the entertainment industry.
Martinez told NPR reporter Rebecca Sananes what it was like to receive the HIV diagnosis and then be separated from society.
“I didn’t want to go, but they would come for you and take you by force,” he told NPR.
He said that government officials interrogated the sanitarium patients and urged them reveal their sexual partners, so they too could be tested for HIV and quarantined.
Martinez was housed in one of the few air conditioned residences and he could rely on a steady supply of food, but the isolation from his family, friends and career made him fall into a deep depression. After going on a hunger strike, he was moved to a psychiatric ward for a month.
“It was very sad for me, because I didn’t understand why I was infected and why I had to go be interned in that place,” he says. “And on top of this, that was killing my career. I was at the top of stardom at that moment.”
Eventually, he reconciled himself to his situation, dire as it was, and accepted that the sanitarium would be his entire world for the rest of his life. He created a drag persona, “Samantha,” to help him reclaim his passion for fashion design.
“I needed a model in order to continue producing designs, and I just used myself as a model,” Martinez said.
He also encouraged his fellow patients to pursue creative self-expression and built a community of artists. Sadly, Martinez was one of the only people from his sanitarium generation to survive to a time when HIV could be effectively managed through treatment.
He told NPR about how he watched many of his friends die as they volunteered as test subjects for potential cures researched by the Cuban government.
With funds to Cuba from the Soviet Union ending with the 1991 fall of the USSR, the ongoing expense to house HIV patients was deemed too costly, and in 1995, Cuba began to allow HIV-positive patients to leave the sanitariums.
Martinez told NPR that he was one of the first patients to be offered his freedom, but the idea of leaving his home of five years scared him. Cuba was experiencing widespread homophobia and poverty, and his life in Santiago de Las Vega was filled with comfort, safety, friendship and creative purpose.
“I refused to leave, because I said I was too committed to the community inside the sanitarium,” he said.
But by 1996, he decided to return to Havana, where he built a second career as a drag artist. Martinez produces fashion shows and drag performances at one of Havana’s most famous nightclubs, the Tropicana. He said that sometimes, members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba come to see him perform as “Samantha.”
September 1, 1986
KGB Operatives Spread AIDS Disinformation at Conference
A Russian-born German scientist and his wife distribute AIDS – Its Nature & Origin to attendees of the Conference of Nonaligned Nations in Zimbabwe. The 47-page pamphlet falsely claims that HIV was created in the U.S. as a biological weapon.
Learn More.
Jakob and Lilli Segal, along with 20 KGB officers from the Soviet Union, distributed the report at the conference attended by representatives of more than 100 developing nations.
“Segal’s explicit repudiation of the thesis that AIDS originated in Africa was tailor-made for an African audience, and his claims subsequently appeared in the press of 25 African countries.” wrote scholar Thomas Boghardt in his 2009 article,“Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign,” for Studies in Intelligence.
Jakob Segal, a Russian-born German biologist and KGB recruit, crafted the report from information that the Stasi (East Germany’s counterpart to the Soviet KGB) had given him. With the assistance of his scientist wife Lilli, Segal wrote about a series of occurrences — some founded in fact and others totally fabricated — that concluded that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus and first tested it on gay prison inmates.
The creation and distribution of the report was a notable achievement in the disinformation campaign launched by Soviet and East German officials to “strengthen anti-American sentiments in the world and to spark domestic political controversies in the USA.”
The Stasi’s version of the AIDS disinformation campaign was called “Operation Denver” (not “Operation Infektion,” as widely reported at the time). The campaign’s goal was to “strengthen anti-American sentiments in the world and to spark domestic political controversies in the USA,” according to the Stasi’s plan.
September 10, 1986
NYC Interior Designer Robin Jacobsen Dies
Robin Jacobsen, a designer known for dramatic modern interiors, died of AIDS-related illness at the New York University Medical Center. He was 45 years old.
Learn More.
Jacobsen designed corporate showrooms and private homes that combined modern technology with classical elements and a minimalist point of view, according to the New York Times.
When Jacobsen became sick earlier in the year, his partner, R. Scott Bromley, an architect, took over meetings with clients while spending his evenings with Jacobsen at NYU Medical Center.
“After Robin died, one client phoned another client and asked if he could pick up AIDS from me,” Bromley told the NY Times in 1991. He never heard from the client again.
Jacobsen was also a volunteer firefighter with the Pines Fire Department on Fire Island, and served on the Board of Directors for the Pines Care Center, founded in 1983 to provide medical care to the Fire Island community.
Transportation historian and author Anthony Perles dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 50.
Learn More.
In 1981, Perles’ book The People’s Railway was published, providing a detailed history of the San Francisco Municipal Railway from its earliest days through to the era of light rail. Perles described every aspect of the railway system, including the struggle against United Railroads and the development of light rail vehicles (LRVs) in the 1970s.
Perles’ final work, Tours of Discovery, was published in 1984 and provided a pictorial journey through the decades of development and change on the Municipal Railway of San Francisco.
Raymond Tasco, an actor and director with Oakland Ensemble Theatre and Black Repertory Group, dies of AID-related illness at the age of 40.
Learn More.
Tasco directed several works at Theatre Rhinoceros and Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. He also co-founded the Bay Area Black Artists’ Connection support group.
The goals of the program are to develop community-based services for persons with AIDS and to determine factors that facilitate or impede service.
The foundation starts with nine projects located in 11 communities: Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Nassau County (NY), New Orleans, Newark, Jersey City, Seattle, and West Palm Beach.
The AIDS epidemic in each site varies substantially. Lack of health insurance represents a problem for the majority of clients in states having the most restrictive Medicaid policies (Atlanta, New Orleans, and Dallas) and in communities where a large proportion of clients enter the program before their condition progresses to AIDS (Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach).
Between 1987 and 1990, the average annual population with AIDS in program sites increase 126% (with increases ranging from 91% to 175%). During that period, the average increase in the number of persons alive with an AIDS diagnosis in these eleven cities is 191%, ranging from 181% to 257%.
The men and women attempting to build a network of coordinated services for persons with HIV/AIDS find themselves with an extremely difficult task. As the epidemic progresses, there is a substantial increase in the scope of the epidemic as well as change in the racial, sex, and risk-group composition of HIV-infected persons.
Program staff have to cope with confusing state and federal policy, complicated by changes in medical treatment and in the conceptualization of AIDS. In 1986, AIDS is still perceived as an acute, fatal illness, and policies for expanding terminal care benefits are the focus of discussion. However, soon the focus would shift to early intervention and ongoing treatment programs for a new chronic disease.
October 6, 1986
APLA Founder Nancy Cole Sawaya Dies
Nancy Cole Sawaya, co-founder of AIDS Project Los Angeles, dies in Sherman Oaks Community Hospital from AIDS-related illness at the age of 40.
Learn More.
Two months before, on August 4, Sawaya publicly disclosed that she had contracted AIDS, apparently from sexual encounters with men prior to her marriage, at least one of whom later died of AIDS complications.
“I just wish people would realize that it could happen to anybody,” Sawaya would tell the Los Angeles Times. “I do this couple support group on Monday nights, and all these people are a group of well-educated, down-to-earth, loving, successful people. It’s not the image like when you see on TV — they immediately shoot to Santa Monica Boulevard, somebody in leather, groping the other person, and it’s not like that.”
Sawaya began her HIV/AIDS advocacy work in 1982, when she helped to create the first hotline in Los Angeles to share verified medical information about the disease. In December 1982, she hosted a Christmas party to raise $8,000 for a new organization — AIDS Project Los Angeles. In early 1983, APLA would open its doors on Cole Avenue, with herself, Max Drew, Matt Redman, and Ervin Munro as Founders.
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. Sawaya was the first to manage APLA’s client services operation, often working 60 hours a week.
One in every five gay men and one in every 10
lesbians report being physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation, according to an eight-city study of antigay violence conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Learn More.
In the first Congressional hearing to address anti-gay violence, Kevin Berrill of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (now called the National LGBTQ Task Force) told members of the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice that in addition to battling the AIDS epidemic, the gay community was also contending with rampant and deadly antigay violence.
“There is disturbing evidence that the AIDS and antigay violence epidemics may now be following the same menacing curve,” Berrill said. “For inasmuch as AIDS has spread, so has the fear and hatred that spawns violence.”
Berrill went on to criticize the federal government for viewing widespread violence against gay men and lesbians as “just a gay problem and therefore not of concern to all society.” He bitingly referred to this passive policy as the same one the government has adopted to address HIV and AIDS.
In its study on antigay violence, the Task Force surveyed more than 2,000 community members in eight cities. Berrill also presented data from local governments which confirmed the Task Force’s findings. At the time, the federal government did not collect data on violence against LGBTQ community members.
“The toll of antigay violence cannot be measured solely in terms of these statistics,” Berrill told the Congress members. “These numbers do not measure the anguish, fear and loss experienced by Dee, who is still recovering from burns caused by acid thrown at her face when she was leaving the Los Angeles Gay Community Center. Or by Robert from New Jersey, where assailants beat him, extinguished cigarettes in his face, and then tied him to the back of a truck, dragging him in tow. Or by the family and friends of Charlie Howard of Maine, who was thrown off a bridge to his death by three teenagers.”
Berrill called on Congress to initiate federal studies on antigay violence and pass tougher laws to combat violent crimes targetting gays and lesbians. He also urged the repeal of all sodomy laws (which were still on the books of most states), and called for the passage of legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Also testifying that day was Diana Christensen, executive director of the Community
United Against Violence in San Francisco, who told the subcommittee the following:
“Is the increase in antigay violence an indicator of an AIDS-related backlash? At this point, I believe that AIDS and homosexuality have become synonymous in the American public’s mind. For the homophobic mind, AIDS is simply another justification for violence.”
David Wertheimer, executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project (which would become the NYC Anti-Violence Project) also provided the highlights of his 20-page testimonial submitted to the subcommittee. Founded in 1980 to provide support services to lesbian and gay survivors of homophobic violence, the organization became a city-wide, nonprofit service
provider in 1983.
Wertheimer reported that between 1984 and 1985, reported cases of violence “began to mushroom,” and the organization’s caseload increased 41%. In the current year — 1986 — violence was reported even more frequently, with between 40 and 60 new cases each month.
He explained that in the past, cases typically were in the form of antigay and antilesbian verbal harassment in a public place, or in the form of menacing behavior or even assault. A new form of violence had emerged recently, Wertheimer said, one that now represented 28% of the Anti-Violence Project’s caseload.
“AIDS-related violence — that is violence that may begin with verbal and menacing acts that are specifically related to AIDS,” he said. “For example, someone might start an attack by saying, ‘I hate faggots. You faggots give us AIDS.’ Or a lesbian might find notes on her door saying ‘Lesbians, dykes, you give us AIDS. Get out of the building.'”
Wertheimer told the Congress members that antigay violence can result in death. The organization reported seven antigay homicides in 1985, and 15 such homicides in the first nine months of 1986.
Also providing testimony was Dr. Gregory M. Herek, assistant professor of psychology at
the City University of New York and a member of the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Lesbian and Gay Concerns.
“A growing body of scientific data, including my own empirical research, shows that individuals’ irrational fears surrounding AIDS — such as fear of transmission through casual contact — are highly
correlated with their level of homophobia,” Dr. Herek said. “I interpret this finding to mean that reducing AIDS hysteria requires confronting its roots in homophobia, and that eliminating homophobia will require education about AIDS. Unfortunately, the U.S. Justice Department has sanctioned discrimination based on fears of AIDS-contagion, and has thereby fueled fears about AIDS
and probably contributed to public homophobia.”
Rep. Barney Frank (who in 1987 would become the first member of Congress to be openly gay) also spoke for the Congressional record in support of raising awareness about anti-gay violence.
October 15, 1986
Fred Alizie, Tenor with San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Chorus, Dies
Fred Alizie, a singer with the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Community Chorus and the choral ensemble Vocal Minority, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 36.
After Alizio became too sick to perform, he continued to attend performances by the Community Chorus and Vocal Minority, and shortly before he died, he donated funds for Vocal Minority to buy new uniform jackets.
October 1986
U.S. Grant Program Feeds Growing Healthcare Needs
The U.S. launches the AIDS Service Demonstration Grants program, allocating $15.3 million in available funding to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami.
Learn More.
The grant program is run by the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As the HRSA’s first AIDS-specific health initiative, program focused its funding on cities hardest-hit by HIV/AIDS.
In the years to come, the HRSA would create the HIV/AIDS Bureau and develop a comprehensive system of HIV primary medical care, medications, and essential support services for low-income people with HIV.
The HIV/AIDS Bureau will oversee the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program and play a critical role in helping diagnose, treat, prevent, and respond as part of the “Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America” initiative.
The report, issued by U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, M.D., also calls for a nationwide education campaign that includes early sex education in schools, increased use of condoms, and voluntary HIV testing.
“By the end of 1991, an estimated 270,000 cases of AIDS will have occurred with 179,000 deaths within the decade since the disease was first recognized,” Dr. Koop states in the report’s preface.
“In the year 1991, an estimated 145,000 patients with AIDS will need health and supportive services at a total cost of between $8 and $16 billion.”
October 23, 1986
Esquerita, Flamboyant Pioneer of Rock n Roll, Dies
Esquerita — an innovative, self-taught pianist and performer whose influence on rock ‘n’ roll started with the birth of the genre in the early 1950s — dies of AIDS-related illness at a hospital in Harlem, New York. He was 50 years old.
Learn More.
“Without Esquerita, there might have been no Little Richard, hence no Prince and no Elton John — and no rock ‘n’ roll as we know it,” music reporter Alan Richard wrote in Country Queer. “Little Richard himself credited Esquerita with showing him how to pound the piano with intensity and soul.”
Born in 1935 in Greenville, South Carolina, he was known locally as Eskew Reeder (or “SQ,” for Stephen Quincy) and was just a teenager when he joined the New York-based gospel group Heavenly Echoes.
Early on, he adopted an unconventional style, sporting a six-inch pompadour and makeup — which was quite shocking during the predominantly conservative culture of the 1950s, music reporter Iaian Ellis wrote in Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists.
When the Heavenly Echoes disbanded in the early ’50s, he returned to Greenville and created an act under the name “Professor Eskew Reeder.” The Owl Club on Washington Street booked him as the house performer, according to Ellis.
Esquerita also began performing on the “Chitlin’ Circuit” in the Deep South, where audiences embraced his unconventional appearance and performance style. Encouraged by the responses he received from Black audiences across the South, Esquerita became even more manic as he performed and often added a wig or two atop his already towering pompadour. His stage costumes typically incorporated sequins, rhinestones, and capes.
It was around this time when Little Richard (also known as Richard Penniman) saw him perform and expressed admiration for Esquerita’s technique on the piano, Ellis writes. Esquerita responded by teaching Little Richard some of his technique.
While Esquerita was performing live to Black audiences and honing his act to exquisite imperfection, Little Richard was already recording songs as a solo vocalist and piano player. But after seeing Esquerita perform, he decided to move away from the soothing jump-blues style of Roy Brown and tap instead into the fast rock ‘n’ roll rhythm that he experienced in Esquerita’s performances.
After “Tutti Frutti” became a big rock ‘n’ roll hit in 1955, Little Richard released a series of records in the same style and quickly became a nationwide sensation. The popularity of his music crossed the racial divide, and he was soon performing on television shows and in some of the earliest rock movies, such as Don’t Knock the Rock and The Girl Can’t Help It.
“I think Little Richard copied off [Esquerita] a lot, but Little Richard got to the studio first,” Lightin’ Lee, a New Orleans guitar player who knew both men, told Baynard Woods for his article “Esquerita and the Voola.”
But in 1957, Little Richard surprised everyone by announcing he was retiring from rock ‘n’ roll to get closer to God, and he enrolled in a theological college in Alabama. According to Baynard, Little Richard made this decision public at the last concert of his tour, saying, “If you want to live with the Lord, you can’t rock ‘n’ roll, too. God doesn’t like it.”
This opened the door for Esquerita to record his own songs.
While performing at the Owl Club in 1958, Esquerita caught the attention of rockabilly pioneer Paul Peek, who had just performed with Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps in the musical-comedy film The Girl Can’t Help It. Peek helped Esquerita get studio time at a Greenville radio station, and sent the resulting demos to bandleader Vincent. Seen as “the next Little Richard,” Esquerita was signed to a record deal with Capitol Records, thanks to help from Vincent.
The same year, Capitol started releasing a series of singles featuring Esquerita, first with the rockin’ “Oh Baby” and, on the B side, the slower-moving, bluesy “Please Come Home.” This was followed quickly by the release of the single “Rockin’ The Joint“/”Esquerita And The Voola.”
“With its thundering piano and obligato holler, ‘Esquerita and the Voola’ could be read as a response to Little Richard’s conversion,” writes Woods in his tribute to Esquerita. “Just as Richard gave himself to the Lord, Esquerita had dedicated his life to the Voola.”
Woods calls “Esquerita and the Voola” the artist’s “most dissonant song,” and it is fair to say that even the cutting-edge rock ‘n’ rollers of 1958 weren’t prepared for something like this.
“[The song] begins with a rolling rhumba drumbeat and then takes off into a piano rumble that swerves between the almost-off-the-rails high-note plinking of Thelonious Monk and the raucous bass thudding of Fats Domino,” Woods writes. “The piano is enough to make ‘Esquerita and the Voola’ one of the most experimental of the early rock singles, but then the wordless vocals come in and things really get weird, as Esquerita executes the kind of operatic howls that others call rock shouting and he called obligato.”
Fans of rock ‘n’ roll would find similarities between Esquerita and Little Richard — like the driving energy, the high-pitched “who-o-o-o-o-o’s!”, and the rollicking style of the piano playing — but there were obvious differences as well. Esquerita’s singing voice was deeper and rougher than Little Richard’s, and his handing of the piano was wilder.
“One could perhaps say that Little Richard’s voice had more of a gospel sheen to it, whereas Esquerita’s is far more dirty blues,” states George Starostin on his music review website . “As for the piano-playing, here, too, Esquerita shows far less discipline and far more aggression, not really minding getting off tempo every now and then, as long as the spirit stays strong inside him.”
Capitol would release Esquerita’s eponymous album in 1959, but it would not include “Esquerita and the Voola” on the LP. Unfortunately, the record did not do well, and Capitol dropped Esquerita from its roster.
From that point on, Esquerita drifted around the fringes of the musical world, performing under various names, such as the Magnificent Malochi, Estrelita, Eskew Reeder, and The Voola, writes Woods in his tribute to Esquerita.
In Dallas, he assembled a band and recorded a series of demos. Then he moved to New Orleans and became a house musician at the Dew Drop Inn, performing with many of the city’s best musicians.
In the 1960s, legendary record producer Berry Gordy brought Esquerita to Detroit as part of an ensemble exploring new Motown sounds.
“That’s when the Gordy sound changed,” Esquerita said later. “We just started jammin’, payin’ no mind, carryin’ on, and Berry taped us right there in Hitsville, USA.”
Even though Motown updated its sound to a harder-charging R&B beat after hearing the crew from New Orleans, it didn’t result in a recording deal for Esquerita. By the late ’60s, he had moved to New York, where he worked with the great drummer Idris Muhammad for a while.
In 1970, Little Richard launched a comeback and invited Esquerita to the studio to play piano on “Dew Drop Inn,” a song Esquerita wrote about the New Orleans club. For the LP (The Rill Thing), Little Richard recorded a second Esquerita number called “Freedom Blues.”
But after that, work dried up for Esquerita, and he reportedly turned to criminal activity to make ends meet, resulting in prison time in Puerto Rico and New York City.
In 1981, he was booked to perform on Monday nights at a tiny club on West 17th Street called Tramps. Music writer James Marshall said he saw the small Village Voice ad for “Every Monday: Esquerita!” and couldn’t believe the rock ‘n’ roll legend was still performing.
“We headed for Tramps, and there he was: the legend, the man — Esquerita himself!” Marshall wrote on his website, The Hound Blog. “His hair was short, and he looked like he’d ridden some hard miles, but it was he, the guy who made those insane records way back when.”
Marshall and his friends Billy Miller and Miriam Linna, publishers of Kicks magazine, began to attend Esquerita’s shows regularly. They put Esquerita on the cover of an issue of Kicks, and soon others were coming to Tramps on Monday nights.
Being friends with Esquerita was a mixed bag, Marshall recalled. Sometimes, he would show up at a party and treat everyone to a private recital, “rocking through versions of ‘Slow Down’ and ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie.'” But at other times, write Marshall, Esquerita would appear in the middle of the night, pounding on windows and asking for money.
In the early 1980s, crack was cheap and plentiful in New York City, and Marshall watched his friend succumb to the effects of this dangerous drug. According to Pierre Monnery, who wrote “The Magnificent Malochi: The Esquerita Story,” Esquerita was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1985.
“He died of complications arising from AIDS in a Harlem Hospital on 23rd October, 1986, aged just fifty,” Monnery wrote. “Shamefully, he was buried in an unmarked grave in New York’s ‘Potters Field’ on Hart Island in northeast Bronx, where he rests today with other New Yorkers who could not afford a proper burial.”
In 1986, Little Richard was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Esquerita was buried in an unmarked grave the same year.
October 24, 1986
Black & Latinx Cases Grow at Higher Rate
CDC reports that AIDS cases are disproportionately affecting black and latinx communities. This is particularly true for children in these communities, who make up 90% of perinatally-acquired AIDS cases.
October 29, 1986
Report Calls for Nationwide Education Campaign
The National Academy of Sciences issues a report calling for a “massive media, educational and public health campaign to curb the spread of the HIV infection,” as well as for the creation of a National Commission on AIDS.
The mission of NAS is to provide scientific advice to the government “whenever called upon” by any government department. The Academy receives no compensation from the government for its services.
October 31, 1986
AIDS Fears Amplified by Soviet Disinformation Campaign
Soviet newspaper Pravda publishes a cartoon depicting the false idea that AIDS was the work of American biological warfare researchers.
Learn More.
The cartoon is part of a massive disinformation campaign as part of the Soviet Union’s Cold War strategy against the United States.
“Of all the many disinformation campaigns inaugurated during the Cold War, most but not all by the USSR, arguably the most infamous was the effort by the KGB and its allies to convince the world that AIDS was created in an alleged secret US biowarfare lab at Ft. Detrick, MD,” wrote David Durant, librarian for East Carolina University’s Cold War & Internal Security Collection.
A collaboration of the KGB, their counterparts in the East German Stasi, and other Warsaw Pact secret services, the campaign began in 1983, intensified in 1985, and then wound down in late 1987.
“Despite being refuted by all credible medical experts, the AIDS as bioweapon theory has lingered on, serving as a sort of gateway drug to other conspiracy theories, and paving the way for later falsehoods regarding diseases such as Ebola virus and COVID-19,” Durant wrote in 2023.
November 4, 1986
Activists Defeat California Prop 64, Attempt to Expose PWAs
LGBT activists organize voters to overwhelmingly defeat Prop 64, a Lyndon LaRouch-backed initiative on the California ballot requiring “carriers of the AIDS virus” to be reported to government authorities.
Learn More.
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.
November 21, 1986
Film Actor Marcelino Sánchez Dies
Marcelino Sánchez, best known for his starring role as Rembrandt in the 1979 cult classic The Warriors, dies of AIDS-related illness in his Hollywood home at the age of 28.
Learn More.
Born in Puerto Rico, Sánchez began acting in the late 1970s, according to the Los Angeles Blade. He played Ricardo on The Bloodhound Gang mystery vignettes featured on the 1980s children’s educational television show 3-2-1 Contact. He also appeared in TV shows CHiPs, Hill Street Blues and the film 48 Hrs.
In an interview with Noblemania.com, Bloodhound Gang co-star Nan-Lynn Nelson recalled:
“Marcelino had actually contacted me months prior to his passing to let me know that he was sick. We met and spent an entire day together while he was here in NYC, basically to say good-bye. I still think of Marcelino often.”
In 1986, Sánchez’s health would decline quickly. His sister and brother would come to Los Angeles to take care of him until his death just two weeks shy of his 28th birthday, according to the tribute to him on Gran Varones, a website dedicated to pop culture, queer history & storytelling through a Afro-Latinx Queer lens.
November 23, 1986
Fear of AIDS Linked to Increase in Anti-LGBT Violence
LGBT leaders sound the alarm against the increase in violence targeted toward members of the community.
Learn More.
In a New York Times article reporting on the three-year increase in anti-gay violence, LGBT organization leaders cite studies and provide anecdotes that reflect the disturbing trend, linking it to the spread of HIV/AIDS.
The article largely re-caps the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice hearing on anti-gay violence held more than a month before.
Also included in the article, written by William R. Greer, is the account of a Brooklyn man who was attacked outside his home on a Saturday morning. The man, who is identified as an employee in the Office of Mayor Ed Koch, said three assailants struck him repeatedly while yelling homophobic slurs at him and accusing him of spreading AIDS.
”What I find frightening is these groups don’t seem to have any fear of verbally or physically assaulting people in the middle of the day, in a shopping center, in front of businesses, with hundreds of people around,” he told the NYT reporter. ”Somehow they’ve gotten the message that their action will be condoned or at least ignored.”
November 1986
Redbone Press Publishes ‘In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology’
In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, curated by Joseph Beam to explore the experiences of gay Black men, hits bookshelves.
Learn More.
Although sales for the book were initially small, word of mouth would cause In the Life to be widely read and celebrated as the first collection of writings about being gay in the age of AIDS. Written by 29 Black, gay authors and edited by Beam, In the Life included stories, verses, works of art, and theater pieces, all voicing the point of view of “an often silent minority.”
“The bottom line is this,” Beam wrote, “We are Black men who are proudly gay. What we offer is our lives, our love, our visions… We are coming home with our heads held up high.”
A showcase for new literary talent, a source of inspiration for its readers, and a literary and cultural milestone for the gay community, In the Life advanced the visibility of gay Black men in a lasting way.
“For the first time,” wrote James Charles Roberts, a contributor, “Black gay men got to tell about their lives and experiences in their own words.”
Charles Stephens, co-editor of Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call, recalled coming across In the Life at a pivotal moment.
“I lacked the language to describe what I was longing for, and perhaps in a sense Beam, and his stunning vision of community, provided that language for me,” said Stephens in an interview for Lambda Literary. “I absorbed his words, and found a home in them. In the Life became a compass for me, to first locate myself, and then others that shared my commitments.”
Beam would die of AIDS-related illness in December 1988, three days before his 34th birthday. His unfinished manuscript for a second anthology would be completed by his friend Essex Hemphill and published in 1991 as Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men.
November 25, 1986
Bay Area Opera Director Arthur Conrad Dies
Arthur Conrad — director of more than 200 productions for the Marin Opera, West Bay Opera, Oakland Opera, Sacramento Opera and the Lamplighters — dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 51.
Learn More.
Conrad began his career as a dancer, performing in the role of “Mother Marshmallow” in the Oakland Ballet’s Nutcracker for several years. He began to choreograph Bay Area productions, and ultimately began directing.
HIV/AIDS services advocate Bev Sykes wrote in her blog Funny The World about how in the summer of 1986 she was Conrad’s assistant as he directed a production of The Mikado for the Oakland ballet.
“He had a ‘cold’ during the rehearsal period and complained that he couldn’t shake it,” she recalled.
The show ran throughout the month of August and, at its conclusion, Conrad promised Sykes that he would take her to lunch to thank her for all her help. She never heard from him again.
In November, she found out that Conrad was hospitalized with pneumocystis pneumonia. He died shortly afterward.
“Until that time, AIDS had been something that happened to someone else,” she wrote.
Martin Burgoyne, British-born Designer and Madonna Pal, Dies
Martin Burgoyne, a designer whose close friendship with Madonna would later inspire the lyrics of one of her songs, dies of AIDS-related illness in New York City. He was 23.
Learn More.
“Sitting on a park bench thinking about a friend of mine,” Madonna sings on the track for “In This Life” on her 1992 album Erotica. “He was only 23, gone before he had his time.”
Martin Burgoyne was born in England in 1963 and moved with his family to Florida as a young child. After graduating from high school, he moved to New York City as a teenager to study art at the Pratt Institute. To pay the rent, he worked at Studio 54 as a bartender and soon became an insider on the Manhattan nightclub scene.
When Madonna arrived in New York in the late 1970s, she met Burgoyne and they became fast friends. Soon they moved in together in an apartment on NYC’s Lower East Side. They became regulars in the downtown clubs and performance spaces, and with his nightlife connections, Burgoyne was able to usher Madonna into the spotlight that she craved.
“He knew everyone in New York and showed her around all the clubs, introduced her to Andy Warhol, whisked her through the side doors,” wrote music industry executive Seymour Stein (1942-2023) in his memoir Siren Song: My Life in Music. In 1982, Stein signed Madonna to Sire Records, and became acquainted with Burgoyne as a member of Madonna’s inner circle.
Stein credited Burgoyne with putting Madonna in the right places at the right time. Burgoyne was also her sounding board for new songs and style choices.
“She worked out all her early songs, outfits, and moves with Martin giving her his honest feedback,” Stein wrote.
Burgoyne designed a cover for Madonna’s first album, but Sire Records went with a different design. His second attempt at designing for Madonna was more successful; he created silkscreens that were used for the cover of her single “Burning Up.”
Burgoyne was one of Madonna’s dancers for live performances, but following the massive response to Sire’s release of the single “Everybody,” Burgoyne and other amateur dancers in Madonna’s show were replaced by professionals, according to Andrew Morton in his 2001 biography, Madonna.
One of those dancers, Jordan Levin, recalled Burgoyne inviting her to dance in Madonna’s first video in 1982.
“I was on the street one night when I heard someone yelling ‘Jordan!’ and turned to see Martin running up behind me,” Levin wrote in an article for the Miami Herald.
Burgoyne told her that Madonna was going to make a video for “Everybody,” and she wanted Levin to dance in it. Of course, she accepted the invitation.
Meanwhile, Burgoyne became the road manager for Madonna’s performances at Danceteria, CBGB and Mudd Club in 1982 and 1983, shows which allowed Madonna to hone her act in time for her national debut on the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards.
Soon, Sire Records took over every aspect of her record and tour production, and Burgoyne no longer had an official role in the commercial industry that had sprung up around Madonna. However, the two remained close friends, according to David Blaine in his 2014 interview with Madonna for Interview magazine.
In the summer of 1986, Burgoyne was diagnosed with AIDS-related complex (ARC), an early medical term to describe the multi-symptom condition of AIDS. Burgoyne’s friends organized a fundraising party at the Pyramid Club, which was held in early September 1986, and raised $6,000 for Burgoyne’s living expenses, according to The New York Times. Andy Warhol and Keith Haring designed the invitation, and more than 500 people showed up, including Wendy Wild, Lady Bunny, John Sex, Kenny Scharf, Anita Sarko, Steve Rubell and, of course, Madonna.
According to Christopher Ciccone, Madonna’s brother, the rising star paid for Burgoyne’s medical expenses at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and she also leased an apartment for him close to the hospital in the West Village.
Former dancer Jordan Levin said she visited Burgoyne at his apartment, recalling that he was “frantic” because The New York Post ran a story under the headline “Madonna’s Former Roommate has AIDS — Sean is Furious!”
Burgoyne told her that he saw Madonna and Sean Penn in the last week, and Penn had hugged him.
“Sean isn’t angry at me … How can they do this?” she recalled Burgoyne saying.
Still, he found the energy and motivation to paint a denim jacket that would be auctioned off at an AIDS benefit fashion show for St. Vincent’s. Madonna modeled the jacket at the event, which was held on November 10, 1986.
Twenty days later, Burgoyne died with Madonna at his side.
December 2, 1986
Bay Area Actor-Director Chuck Solomon Dies
Founder of the Gay Men’s Theater Collective and co-creator of its pioneering production Crimes Against Nature, Chuck Solomon dies of AID-related illness at the age of 40.
Learn More.
As an actor and director, Solomon worked with several local companies, including the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Theatre Rhinoceros.
He is immortalized in Marc Huestis’ 1987 documentary “Chuck Solomon: Coming of Age,” which received the Silver Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival. In the film, Solomon is celebrated by members of his family and about 350 friends on his 40th birthday.
Starcross Monastery in Sonoma County becomes guardian to Michelle, a five-month-old baby born with the AIDS virus who was abandoned at a hospital. Many other infants and children would follow Michelle to Starcross and be cared for by Catholic monks.
Learn More.
Brother Tolbert “Toby” McCarroll, Sister Marti Aggeler and Sister Julie DeRossi used the proceeds of the 1976 sale of a building near San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury to buy a ramshackle farmhouse on 115 acres of meadows and forest, where they opened the Starcross Monastic Community.
Their idea was to grow and sell Christmas trees, provide a wholesome country home for children in the foster care system, and pursue a monastic lifestyle in a secluded part of northern California, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Then the AIDS crisis hit, and the monks began to reach out to nearby hospitals who were housing orphaned infants and children infected with the virus. They found that many did not need to be hospitalized, but there was no one else for them to go.
Starcross began to assume guardianship of infants and young children with HIV, and provided them with a home and medical care. The monks developed a home care program that resembled a family farm more than a hospice.
“We had no medical training, but we did know how to take care of kids, having raised
many foster children over the years,” states Starcross’ paper on the history on the monastery’s work during the AIDS crisis. “At the time, medicine had nothing to offer. The local AIDS doctor encouraged us saying that these little children whose mothers were too sick to care for them, needed to be in regular homes, not hospitals. We joyfully welcomed six HIV positive babies into our family.”
Before long, word spread and Starcross received a generous donation from Frank Sinatra. Then Parents magazine named Brother Toby, a celibate monk from an unheard-of town in California, its Parent of the Month. In his 1994 book Last Watch of the Night, author Paul Monette — famous for publicly tearing up a photo of the Pope — cited Brother Toby as one of the few men of the cloth he admired.
The media exposure also brought negative attention to the monastery. Some of Starcross’ country neighbors recoiled at the news that the AIDS virus was among them. Shortly before Christmas 1997, one of the Starcross children, an HIV-infected baby named Aaron, had difficulty breathing. The monks phoned for help, but the volunteer Annapolis firefighters would not respond to the call.
Some of the first residents, like Aaron, Michelle and Josh, died at the farmhouse within years of their arrival. But as HIV treatment options grew, children began to survive. Nicole, who arrived at Starcross as an HIV-positive infant with a variety of special medical needs, would grow up to enjoy learning at the local schools, according to a 2001 article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Starcross remains today, and so do the homes for AIDS orphans that Starcross created in Uganda and Romania. Both now operate independently of Starcross and Brother Toby told the LA Times that he expects that will continue indefinitely, as they must because the global AIDS crisis shows no signs of going away.
February 1987
Cleve Jones Creates First Panel for AIDS Memorial Quilt
AIDS activist Cleve Jones creates the first panel of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in honor of his friend Marvin Feldman, who died on October 10, 1986 of AIDS at the age of 33.
Learn More.
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.
February 1, 1987
Global Response Begins with WHO Program
The World Health Organization (WHO) launches the Special Programme on AIDS to serve as the architect and keystone of a global AIDS plan.
Learn More.
The two main functions of WHO’s program were: (1) to provide global leadership and ensure international collaboration
and cooperation; and (2) to provide support to national programs to prevent and control AIDS, according to The Fourth Ten Years of the World Health Organization.
WHO established a global commission on AIDS and a management committee to support and guide the program. As part of the new program, a special public information service was launched to satisfy the increasing media interest in HIV/AIDS and to ensure that accurate and timely information was being disseminated to the public.
provide technical and financial support to countries;
initiate relevant social, behavioral, and biomedical research;
promote participation by nongovernmental organizations; and
champion rights of those living with HIV.
With technical and financial support from WHO, AIDS programs rapidly began to be established in nations throughout the world. WHO puts forth the idea that a global response was vital not only for national interests but also because “ultimately AIDS cannot be stopped in any one country unless it is stopped in all countries.”
At the global level, the program was responsible for strategic leadership, developing consensus, coordinating scientific research, exchanging information, assuring technical cooperation and mobilizing and coordinating resources. During 1986 and 1987, a total of 127 countries sought WHO’s collaboration on a national response to AIDS, according to The Fourth Ten Years of the World Health Organization.
Founded in 1948, WHO is the United Nations agency that connects nations to promote health, keep the world safe and serve vulnerable populations. On January 1, 1996, the UN would launch UNAIDS to consolidate its global AIDS response.
February 4, 1987
Pianist & Vegas Showman Liberace Dies
Emmy-Award winning pianist and mainstay of the Las Vegas entertainment scene Liberace dies at his Palm Springs, California home at the age of 67.
Learn More.
Liberace’s doctor claims that the man called “Mr. Showmanship” died of a heart attack caused by an underlying brain infection. But an autopsy by the county coroner reveals that Liberace died of AIDS-related illness.
Just weeks before his death, Liberace was treated at Eisenhower Medical Center for what his staff called “the effects of a watermelon diet.” Hundreds of friends and tourists kept vigil outside of his Palm Springs home as rumors of his real illness became rampant.
When death seemed imminent, his attorney would tell reporters that Liberace chose his Palm Springs home to die because, “I think he wanted to rest in the place he loves. He’s always thinking about his fans. He wants to be remembered as he was — an entertainer. I think it’s nice that fans are here and supporting him.”
The news of Liberace’s death demonstrated the powerful stigma of AIDS and led to a national discussion about the rights of people living with AIDS to privacy, both before and after death.
Jay Phillips, a promising artist whose abstract sculptures won him a select but distinctive following in Los Angeles and New York, died of AIDS-related illness in New York City. He was 32.
Learn More.
Seduced by southern California’s saturated colors and New York City’s vibrant architecture, Phillips incorporated the world around him in his work. Melding painting and sculpture, his works typically featured brightly colored enamel on metal that was cut, folded and otherwise manipulated. His use of color-drenched patterns referenced his early exposure to commercial fabric patterning.
Suzanne Muchnic, art critic for the Los Angeles Times, credited Phillips with a “swift, sure sense of arrangement that allows him to join bold checkerboards, bright stripes, lattices and circle patterns with painterly gestures evocative of landscape.”
A recipient of the Los Angeles County Museum’s 1981 Young Talent Award, Phillips exhibited his work at LACMA in November 1985 – February 1986.
“There is in his work a greater insistence on structure and manipulation of the composition,” wrote Stephanie Barron, LACMA’s curator of 20th Century art. “Yet, ever the romantic, Phillips continues to search for ways to interpret his surroundings.”
Phillips often worked with aluminum, cutting wavy edges along the side of his pieces and folding them back. This technique “had the effect of playing off a sense of depth against perceptual pulls of shape and color,” according to Burt A. Folkart of the LA Times.
He also briefly worked with paper, creating a series of silk-screened prints named for the Los Angeles locations of Hancock Park, Melrose, Hollywood and Bel-Air Gate.
“Although the material involved was atypical of Phillips’ work, the colors and wide stripes and thick brush strokes were not,” Folkart wrote.
Phillips earned his bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of New Mexico and his master’s degree from Claremont Graduate School in 1979. In Los Angeles, his work was also shown at the Newspace and Roy Boyd galleries.
March 12, 1987
Activist Larry Kramer Founds ACT UP
Activist Larry Kramer founds the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP ) at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City.
Learn More.
Kramer’s goal is to create a political direct-action group that will force governments, elected officials, public health agencies, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, and religious institutions to act to protect those at risk of HIV, and those who are sick with AIDS. The organization was founded in response to the U.S. government’s lack of action on the growing number of deaths from HIV infection and AIDS.
Time magazine calls ACT UP “the most effective health activist [group] in history ” for “pressuring drug companies, government agencies and other powers that stood in their way to find better treatments for people with AIDS — and, in the process, improving the way drugs are tested and approved in the U.S.”
March 17, 1987
Fashion Illustrator Antonio Lopez Dies
Antonio Lopez, whose drawings appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and Interview, dies of AIDS-related illness at the UCLA Medical Center at the age of 44.
Learn More.
Based in New York, Lopez had come to Los Angeles for a showing of his drawings at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica when he became ill and was hospitalized, according to fashion model Susan Baraz.
Lopez is credited with launching the careers of Jessica Lange, Jerry Hall, Tina Chow and Grace Jones, and he also was the first artist to use black models in his work, which was seen in the top fashion magazines in the mid-1960s.
He also was credited with being the first artist to draw not only the inanimate creations of the haute couture but to idealize the models behind them.
His family migrated to New York City when Lopez was seven and he attended P.S. 77 on East 104th Street. To keep her son preoccupied and away from street violence, Lopez’s mother, a seamstress, would ask him to draw flowers for her embroideries, according to the tribute to Lopez on the Visual AIDS website.
While a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, he received a work-study assignment at Women’s Wear Daily, where his talent was immediately recognized. WWD put him on staff and he left FIT.
At the time of his death, Lopez had been in California for an exhibition of his fashion drawings and personality portraits at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica. An exhibition of his drawings was also taking place in Munich, West Germany.
Lopez’ creative partner, Juan Eugene Ramos, would die of AIDS-related illness eight years later, on Nov. 3, 1995, at the age of 53.
In 2016, a retrospective of Lopez’ and Ramos’ work was exhibited at El Museo del Barrio in New York. The exhibit, “Antonio Lopez: Future Funk Fashion,” was curated to evoke serious discourse on gender, sexuality, race, and heritage, and simultaneously invited viewers to revel in Lopez’ and Ramos’ legacy.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the first medication for AIDS — AZT (zidovudine), an antiretroviral drug initially developed to treat cancer.
As the only medication available to treat HIV, AZT became a highly sought-after treatment, albeit one fraught with side effects. Studies showed that AZT therapy could lead to the damage of muscle tissues, including the heart, and also the suppression of the production of red blood cells, neutrophils, and other cells in the bone marrow.
In addition, the side effects of fatigue, malaise, and anemia were common. Many patients taking AZT experienced gastrointestinal intolerance, nausea and vomiting. Rarer side effects included lactic acidosis and hepatic steatosis.
The drug’s approval remains controversial to this day, but now that we are in a world where treatment options are so far advanced, it can be difficult to imagine the sense of urgency permeating the medical community in the 1980s.
Today, if someone is diagnosed with HIV, he or she can choose among more than 40 drugs that can treat the disease. And there is an excellent chance that with the right combination of medications, given at the right time, HIV levels can be reduced and kept so low that the person never gets sick and the virus becomes undetectable.
March 24, 1987
FDA Accelerates Drug Approvals
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issues regulations that expand access to promising new medications that have not yet been approved or licensed by the agency. This accelerates the approval of drugs by two to three years.
Learn More.
In a few months, the FDA would go on to issue treatment IND (investigational new drug) regulations on May 22 to permit new drugs to be used to treat patients before clinical trials are completed where no alternative therapy exists for a “serious disease.”
In its explanation of the regulations, the FDA mentions advanced cases of AIDS as the first example of an immediately life-threatening disease, but did not include AIDS in its list of examples of serious diseases. It explained that some diseases, like multiple sclerosis, are not serious at earlier stages, and that the Treatment IND regulations would not apply to drugs intended to treat those earlier stages of disease.
March 24, 1987
ACT UP Holds Its First ‘Zap’ on Wall Street
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) stages its first protest on Wall Street, bringing widespread attention to the AIDS epidemic.
Learn More.
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.
March 31, 1987
American & French Researchers Share Credit for Discovery of Virus
President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac end an international scientific dispute when they announce that researchers from the two countries will share credit for discovery of the AIDS virus.
Learn More.
The countries agree that patent rights to a blood test that emerged from that discovery will also be shared, with most of the royalties to be donated to a new foundation for AIDS research and education.
This settles a years-long rift between the two countries, each laying claim to the valuable patent for the first HIV-antibody test. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services claimed virologist Robert Gallo first developed the test, while the Pasteur Institute claimed it was French virologist Luc Montagnier.
Gallo had won the prestigious Lasker Award in 1986 for his share of the work (his second Lasker, having won in 1982 for his work on retroviruses).
Years later, the National Institutes of Health would conduct an investigation that proves Gallo and his colleagues first had isolates of HIV with the exception of one sample that originated from the Pasteur Institute’s lab (which was requested by the Gallo lab and sent to them from Paris).
Gallo and Montagnier later agree to share the title of co-discovers of the virus and they write several papers together describing their work in Science (Dec. 29, 2002) and the New England Journal of Medicine (Dec. 11, 2003).
However, in 2008 when Stockholm would call with the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, it was only for Luc Montagnier. The scientific world would be shocked to learn that the Nobel Committee was snubbing Gallo’s work, but because those archival records are locked up until 2058, we will not know the precise argument behind this decision for many years.
April 6, 1987
Dr. Koop Focuses on Children with AIDS, Calls for Sex Ed
At a four-day workshop at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop draws attention to the plight of the growing number of children who acquire AIDS from their mothers or through blood transfusions.
Learn More.
The workshop kicks off with a large press conference, where Dr. Koop announces that AIDS is a growing menace to the nation’s children and reiterates his call for early sex education as part of the general effort to halt its spread. He recommends that sex education start in kindergarten and include information about AIDS.
”It’s the responsibility of parents, and it should begin before children go to school,” Dr. Koop says.
He mentions that parents are often reluctant to discuss sex with their children, and so the burden falls upon schools, churches and synagogues to teach children and youth about sex and AIDS.
“If parents don’t do it, they’ve abrogated their responsibility and somebody else has to do it,” Dr. Koop says.
Dr. Koop’s stance for early sex education puts him at odds with some of his fellow conservatives.
The workshop brings together families affected by HIV, leading HIV researchers and clinicians, mental health professionals, public health officials, and representatives from the insurance, legal, and nonprofit organizations.
In the last week, the number of children under 13 years old diagnosed with AIDS reaches 471, double the number of cases reported a year ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In addition, there are 139 cases among teen-agers.
But Dr. Koop says these figures do not include as many as 2,000 children who have some AIDS symptoms but who do not meet the strict Federal definition of the illness, and he says the number of infected children is expected to continue to increase ”dramatically.”
Dr. Koop also notes that a disproportinate number of children infected with AIDS are members of minority groups: about 50% are black and 33% are Hispanic.
”We have, therefore, a segment of society that is very difficult to reach,” Dr. Koop says.
April 7, 1987
FDA Declares HIV Prevention as Indication for Condoms
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorizes the sale of male condoms to include HIV prevention as an indication for use, marking a major stride in public health communication and safe sex and HIV/AIDS transmission.
Learn More.
AIDS brings condoms back to the forefront for sexually active people of all sexual orientation.
Nevertheless, condom use does not equal 100% protection from HIV, and its effectiveness largely depends on correct and consistent use. Also, some people are allergic to the latex, lubricants, and perfumes.
The FDA also begins to test latex condoms for leaks, resulting in an improvement in the overall quality of condom products.
April 17, 1987
Fashion Designer Willi Smith Dies
Fashion star Willi Smith dies in New York at the age of 39.
Smith was apparently unaware that he had contracted the virus and had shown no symptoms.
Learn More.
Thinking he was suffering from an attack of shigella, a form of dysentery, acquired on a textile-buying trip to India, Smith admitted himself to the hospital, where tests showed he was HIV positive.
At the time of his death, Smith was regarded as one of the most successful African-American designers in the fashion industry. His company, WilliWear Limited, launched in 1976 and by 1986 was grossing over $25 million in sales.
“Smith was, in the truest sense of the word, a streetwear designer, long before anyone used the term,” writes Jenny Comita in W magazine. “Even as he was collaborating with some of the most avant-garde artists of the day and staging fashion shows that doubled as performances, he was taking his cues as a designer from the women he saw on the sidewalks of midtown.”
Smith was born in Philadelphia, the son of an ironworker and a homemaker. He studied drawing at Mastbaum technical school and, later, fashion illustration at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art.
His big break came through his grandmother Gladys, who worked as a housekeeper. One of her clients had a connection to the famed couturier Arnold Scaasi and secured an internship for Willi.
Smith’s first major role, in 1969, was as head designer of the sportswear label Digits, where he quickly made a name for himself with bright, bold prints; flowy high-waisted pants; and an ahead-of-its-time marketing campaign featuring women on the gritty streets of New York. Two years later, he became the youngest designer to be nominated for a Coty Award, then the fashion equivalent of an Oscar.
Smith designed the costumes for “Secret Pastures,” a 1984 work by dance pioneers Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane; Keith Haring created the sets. Smith also contributed to Spike Lee’s 1988 musical comedy-drama School Daze, making the gowns for the homecoming court.
Many of his friends wonder what would have happened if Smith had lived.
“We’ve been told that he wanted to move to India permanently, a place he visited constantly. He might have gone to Hollywood to produce films full-time after making a short film called Expedition.”
Smith’s legacy is the streetwear that lives on in menswear season after season.
U.K. Princess Extends Hand to Person Living With HIV
Princess Diana makes international headlines when she is photographed shaking the hand of an HIV-positive patient in a London hospital. She goes on to become a passionate advocate for people living with HIV/AIDS.
Learn More.
The 26-year-old Princess of Wales reportedly was living with the specter of AIDS every day. In the loneliness of her failing marriage to Prince Charles, gay men arere the bedrock of her private world: fashion designers, ballet dancers, art dealers and numerous members of the palace staff. They sympathize with her, escort her, lighten her load. It pains her to watch them sicken and die.
When London’s Middlesex Hospital invited Princess Diana to open the Broderip Ward, the U.K.’s first dedicated ward for AIDS and HIV-related diseases, she agrees to do it. She is intensely nervous, but she knows it is the chance to dispel the stigma surrounding the disease.
“With her instinctive understanding of the power of gesture, she resolved not only to open the new ward but to shake the hands of 12 male patients without gloves,” writes Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles.
In a time when fear and misinformation runs rampant surrounding the transmission of a disease widely associated with gay men, the simple act of shaking an ill patient’s hand was a headline-making moment that helped educate the public.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Princess Diana would go on to use her platform to bust myths about how HIV/AIDS could be contracted, and spends time with people affected by the virus around the world.
She would become an official patron for the National AIDs Trust, and spoke of the impact on mothers and children, further dispelling the myth that it was purely a problem for the gay community.
Even after her death, her legacy continues with her sons, who would continue to help fight the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDs. Prince Harry would take an HIV test on live TV to show how easy it is, and Prince William would appear on the cover of Attitude Magazine to discuss the mental health issues faced by victims of homophobia and transphobia.
April 28, 1987
Los Angeles County Creates Commission on AIDS
With the total number of confirmed AIDS cases in Los Angeles County reaching 2,965, the Board of Supervisors vote unanimously to create a 17-member LA County Commission on AIDS to advise on ways the county can combat the epidemic.
Learn More.
The new AIDS Commission would replace the three-year-old AIDS task force formed by Supervisor Ed Edelman and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. The Supervisors said they would appoint to the commission activists in the fight against AIDS as well as county officials.
The unanimous vote by the five-member LA County Board of Supervisors followed an April 14, 1987 editorial by the Los Angeles Timescalling for the supervisors to approve the proposal for a county AIDS commission.
“Such a commission could be of great assistance to the Board of Supervisors in the weeks ahead when major budget decisions and major policy shifts will be before the board,” wrote the LA Times editorial board. “And the commission could reassure the community that the AIDS problems in this region are being addressed.”
Supervisor Ed Edelman told the Los Angeles Times that the new commission would help to coordinate efforts by various county departments in the local effort to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. At the time, local efforts were concentrated in educational, mental health and hospice programs.
According to the LA Times, the total number of confirmed AIDS cases in Los Angeles County in May 1987 was 2,965, making the county the third most impacted region in the U.S. Only San Francisco and New York had more AIDS cases.
In its editorial, the LA Times criticized LA County for failing to organize “the basic services required to handle the rapidly rising caseload of AIDS patients.”
The LA Times pointed out that while in-patient care was available at some of the larger county facilities, there were virtually no home-care, day-care, nursing-facility or hospice programs offered by the county. As time ticked by of the lives of people living with AIDS, the county supervisors were withholding funds from critical programs until there was more state and federal money to supplement the county budget.
“With the advice of the task force, the AIDS Project Los Angeles and other professionals, the supervisors can quickly organize an effective commission to see that not another minute is wasted,” the LA Times wrote.
Rabbi Allen Freehling would be the first Chair of the AIDS Commission, and the appointed commissioners would include Rand Schrader, an openly gay Los Angeles Municipal Court judge who would serve as Chair of the Commission from 1989 to 1991.
April 29, 1987
Western Blot: FDA Releases Updated HIV Test
FDA approves a new, more specific test for HIV antibodies, the Western blot blood test kit.
Learn More.
For several years, the HIV-1 Western blot would be considered the “gold standard” for laboratory diagnosis of HIV-1 infection, but is no longer recommended. The two main reasons for this are the inability of the Western blot to detect acute infection and the potential to misclassify HIV-2 infection as an HIV-1 infection.
A report in Nature in June 1993 would conclude that researchers need to “reappraise” the use of the Western blot antibody tests as a diagnostic and epidemiological tool for HIV infection.
May 5, 1987
Jack Romann, Inspiration to Classical Musicians, Dies
Jack Romann, director of the concert and artist department of the Baldwin Piano Company, dies of AIDS-related illness at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City. He was 59
Learn More.
Romann’s stature among the top pianists in the U.S. warranted him coverage in The New York Times when he died, and years later would inspire composer John Corigliano to write symphonic pieces.
”Almost every talented pianist in America now has had an important slice of his life removed,” Charles Wadsworth, a pianist and the artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, told the NY Times. “When I played at the White House for President Kennedy, Jack came along to give me support and he turned pages for me. Then, on his own, he wrote a press release and sent it to the paper of my Georgia hometown. All of a sudden, I was somebody important there.’
Although Romann was a Juilliard-trained pianist, he never gave public performances and instead supported pianists who were performing for wide audiences.
”I cannot begin to tell you how important he was to me and almost any pianist I know,” pianist Santiago Rodriguez told the NY Times. ”He gave me tons of advice … I never met a man so ready to give.”
Another person who Romann left with a lasting impact was composer John Corigliano, who on March 15, 1990 would premiere his masterwork Symphony No. 1, the first major musical memorial to those who had died of AIDS.
Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, wrote that Symphony No. 1 “was and it remains the most formidable classical work written in response to the epidemic.”
For the symphony’s second movement, which Ross called “the dark heart of the symphony,” Corigliano drew on his memory of Romann and his AIDS dementia.
According to music critic Steve Smith, Corigliano “recasts” the original intention of the tarantella (a cure for spider-bite delirium) as “an analogue for AIDS dementia,” having a contrabassoon take a gloomy melody and then repeating it with the contrabass clarinet, tuba and ultimately trombone.
Paul Popham, founder and first president of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City, dies at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of AIDS-related illness at the age of 45.
Learn More.
Popham was a Bronze Star Medal-winning Vietnam veteran who had a successful career as a Wall Street banker. He was politically inactive until 1981, when he first read about the disease that later became known as AIDS.
In January 1982, Popham, along with Larry Kramer, Lawrence Mass, Nathan Fain, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White, founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), and Popham became the organization’s first president.
Popham’s leadership style was infused with charm and diplomacy, which some found to be an ideal approach in the new fight against AIDS. However, others thought Popham should have lead the organization with more urgency and ferocity. The latter camp included Larry Kramer, who thought Popham’s approach was overly accommodating and ineffective.
Tensions between Kramer and Popham led to Kramer leaving GMHC in 1983 and, later, their contentious relationship would be portrayed in Kramer’s play The Normal Heart, one of the first plays to address the AIDS crisis. Popham was the basis for the character of Bruce Niles.
In the program notes for one of GMHC’s earliest benefits, Paul Popham wrote, “I think the most impressive thing I’ve seen over the last year and a half is how affectionate men have grown. We are finding out who we are, what we can do under pressure. Although we’re paying a terrible price, we’re finding in ourselves much greater strength than we dreamed we had.”
Popham also helped found the AIDS Action Council, a lobbying organization in Washington, and was chairman of the group.
Popham was diagnosed with AIDS in February 1985. He remained active with GMHC until his illness became too severe.
In July 1986, Popham testified before Congress about allowing AIDS patients to receive drugs that were still undergoing clinical trials. This was less than a year before his death and he was clearly ill. However, he still spoke in his usual calm and resolute manner.
“As a person with AIDS, I am luckier than many in that I know resources that I can use,” he told members of Congress. “But there are many people who have AIDS that don’t have the advantage of coming with the knowledge that I have of where to go to get the resources they need. There is no place to go that is providing up-to-date information about the drug trials going on and how to get into these trials.”
May 9, 1987
Robert Jacobson, Editor of Opera News, Dies
Robert M. Jacobson, editor of Opera News magazine, dies of AIDS-related illness at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. He was 46.
Learn More.
Jacobson, who began as a critic for Musical America in 1963, was a prominent advocate of opera and the arts. His partner, Rocci Genova, told The New York Times that Jacobson also wrote for numerous publications, edited the program booklets for Lincoln Center in New York City, and annotated programs for CBS Records.
In 1974 he became editor of Opera News, and also edited its sister publication, Ballet News, from 1979 until it was discontinued in 1986.
In “AIDS and the Arts: Behind the Scenes of a Tragedy,” a December 1990 article by Sean Mitchell for the Los Angeles Times, Jacobson’s name would appear alongside seventeen other prominent people in the arts who died of AIDS.
“A disproportionate number of AIDS victims, it turned out, were poor and anonymous, but there were also a lot who acted, painted, sang, danced and in one way or another contributed to the public creative life of the nation,” wrote Mitchell.
The U.S. Public Health Service adds HIV as a “dangerous contagious disease” to its immigration and travel exclusion list. The HIV ban will not be lifted until 2010.
Learn More.
“It was not the discovery of HIV alone, but the economic and political climate of the 1980s that led to the introduction of the ban,” writes Dr. Susanna E. Winston and Dr. Curt G. Beckwith in AIDS Patient Care STDS.
In the early 1980s, a worldwide economic recession drove immigrants to enter the U.S., fueling American fears of foreigners taking jobs and becoming a burden on the health and welfare systems. This coincided with the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, with fear and misunderstanding about the disease feeding into the growing xenophobia.
At first, only individuals whose illness advanced to AIDS are excluded from U.S. travel (based on the argument that AIDS affects a person’s wage-earning capacity). But then, under pressure to demonstrate efforts to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic, President Reagan moves to require all immigrants be tested for HIV, and that HIV infection (with or without AIDS) be included as a disease of public health significance.
This adds HIV to the list of dangerous diseases that includes leprosy, tuberculosis, syphilis and gonorrhea.
The U.S. starts mandatory AIDS testing of the 500,000 applicants seeking permanent residence. The ban includes travellers from other countries who test positive for HIV.
The ramifications of the HIV immigration and travel ban would come to light both domestically and internationally with the case of Hans Paul Verhoef. While traveling to San Francisco to attend the 1989 National AIDS Forum, Verhoef, an HIV-infected Dutch citizen and rising chair of the Dutch HIV Foundation, would be detained and arrested when Immigration and Naturalization Service agents find AZT in his luggage.
Verhoef’s arrest sets off an outcry from the international AIDS community in objection of the ban, with protests and threats of boycotts of the two upcoming international conferences, planned for San Francisco (1990) and Boston (1992). For the 1990 International AIDS Conference (IAS), President George H.W. Bush issues an executive order temporarily waiving the ban for all attendees. But IAS organizers decide to hold no further conferences in the U.S. until the ban is revoked, and the 1992 IAS conference is relocated from Boston to Berlin.
The travel ad immigration ban would be lifted 22 years later, on January 4, 2010. A new federal rule under President Barack Obama’s administration would be heralded as a monumental achievement, accomplished through the hard work of advocates.
May 28, 1987
Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s Charles Ludlam Dies
Charles Ludlam, whose Ridiculous Theatrical Company had become one of New York City’s more popular attractions, dies in St. Vincent’s Hospital of AIDS-related illness at the age of 44.
Learn More.
An actor, writer and director, Ludlam was one of the more prolific artists on the off-Broadway scene. His productions in a small basement theater Greenwich Village included such parodies as Bluebeard, Galas (a spoof on operatic diva Maria Callas) and Reverse Psychology.
“He was a master of travesty, creating in a tiny grotto theater on Sheridan Square critically and popularly acclaimed parodies of such familiar genres as the dime novel (The Mystery of Irma Vep), film noir (The Artificial Jungle) and opera (Camille, Der Ring Gott Farblonjet),” Gerard wrote.
Ludlam’s productions received a Drama Desk award and six Obie awards. The Ridiculous Theatrical Company has toured extensively in the United States and Europe.
Recently, he was retained by producer Joseph Papp to direct the production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. However, the play was postponed when Ludlam was admitted to the hospital on April 30.
The most moving remembrance was offered by Everett Quinton, Ludlam’s longtime partner and his successor as artistic director of the company.
”I’ve never felt so alone in my life, but it’s going to be all right,” Quinton said. ”We’re going to continue to do wild theater and wonderful theater.”
President Reagan Makes His First Public Speech about AIDS
President Ronald Reagan makes his first public speech about AIDS at the American Foundation for AIDS Research Awards Dinner.
The epidemic is now six years old; 36,058 people have been diagnosed with the disease and 20,849 have died.
Learn More.
amFAR event attendees “boo” Reagan when he says he asked the Department of Health and Human Services “to add the AIDS virus to the list of contagious diseases for which immigrants and aliens seeking permanent residence in the United States can be denied entry.”
Attendees also shout out their opposition when the president says he is ordering testing for active members of the military, those seeking care at veterans’ hospitals, applicants for marriage licenses, and federal prisoners.
Among the event attendees are amfAR Founder and National Chairperson Elizabeth Taylor and amfAR President Dr. Mervyn Silverman.
After Reagan speaks, Taylor tries to move ruffled feathers by telling the audience, “While there are differences of opinion on AIDS testing,” Reagan’s remarks are ”basically in concurrence with what we all hope and pray for,” namely a cure for the disease.
AmfAR advocates for voluntary, confidential testing accompanied by intense counseling, adds Dr. Silverman.
After the event, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop said he ”found no fault with the speech” and that he considered it reasonable to test Federal prisoners and immigrants and to offer the test to marriage applicants. He also said he was embarrassed by the reaction of some in the audience.
“I never heard anyone boo the President before,” Dr. Koop said.
June 24, 1987
President Reagan Creates Commission on AIDS
President Reagan signs an Executive Order creating the first Presidential Commission on AIDS.
Learn More.
Two days later, Reagan would appoint Dr. W. Eugene Mayberry, CEO of the Mayo Clinic, to chair the commission. Jeff Levi, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force would object to the appointment of someone with no experience with the disease, but others praise Mayberry’s experience in both medical research and clinical services.
The president also appointed the following people to the Commission:
Dr. Colleen Conway-Welch, dean of nursing at Vanderbilt University
John J. Creedon, CEO of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
Dr. Theresa L. Crenshaw, a sex educator and opponent of condoms as a means of preventing the spread of HIV
Richard M. DeVos, president of Amway
Dr. Burton J. Lee III, a physician at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Dr. Frank Lilly, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Lilly served on the board of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and is “one of the first openly gay Presidential appointees”
Dr. Woodrow A. Myers Jr., an African American, the health commissioner of Indiana, and president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers
Cardinal John O’Connor, an opponant of including instruction about condoms in AIDS education programs in schools
Penny Pullen, an Illinois legislator. advocate of mandatory premarital HIV testing who would go on to found the conservative Christian organization Illinois Family Institute
Corinna “Cory” SerVaas, editor of the Saturday Evening Post
Dr. William B. Walsh, president of Project HOPE, a medical relief organization
James D. Watkins, a retired admiral
Dr. Lilly of the GMHC is considered to be the most controversial appointment, opposed by conservaties including Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-New Hampshire).
“The President should strive at all costs to avoid sending the message to society – especially to impressionable youth – that homosexuality is simply an alternative lifestyle,” Sen. Humphrey tells The New York Times.
At the commission’s first meeting, Lilly finds himself seated next to Cardinal O’Connor, and they would be observed “chatting cordially.”
June 27, 1987
Hustler Publisher Althea Flynt Dies
Wife of Larry Flynt and publisher of Hustler magazine, Althea Flynt drowns in a bathtub in her Bel-Air mansion in Los Angeles at the age of 33. Her husband says she was diagnosed with AIDS four years ago and likely fell asleep while bathing.
Learn More.
Althea is Larry Flynt’s fourth wife, and because she married him in 1976, she is the only partner who joins him in his rise to celebrity. She would meet Flynt in Ohio, while working in one of his clubs as a go-go dancer.
Born in poverty in a Kentucky mining town, Althea Flynt was orphaned at eight years old, when her father murdered her mother and her grandfather and her mother’s best friend, and then killed himself. Flynt recounted her childhood ordeal in a 1978 interview with New York magazine:
“They put you in a bare room with dirty floors and a single mattress that was stained and filthy and stank,” she said. “I still remember the smell. They put a pot and a roll of toilet paper in the room. Then they locked you in.”
In the late 1960s, she and Larry Flynt started a relationship that would last until the rest of her life. As partner in her husband’s publishing business, she would be known to come to work in outrageous attire, including in leather dog collars and bangled chains that ran from her ear to her nostril.
As documented on video from Flynt’s library, Althea’s style was complex and highly unusual, particularly once she came into money and moved to Los Angeles. Her attraction to drug culture, Sunset Strip clubs and punk rock led her to patronize Hollywood shops like North Beach Leather and Trashy Lingerie.
In March 1978, her husband would be shot by a religious extremist, leaving him paralyzed and in pain, and she would remain with him, for better and for worse.
In a 1983 magazine article by the Washington writer Rudy Maxa, the Flynts would descibe how Larry tried to manage the pain with methadone, marijuana, cocaine, sleeping pills, morphine, and Dilaudid. Althea would experiment with drugs with her husband, and soon both would become addicted to narcotics.
She would be diagnosed with HIV in 1983, reportedly from a blood transfusion while undergoing a hysterectomy. Larry Flynt explained that Althea “always used clean needles when using drugs.”
The cause of Althea’s death is a perscription drug overdose-induced drowning, according to the coronor’s report. Her husband, however, states that she was in the advanced stages of AIDS and would have died within that year, regardless.
Flynt’s body is buried in Saylersville, Ky., where her husband keeps a family burial plot.
‘Persons Living With AIDS’ are Named Grand Marshal of Houston Pride
Houston Pride honors persons living with AIDS as the Grand Marshal for the Pride Parade.
Learn More.
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.
July 2, 1987
Broadway Director Michael Bennett Dies
Director and choreographer Michael Bennett, the mastermind behind A Chorus Line, dies at his home in Tucson, Arizona at the age of 44.
Learn More.
Bennett was the ultimate Broadway ″gypsy,″ a dancer in the chorus who went on to become a successful choreographer, director and producer, associated with such hit shows as Promises, Promises; Company; Follies; Dreamgirls; and of course, A Chorus Line.
″I went from dancer to choreographer to director to producer to sometime writer,″ he once said. ″But I never had to deviate from my ambition, which was to work in theater.″
Born Michael Bennett DiFiglia in Buffalo, New York, Bennett started dance lessons as the age of 3. As a teen-ager, Bennett studied dance during the summer in New York with Aubrey Hitchins, Matt Maddox and others.
He dropped out of high school at age 16 to perform in a European tour of West Side Story, directed by Jerome Robbins, one of Bennett’s dance idols. Upon his return to New York, he found work dancing in several Broadway shows, as well as TV shows like The Dean Martin Show.
Bennett made his debut as a choreographer in 1966 with A Joyful Noise. Two years later, he had his first Broadway success with the choreography for Promises, Promises, the Burt Bacharach-Hal David musical based on the film The Apartment. This was quickly followed by more hits: Coco starring Katharine Hepburn, and then Stephen Sondheim’s Company.
In 1971, he both choreographed and co-directed Follies, another Sondheim show, and won Tony Awards in both categories. In 1975, he directed, choreographed, and wrote A Chorus Line, which became the longest running musical on Broadway up to that time.
Compared with his contemporary Bob Fosse, Bennett did not have an immediately recognizable choreographic style, according to Masterworks Broadway’s tribute to Bennett.
“Like Jerome Robbins, whom he endeavored to emulate, he strove for unity of style within each separate work, shaped by the story and the characters in it,” Masterworks’ tribute states. “Thus the movement might be jazzy or balletic, romantic or angular, athletic or even a little bumbling, depending on the circumstances. Even in A Chorus Line, the dancers’ execution becomes progressively more polished as the ‘show within the show’ crystallizes.”
Michael Riedel, theater columnist for the New York Post, said A Chorus Line came at a privotal time for Broadway.
“By the mid-1970s Broadway was starting to flounder and so was the city,” Riedel said. “The 1960s rock revolution had changed everything, and new musicals were mostly doing mediocre business or they simply tanked. Times Square had become the preserve of pimps and prostitutes and drug-pushers.”
When A Chorus Line moved to Broadway from its original downtown location of the Joseph Papp Theater, many of the surrounding theaters were dark. But that soon changed.
“Somehow it caught the moment, and when it transferred to the Shubert Theatre on Broadway people started to flock back to Times Square,” said Riedel. “It was the Hamilton of its day. I don’t think any show has ever been so vital to the New York economy.”
In 1986, Bennett determined he was too sick to work, sold his New York property, and moved to Tucson, where he stayed until his death.
Donna McKechnie, an original star of A Chorus Line who was briefly married to Bennett, thinks that if he survived, he could have gone on to even greater things.
“But I learned on Chorus Line to relish the moment you’re in as a performer, because it can end any moment – especially for a dancer,” McKechnie said.
Bennett’s striking panel was among the first to be included in the original display of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Dancer Sean O’Neill, who performed with the Pacific Ballet and also edited the San Francisco Ballet program, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 29.
July 11, 1987
Gay Games Founder Tom Waddell Dies
Dr. Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Games, dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 49.
Learn More.
Waddell was a superior athlete, good enough to take sixth in the world in the decathlon in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, writes Mart Dobrow of ESPN. He was a paratrooper in the Army, and a doctor with a sense of adventure — working in Africa on patients with tropical diseases and becoming the physician for the Saudi Arabian Olympic team in 1976.
“To Waddell, the symbolism of the Games spoke to his highest ideals: the five interlocking rings, the parade of nations, the torch being lit,” writes Dobrow. “In some ways, this felt like sports at its most pure. It brought people of the world together.”
After his athletic career, Waddell would worked for years as a medical consultant for Whittaker Corp., enjoying the opulence of the Saudi royal family in Riyadh. When he wasn’t in the Middle East, he settled in San Francisco.
There, in the hub of American gay life, Waddell embraced the bacchanal fully, its drug use and promiscuity, before finding what he hoped was true and lasting love with Charles Deaton, a 50-year-old former CIA operative.
Then Waddell had a grand vision; it started out as the “Gay Olympic Games.” Waddell was aware that for many gay people, sports had meant a door slamming shut. His goal was to open the door of completitive sports wide open to the LGBTQ community.
He modeled the Gay Olympic Games after what he considered to be the true principles of the Olympics: equality, fairness, human dignity. Except that the U.S. Olympic Committee didn’t see it that way.
Just 19 days before the games were to begin, the USOC persuaded a federal court to issue an injunction prohibiting Waddell and his group, San Francisco Arts & Athletics, from using the word “Olympic” because of copyright infringement.
Waddell was incredulous and wounded to the core. He pointed out that in the past there had been no opposition to multiple other uses of the term (e.g., the Special Olympics).
With no legal recourse, Waddell and the SFAA scrambled to remove the offending word from a slew of merchandise and promotional material. The hastily rechristened “Gay Games” played out nevertheless in the summer of 1982 with some 1,300 athletes from 12 countries participating.
By the next summer, as Gay Games 2 came to a now-besieged San Francisco, Waddell knew his days were numbered. He checked himself out of the hospital, marched in the opening ceremonies, and delivered a stirring opening address as part of the Games, which attracted some 3,500 athletes from 17 countries.
In one final feat of athletic strength, Waddell managed to win the gold medal in the javelin. Within a year, he was gone.
Today, the Gay Games live on and are help in locations all around the world, including Amsterdam, Sydney, Paris and Hong Kong. Since 1986, The Federation of Gay Games Scholarship Fund has awarded more than 1,000 scholarships to underfunded LGBTQ+ individuals from 70 countries around the world, where the daily struggle for equality is harsh and often dangerous.
Tom Waddell’s core principles of Participation, Inclusion, and Personal Best continue to bring thousands of athletes together to compete.
Every four years in conjuntion with the Gay Games, the Tom Waddell Award is presented to a person or organization involved in the Gay Games that embodies the standards of commitment, selflessness, and love of humanity, and inspires pride through leadership and excellence in sports, culture, or volunteerism.
Group Launches to Help API People Living with HIV/AIDS
Five members of the Los Angeles-based Asian Pacific Lesbian and Gays (APLG) start a new group within their organization to address healthcare, education and social support needs of members in their community affected by HIV.
Learn More.
The launch of the APLG AIDS Intervention Team was a response by Dean Goishi, Douglas Chin, Tak Yamamoto, Roy Kawasaki, and Herb Dreiwitz after they started to see friends struggle with HIV at a time when no government funding existed to address the crisis within their community.
In 1989, APLG AIT would become the first LGBTQ+ organization to join the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council and would help the council establish its HIV/AIDS committee.
The same year, APLG AIT would receive a California Community Foundation grant to develop HIV education materials in seven API languages. The committee’s first education campaign, “Love Your Asian Body,” would be launched in and it broke through the stigma and shame associated with HIV and AIDS to promote HIV testing as a form of self-care.
Due to the demand in the API community for HIV education, the committee would break off and form its own organization called the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT) in 1991. With Goishi as the Founding Director, APAIT fought against ignorance, racism, and homophobia to break the silence about HIV/AIDS in the Asian community.
“It was a role that … if I didn’t step up, nobody else would, and we would have been left out and we would have been left behind in services, funds and so forth,” said Goishi in 2023 for Okaeri Voices, an oral history project featuring LGBTQ+ Japanese Americans.
July 29, 1987
Gay Cinema Pioneer Arthur J. Bressan Jr. Dies
Arthur J. Bressan Jr., best known for his devastating 1985 AIDS drama Buddies, dies of AIDS-related illness in New York City at the age of 44.
Learn More.
A pioneer of independent gay cinema in the 1970s and ’80s, Bressan is best known for his 1985 drama Buddies, the first feature film about the AIDS pandemic. He also directed the largely influential Gay USA, the first documentary by and about LGBT people, and the feature film Abuse (1983).
“If you want to submit one director as the auteur for the post-Stonewall, pre-New Queer Cinema era of Gay Liberation, Arthur J. Bressan Jr. is that director,” writes film critic Caden Mark Gardner.
Bressan’s first credited film work is that of a documentary short called Coming Out, about the first official San Francisco Pride march in 1972. Shot in 16mm and in color, it offers a snapshot of many people who made the pilgrimage to San Francisco.
Bressan would expand this cinematic approach for his 1978 feature-length documentary, Gay USA, made during the National Gay Freedom marches across the country in 1977, the year Harvey Milk became America’s first openly gay elected official.
“Many of the interviewers and testimonies in Gay USA are not just talking about the pleasantness of seeing themselves and being out at this Pride parade, but are speaking with righteous indignation about homophobic violence and systemic homophobia,” Gardner writes.
Bressan’s 1983 film Abuse, a drama with an intensely provocative portrayal of child abuse, is hailed by film critic Rex Reed as “a film of astonishing power and emotional impact.”
“Artie loved butch men and women, drag queens, black, brown and white,” writes Emmy Award-winning director Greta Schiller. “Artie was exceptional in that he loved women. He had none of the misogyny that was (and still is) rampant in our culture, even in the LGBT community. He knew who and what he was, and he was not threatened by women.”
Schiller, who met Bressan in 1983 through activist Vito Russo at a screening of Abuse, said she went to the event “angry that it was a film about a man in authority sleeping with an abused teen.”
After watching the film, she emerged “with my mind blown by the complexity of what I’d seen.”
Russo convinced Schiller to share her reaction to Abuse with Bressan.
“I told him it was a brilliant film that made me realize not all older men who fall in love with a younger man are predators,” she recalled. “The story and acting made me think of Italian postwar neorealist films.”
Schiller says that when Bressan became sick, he was determined to complete Buddies.
“He cut the film on a flatbed in his tiny apartment. He poured his heart and soul into making one last film,” she writes. “I lived a few blocks away from him [in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City], and I would come get him for a walk around the block. Soon, he could only make it to the corner of 18th Street and 8th Avenue, a block from his home. He would gaze at the high-school boys and talk about the ones he fancied, and how those who were gay would have a better, freer life.”
About 10 years after Bressan’s death, his sister Roe Bressan and LGBT film historian Jenni Olson would launch The Bressan Project to preserve and promote Bressan’s films.
Cost of Ongoing AIDS Treatment Estimated at $50 Billion
A task force of the Society of Actuaries issues a report claiming that the cost of AIDS to insurance companies could exceed $50 billion by the year 2000.
Learn More.
The study, commissioned by the 10,000-member Chicago-based organization, also predicts that future life insurance policies could add $30 billion to $60 billion to the total, depending on whether applicants are screened for the AIDS virus.
The study bases its findings on statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, which suggests that 15% of those infected with the AIDS virus develop the fatal disease after five years and up to 36% are stricken after seven years.
The CDC reported there were 8,000 AIDS deaths in 1986, and is projecting that the number to rise to 54,000 by 1991.
The authors of the study, who are actuaries for the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America, contend that based on the Federal projections, AIDS claims are expected to go up by a factor of 10 by the 1990s.
August 5, 1987
Florida Schools Ordered to Enroll HIV-Positive Brothers
A federal judge orders the DeSoto County School Board in Florida to enroll HIV-positive brothers Ricky, Robert, and Randy Ray. The school board had refused to allow the three boys to attend the district’s schools in their hometown of Arcadia, Florida.
Learn More.
After the court ruling, some town residents would refuse to allow their children to attend school, many would anonymously call the Ray home with threatening messages, and ultimately someone would set fire to the Ray house, destroying it and forcing them to move.
“Arcadia is no longer our home,” their father, Clifford Ray, tells the press the day after the fire. “That much was made clear to us last night.”
Ricky, Robert and Randy, who were 10, 9 and 8 at the time, were all born with hemophilia, a condition that required them to receive blood transfusions. Ricky would go on to become an activist in the fight against AIDS. President Bill Clinton reaches out to him and thanks him for his work raising awareness about HIV/AIDS.
The young teenager would allow camera crews to document his declining health, saying he wanted Americans to see what AIDS did to people. Ricky Ray would die in 1992 at age 15.
Robert would die of AIDS-related causes in 2000 at the age of 22. Shortly thereafter, their father would attempt suicide but would survive. Randy Ray would marry in 2001 and settle in Orlando, Florida, successfully managing his HIV through medication.
August 8, 1987
Dancer-Choreographer Jorge Samaniego Dies
Jorge Samaniego, a Cuban-born dancer who performed with the New York City Opera Ballet and on Broadway, dies of AIDS-related illness at County-University of Southern California Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 40 years old.
Learn More.
Samaniego started and ended his dance career in Los Angeles. He studied at the American School of Dance in Hollywood before moving to New York to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera Ballet. In 1977 in NY, he established his own dance company, the Samaniego Dance Gallery.
Samaniego was ballet master and choreographed for the Milwaukee Ballet before joining the Des Moines Ballet in 1978 as its Artistic Director. The company also brought in Kenneth MacDonald as Associate Artistic Director. The two men, professional and personal partners, were together for 14 years until Samaniego’s death.
In 1981 he choreographed a Public Broadcasting Service production of Romeo and Juliet, in which he played the role of Mercutio. Samaniego also performed with the Western Ballet and Netherlands Dance Theater.
Samaniego returned to Los Angeles in 1982. He reestablished his Dance Gallery, which performed regularly at the Assistance League Playhouse and other LA venues.
Dance Magazine reported that “His annual staging of A Christmas Carol, Peter and the Wolf, and The Nutcracker were holiday favorites in Southern California.”
On Samaniego’s AIDS quilt, MacDonald wrote: “To Jorge Samaniego, my tears, my love, Kenneth.” MacDonald would die from HIV/AIDS complications eight years later, in 1995.
Samaniego and MacDonald are both memorialized in the project Dancers We Lost: Honoring Performers Lost to HIV/AIDS.
The Times estimated the number of people infected with the AIDS virus worldwide as somewhere between 5 million and 10 million.
The report provided the following estimates for “individuals considered AIDS virus carriers”:
United States 1-2 million
Brazil up to 238,000
France 175,000-200,000
Italy more than 100,000
Haiti 100,000
West Germany up to 100,000
Canada 50,000
England 30,000-50,000
Switzerland 20,000
Mexico 25,000-50,000
Netherlands 10,000-20,000
Denmark 10,000-15,000
Sweden 9,000-11,000
Belgium 5,000-10,000
Japan 2,500-10,000
Greece 5,000-7,000
Israel 1,000-2,000
About two months later, on October 13, 1987, The New York Times would publish editorial writer Phillip Boffey’s examination of the nation’s initial reponse to the AIDS crisis. He would dedicate much of his article to addressing the charges laid out by Randy Shilts, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, in his just-released book And the Band Played On: People, Politics and the AIDS Epidemic.
As if to continue the conversation, Los Angeles Times reporter David Shaw would suggest in December 1987 that the press and other outlets of journalism played an outsized role in the failure of the U.S. to appropriately address the early AIDS crisis.
“Most critics say the biggest shortcoming of the press on the AIDS story, especially in the first few years, was not medical/scientific coverage but political coverage; the press didn’t aggressively pursue the public policy and funding aspects of the story,” Shaw writes.
He goes on to point out that during the early years, the press reported various Reagan Administration statements about AIDS largely without question or investigation. This included the administration’s statement that the nation’s blood supply was “100% safe” at a time when HIV-tainted blood was being circulated to hospitals and clinics in many cities.
The media also reported the administration’s promise to start trials of an AIDS vaccine within two years, but failed to hold it to account when the first clinical tests did not start for another three years. (Decades later, a successful vaccine still has not been developed.)
Shaw cites the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the very few papers to report on federal AIDS policy in the early years, largely due to the dedication of reporter Randy Shilts. Most major media outlets did not dedicate a full-time reporter to cover AIDS until about 1987.
The media “went to sleep on the story,” Shilts told Shaw. “I’m not God’s gift to journalism. I’m a good reporter, but I didn’t get [stories] because I’m a brilliant reporter. I just did … the work that any reporter could have done.”
August 14, 1987
CDC Updates Guidelines for Counseling & Antibody Testing
The CDC releases guidelines for public health agencies to help them reduce fear and concerns as they implement HIV testing programs. The report encourges agencies to target outreach to at-risk populations and strengthen policies for patient confidentiality.
Per the guidelines, health agencies should endeavor to provide ready, confidential access to HIV testing to those most at risk of HIV infection.
As examples, the report cites programs offering counseling and testing to gay men, IV-drug users, persons with hemophilia, the sexual and/or needle-sharing partners of these persons, and patients of sexually transmitted disease clinics.
The report also addresses the issue of false-positive HIV test results and its impact, stating that most false-positives are due to human error and more precautions should be used by medical personnel to ensure the accuracy of results.
“All laboratories should anticipate the need for assuring quality performance of tests for HIV antibody by training personnel, establishing quality controls, and participating in performance evaluation systems,” the report advises.
August 18, 1987
Human Testing of HIV Vaccine Begins
FDA sanctions the first human testing of a candidate vaccine against HIV. While the clinical trials do not lead to a vaccine, the FDA’s approval marks an important milestone in the development of HIV/AIDS treatment options.
Learn More.
Manufactured by MicroGeneSys of West Haven, Conn., the vaccine would move forward to clinical trials supervised by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Just months ago, NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the FDA was considering several candidate vaccines and that human trials could begin in 1987.
In early 1993, MicroGeneSys would pull the vaccine, called VaxSyn, from National Institutes of Health trials because the pharmaceutical company could not agree with the NIH over the dosing schedule. The vaccine has already been selected for inclusion in a $20 million U.S. army trial program.
Today, there is no vaccine available to prevent HIV infection or treat those who have it.
However, scientists are still working to develop one. NIH is investing in multiple approaches to prevent HIV, including a safe and effective preventive HIV vaccine. These research efforts include two late-stage, multinational vaccine clinical trials called Imbokodo and Mosaico.
August 21, 1987
Universal Precautions Introduced to Medical Environment
CDC updates its recommendations for the prevention of HIV transmission in healthcare settings, calling for medical workers to practice universal precautions.
Learn More.
The report emphasizes the need for healthcare workers to consider all patients as potentially infected with HIV and/or other blood-borne pathogens and to adhere rigorously to infection-control precautions for minimizing the risk of exposure to blood and body fluids of all patients.
The CDC defines healthcare workers as “persons, including students and trainees, whose activities involve contact with patients or with blood or other body fluids from patients in a healthcare setting.”
Universal precautions are listed in the report, along with precautions for invasive procedures, dentistry, dialysis, laboratory procedures, and autopsies and mortuary work.
August 28, 1987
Home of Three HIV+ Boys is Burned Down
The home of the Ray family is burned down a week after the Rays win a $1.1 million settlement and the legal right to enroll in the local elementary school their three HIV-positive boys.
Learn More.
The Ray brothers — Ricky, Robert, and Randy — were hemophiliacs who contracted HIV from blood transfusions when they were less than 8 years old. Louise and Clifford Ray were told by local school officials that they could not send their boys to school.
When the Rays challenged this decision, unfounded fears about HIV spread throughout their community in Arcadia, Florida, and the family received death threats and was ostracized by members of their church.
After the arson of their home, the Ray family settled in nearby Sarasota, where the brothers attended the local elementary school in spite of opposition from groups like Citizens Against AIDS.
Ricky Ray became an activist in the fight against AIDS. In 1992, he allowed camera crews to document his declining health and stated he wanted America to see what AIDS did to people. President Bill Clinton spoke to him and thanked him for his work raising awareness on AIDS. Ricky Ray died in 1992 at age 15. Prior to his death, he made headlines by planning to marry his 17-year-old girlfriend, but a judge blocked the wedding because of his age.
Robert died of AIDS-related causes in 2000 at the age of 22. Randy Ray married in 2001 and lives in Orlando, Florida. He manages his HIV through medication.
September 26, 1987
New York City ‘Paradise’ Ends
With owner Michael Brody dying of AIDS-related illness, the influential NYC dance club Paradise Garage closes.
Learn More.
Paradise Garage was a focal point of the downtown Manhattan gay disco scene in the 1970s and ’80s. It was a cavernous members-only nightclub with a 25,000-square-foot dance floor, powerful sound system, and a DJ who would become world-famous.
Hundreds of live acts also performed at the club, including Madonna, Tim Curry, Whitney Houston, Grace Jones, Diana Ross, Sylvester, Jody Watley, and salsa pioneer Willie Colón.
The club, located at 84 King Street in SoHo, derived its name from its former life as a parking garage, according to Douglas Martin of The New York Times.
A departure from the glitter and glamor of nightclubs like Studio 54, the minimalist Garage drew lines around the block that led up the ramp to the entrance. The main room was simply but effectively designed around the sound system and a cushioned dance floor.
Paradise Garage was the love child of record executive Mel Cheren and impresario Michael Brody. With a capacity of 1,400, the club was the place to go to dance.
“People didn’t come to network or get laid. Booze wasn’t sold, drug use was discrete … From midnight until 10 a.m. every Friday and Saturday you could shake your butt and not get harassed by chemically-altered assholes,” wrote Carl Brown in his tribute to the club. “To the Blacks, Latins, and Gays who went there each weekend, the Garage was more than sanctuary. It was church.”
Synonymous with Paradise Garage was its resident DJ, Larry Levan.
“For 10 years from 1977 to 1987, Levan was the star attraction at New York’s legendary Paradise Garage, writing himself into clubbing lore with swashbuckling DJ sets that took in minimal underground disco, funky rock, dub and synth-pop, which foreshadowed the house music revolution,” Sam Richards wrote in The Guardian in 2016. “At the same time, his uncanny ability to mix and tweak records for maximum emotional impact would regularly send his devoted congregation into raptures.”
Levan revolutionized the art of DJing by mixing tracks to create the dance sounds he wanted to produce for his fans, Richards said. Club members, who couldn’t get enough of Levan’s sets, danced until daybreak.
“Safer than the sex they were often afraid to have, they could move, sweat, laugh, cry, relinquish, replenish and take a trip with the pulsating beat of the club as soundtrack,” wrote Johnnie Ray Kornegay III in his article “Black Gay Men of the AIDS Generation Invented Your Party” in The Reckoning.
Michael Brody, the club’s owner, died of AIDS-related illness in December 1987, just a few months after closing the Garage.
Levan, who was HIV-positive, died five years later, on November 8, 1992, of heart failure caused by endocarditis at the age of 38. He was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame in 2004 for his outstanding achievement as a DJ. In 2014, a petition was started to rename King Street, the site of the former Paradise Garage, “Larry Levan Way.”
In 2018, the building that housed the former club was demolished to make room for luxury condominiums, according to the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.
September 27, 1987
Seattle Holds its First AIDS Walk-a-thon
In an event organized by the Northwest AIDS Foundation. more than 2,000 people march 6.2 miles in Seattle to raise money for AIDS treatment and research.
Learn More.
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.
September 30, 1987
Geoffrey Bowers, Plaintiff in Landmark Discrimination Case, Dies
Geoffrey Bowers, the plaintiff in one of the first HIV/AIDS discrimination cases to go to public hearing, dies of AIDS-related illness in New York City. He was 33.
Learn More.
Geoffrey Bowers would not live to hear that the court had ruled in his favor.
In early 1987, Bowers filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights, alleging that the international law firm Baker & McKenzie fired him in 1986 because he was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma and AIDS, according to the American Association for Justice.
During the court proceedings, Bowers testified that the firm terminated his employment with little warning. He said his firing occurred shortly after dark purplish lesions from Kaposi’s sarcoma, a symptom of AIDS, began to spread over his face.
In response, Baker & McKenzie arranged for colleagues to testify they had not known that Bowers was sick and that they thought the KS marks were “bruises or bicycle scrapes.”
In the mid 1970s, Bowers attended Brown University, and received a Bachelor’s degree in political science. He also learned to speak Italian, German, French, Dutch and Spanish. After a few years working as a television news reporter and factory worker, he enrolled in Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
To support himself through law school, he held several part-time jobs and also earned a position on the Cardozo Law Review. After receiving his Juris Doctor and passing the Bar exam in 1982, he joined Phillips, Nizer, et al. as an associate, and then in August 1984, be became a litigation associate with Baker & McKenzie.
Bowers was diagnosed with AIDS in April 1986.
Jay L. Katz, a Cardozo classmate who went with him to get the test results, told The New York Times: “But he dealt with that. He continued work and he continued with his life.”
The visible signs of Kaposi’s sarcoma were appearing on Bowers’ face, starting with a dark spot under the pale white skin of his chin, Katz said.
The following month, Bowers received a satisfactory evaluation from his supervisors at Baker & McKenzie. However, in July 1986, the firm moved to fire him, and went outside the normal termination procedures to do so.
Bowers told Lynne Weikart, the Executive Deputy Human Rights Commissioner overseeing his case: “In light of the fact that I was dealing with my AIDS and my Kaposi’s sarcoma, I merely felt as though they had taken the last thing in the world that meant anything to me.”
Hearings on the case were held between July 1987 and June 1989. Bowers asked two friends from Cardozo — Robert Balsam and Daniel Felber — to represent him. After Bowers died, Balsam and Felber would continue with the case to its conclusion.
Commissioner Weikart would rule in Bowers’ favor with a record-breaking award — $500,000 in compensatory damages for emotional distress, pain, suffering, and humiliation, plus the back pay he would have earned had he remained employed. In his will, Bowers named his mother as beneficiary.
The commissioner wrote that the firm’s claim of not recognizing the lesions was “unbelievable” and the criticism of Bowers’s performance was unsubstantiated.
“They took from [Bowers] the one thing that kept his spirits high in spite of impending death,” Weikart wrote. “[He] no longer had the opportunity to prove that he could be a competent attorney despite suffering from AIDS.”
The court ruling brought AIDS discrimination to the public eye and established a favorable legal precedent.
In 1994, Geoffrey Bowers would be in the news again, when the trustees of his estate filed suit against the makers of the movie Philadelphia, alleging that the film used Bowers’ story without providing credit or compensation. In 1996, Tristar Pictures would settle with the Bowers estate and issue a statement saying the film “was inspired in part” by Bowers’ story, according to The New York Times.
September 30, 1987
HIV/AIDS PSAs Pop Up in America
TheCDC launches its PSA campaign, America Responds to AIDS, to kick off October as the newly designated AIDS Awareness Month.
Learn More.
Reaching millions, the campaign is the first to be produced on the subject of AIDS prevention, and becomes a central prong in the “everyone is at risk” strategy of AIDS prevention. From 1987 to 1996, the America Responds to AIDS campaign reaches a wide range of audiences variously defined by identity or behavior, from heterosexual single mothers, to teenagers of all races, to young adult African Americans, to people who live in rural areas.
The five-phase campaign releases materials to the general public in various mediums, including a national mailer. The themes of the five phases were:
General Awareness: Humanizing AIDS, October 1987
Understanding AIDS, the national mailout, April 1988
Women at Risk/Multiple Partner, Sexually Active Adults, October 1988
Parents and Youth, May 1989, and
Preventing HIV Infection and AIDS: Taking The Next Steps, July 1990
The campaign suggests that the best way to respond to HIV/AIDS is to engage in honest conversations about risk behaviors, including the potential consequences of multiple partners, unprotected sex, intravenous drug use, or any activities that compromise the ability to make a sound, safe judgment.
Not all applaud the effort. Service providers working with groups with a high incidence of HIV/AIDS (most notably young men who have sex with men and intravenous drug users) see the campaign as ignoring the particular needs of these communities in favor of supporting low-risk individuals.
While the CDC claims to be engaging with all Americans, critics argued that the campaign failed to provide adequate outreach and education to those who needed it most.
October 1987
Most Americans Cite AIDS as World’s Most Urgent Health Issue
A Gallup poll finds that 68% of those polled considered AIDS to be “the most urgent health problem facing the world.”
Learn More.
By the time Gallup would field its next survey in 1990, the U.S. Congress would be poised to pass the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, and the share of the public naming AIDS as a top problem would fall to 49%.
In the 1990’s, a decade that saw major advances in HIV treatment including the development of effective combination anti-retroviral therapy, the public would continue to focus on other issues healthcare facing the counties around the world. By 2009, the proportion polled who named AIDS as the top health problem would fall to single digits.
However, in the coming years, Black Americans would be prevalent among those naming HIV as the most urgent health problem.
October 9, 1987
UK Prime Minister Thatcher Gives Anti-Gay Speech at Convention
Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of the United Kingdom, sums up her party’s dark views toward the LGBT community in an anti-gay speech, garnering her thundrous applaus at the 1987 Conservative Party conference.
Learn More.
From her convention podium, Thatcher declared: “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay, ” she said. “All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life. Yes, cheated.”
In less than a year later, Thatcher would usher in the passage of Clause 28, anti-gay legislation to stop all discussion of homosexuality in British schools. An amendment to the 1988 Local Government Act, Section 28 would effectively ban local authorities and schools from “promoting” homosexuality. Government funds could no longer go toward of books, plays, leaflets, films, or other materials showing same-sex relationships, while teachers weren’t allowed to teach about gay relationships in schools.
In the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, the United Kingdom in the 1980s was a place of renewed LGBT activism and a forward movement toward equal rights. New progressive legislation opened the door for the Greater London Council to fund LGBT groups, and some local authorities in London and Manchester began to employ officers to counter homophobia.
There were also alliances between LGBT organizations and labor unions, such as the one between the mineworkers union and a lesbian-gay support group.And in 1985, Margaret Roff became the mayor of Manchester, making her the first openly lesbian woman to hold such a post in the UK.
But all this progress was made while the UK media was using the outbreak of AIDS/HIV to demonize gay and bisexual men. Thatcher and her Conservative Party saw this as an opportunity to activate their base and even win some votes from “the Labour left.”
At the start of her third term as prime minister, Thatcher gave the speech that made her intentions clear, in front of the audience she knew would praise her pronouncements.
October 11, 1987
AIDS Memorial Quilt Displayed on National Mall in DC
The AIDS Memorial Quilt goes on display for the first time on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The display features almost 2,000 panels measuring 3’ x 6’.
Half a million people gathered on the National Mall during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, and listened to the reading of each name represented by a panel.
As the quilt moved from city to city, hundreds of panels were added in each location until the quilt returned to San Francisco at triple its original size, with more than 6,000 panels. More than 9,000 volunteers across the country assisted the seven-person traveling crew for the quilt exhibition. The tour raised nearly $500,000 for hundreds of AIDS service organizations.
October 11, 1987
Helms Amendment Imposes Restrictions on AIDS Education
In a 94-2 vote, the U.S. Senate adopts the Helms Amendment, which requires federally financed educational materials about AIDS to stress sexual abstinence and forbids any material that “promotes” homosexuality or drug use.
Learn More.
The Helms Amendment was incorporated into the $129 billion Labor, Health and Human Resources and Education appropriations bill for fiscal 1988, and contained $310 million for AIDS education efforts overseen by the Centers for Disease Control.
Sen. Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) initially proposed that none of the money allocated to the CDC could be used for material or activities that promote, encourage or condone homosexuality, illegal drug use or any sexual activity outside marriage. During floor debate, Sen. Helms displayed sex-positive comic books created by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York and announced that federal money helped to pay for GMHC’s education program.
″If the American people saw these books, they would be on the verge of revolt,″ claimed Helms.
The senator said he showed the comic books to President Reagan and complained that the GMHC had received $674,679 in federal funding to produce the pamphlets. According to Helms, President Reagan looked at a couple of pages, ″shook his head, and hit the desk with his fist.″
Helms then admitted that the comic books were not paid for with federal funds, but said taxpayer dollars did pay for a series of educational sessions he contended were equally offensive. He said the sessions included assignments to write a personal ad for publication in a gay newspaper and list alternatives to high-risk sex, as well as instruction in the use of safe sex photos.
″I may throw up,″ Helms announced in the Senate chambers.
Sen. Lowell Weicker (R-Connecticut) and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York) are the only two Senators to vote against the legislation. Weicker lectured Helms for moralizing and said his amendment ″means unnecessary lives lost.″
″We don’t have time to get into philosophical or academic or moralistic debates. We’d better do what the experts have told us to do — put our money into research and put our money into education.″
The response from Lori Behrman, spokeswoman for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, is: ″Jesse Helms, first of all, is playing with the lives of thousands of Americans. It sends a message that the gay community is expendable in this epidemic.″
The Helms Amendment will have a chilling effect on CDC’s ability to stop the spread of AIDS among drug addicts, homosexuals and sexually active heterosexuals, particularly young people.
This is the latest in a long conflict among lawmakers about what federal AIDS education materials should say and how graphic they should be.
October 22, 1987
Advocate & Educator Frederick Garnett Dies
National Minority AIDS Council co-founder and board member Frederick Garnett dies at the age of 32 of complications resulting from AIDS, at the Hospice of Northern Virginia.
Learn More.
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.
“AIDS is one of those critical issues, like nuclear weapons, global development, and environmental pollution, which affects the future of all peoples in all countries,” says UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar in his address.
“It is, in many senses, a global combat, and it threatens us with all the consequences of war – not only of massive death tolls and even greater an numbers of disabled,” he said, “but of orphans, of mass displacements, of loss of productivity, of overwhelming and bankrupting demands on financial, administrative and human resources, of fear, anger and panic, and of social instability.”
In closing, Pérez de Cuéllar says: “We must combat fear with knowledge, panic with reason and isolation with compassion. We must affirm through solidarity that we are but one human family.”
After the World Health Organization gives a presentation on the global status of AIDS, the UN General Assembly designates WHO to lead the worldwide effort to end HIV/AIDS.
November 1987
And the Band Played On: Book Recounts Early Years of HIV
Journalist Randy Shilts’ book about the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic, is published.
Learn More.
When Shilts joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981 he was the publication’sfirst openly gay journalist. He had been hired to cover issues in the gay community, though he also reported other stories. As part of his beat, he wrote about the growing number of immune system-related diseases occurring in gay men in San Francisco.
In the early 1980s, he persuaded The Chronicle to let him report on AIDS full time. “And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic,” a history of the first five years of the epidemic, is largely the result of his newspaper work.
In the book, Shilts charges the Reagan Administration, the medical establishment and even some gay organizations with indifference to the disease.
The book would make Shilts a trusted commentator on AIDS, to the point that he becomes the closing speaker at the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal in 1989.
Shilts also wrote The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1982) and the bestselling Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military, Vietnam to the Persian Gulf (1993).
Shilts would die of AIDS-related illness on Feb. 17, 1994 at his ranch in the Sonoma County redwoods, at the age of 42.
November 1987
National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS is Founded
The organization works to educate, mobilize, and empower black leaders to meet the challenge of fighting HIV/AIDS and other health disparities in their local communities.
Fraser-Howze would lead the NBLCA for 21 years as President and CEO. She would also become advisor to two U.S. Presidents (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) while serving on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS from 1995-2001.
As the nation’s oldest nonprofit organization of its kind, dedicated to educating, mobilizing and empowering Black leaders to meet the challenge of fighting HIV/AIDS, the NBLCA would evolve to become a comprehensive advocacy, policy and action organization that addresses multiple health disparities affecting Blacks/African Americans.
In 2019, the organization would change its name to National Black Leadership Commission on Health (Black Health), with an expanded focus that includes not only HIV/AIDS, but also Hepatitis C, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, sickle cell, diabetes and mental health.
November 13, 1987
AMA Declares Ethical Obligation to Treat PWA’s
The American Medical Association declares that doctors have an ethical obligation to care for people with AIDS, as well as for those who have been infected with the virus but show no symptoms.
AMA ethics council also tells physicians that if a patient carrying the AIDS virus refuses to discontinue dangerous sexual practices, a doctor should notify public health authorities and even take it upon himself to directly inform individuals who may be in danger of infection.
The new AMA strictures conflict with California law, under which it is illegal for a doctor, without the patient’s consent, to tell anyone a person has tested positive for the AIDS virus or has AIDS.
The AMA states that no evidence exists that large numbers of doctors have refused to treat patients who tested positive for the AIDS virus.
But an AMA spokesperson concedes, “There have been physicians who have chosen to make public statements that they will not treat HIV-positive people. Those statements have generated tremendous amounts of discussion and debate.”
November 1987
AIDS Hotline Expands Reach to Spanish Speakers
The San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) initiates efforts to reach the Latino community through a Spanish-language AIDS Hotline.
Learn More.
Promoted as “Linea de Informacion Sobre el SIDA,” the hotline was operated by Spanish-speaking volunteers who were trained to provide the latest information about resources regarding HIV and AIDS. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation had been operating the California AIDS Hotline since fall of 1982.
Jorge Zepeda started at SFAF as a volunteer for the Spanish-language hotline shortly after it was launched. Seeing friends and acquaintances in the Latinx community become sick and die inspired him to get involved in SFAF’s work.
“Much of what we needed to do, was to make information only available in English about HIV and AIDS accessible to Spanish-speaking communities,” Zepeda shared in 2021 on SFAF’s website. “This effort has turned into a mission that I continue to do to this day, as the director of Latinx Health at SFAF.”
November 23, 1987
Jerry Carlson, Conductor of Gay Men’s Choir of LA, Dies
Jerry Carlson, conductor of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home. He was 31 years old.
Learn More.
Originally from Chicago, where he had helped to found the Windy City Chorus and the Chicago Gay Pride Band, Carlson became the principal conductor of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles (GMCLA) in 1981. Almost immediately he went to work elevating the Chorus to a more professional sound and look.
Carlson instituted an audition process for the first time, according to the Los Angeles Times. He kept pop music in the chorus’ repertoire, but also challenged his singers to stretch to meet the demands of more serious music like Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms.” Setting the Chorus on an ambitious musical direction that would continue for decades after his death, Carlson always pushed his singers to the next level.
In early 1987, the GMCLA was invited to sing the text of Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony for a November concert with the Long Beach Symphony — a golden opportunity. But Carlson’s health was on the decline, and he soon grew too weak to conduct rehearsals. Choral conductor Beverly Patton stepped in to help.
For the last rehearsal, Carlson was brought in on a wheelchair, so he could speak to the singers one last time.
“It was important for him to know we were still with him, and he was with us,” said Jon Bailey, chairman of the music department at Pomona College who took over from Carlson as GMCLA’s conductor.
Two weeks later, Carlson died.
“Jerry had taken a bunch of guys and made them into a musical instrument, and now they sang for him, at his memorial service,” Bailey told the Los Angeles Times. “And they sang very well.”
While Carlson was the latest AIDS casualty among members of the GMCLA, members had been steadily dying of AIDS-related illness since late 1984, according to the LA Times. But because Carlson had such a strong influence on the Chorus as a whole, his death had perhaps the most profound impact to date.
In 1991, GMCLA became the first gay men’s chorus to tour central Europe, according to Los Angeles Almanac. The Chorus was also the first to perform before a sitting U.S. president (Clinton in 1999), and the first to tour South America (2006).
Steve Tracy from TV’s ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Dies
Steve Tracy, a film and TV actor best known for his role as Percival Dalton on Little House on the Prairie, dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 34.
Learn More.
In addition to his work on Little House on the Prairie, Tracy appeared in several films and other television programs from 1977 to 1986, including Quincy, M.E.;The Jeffersons; and National Lampoon’s Class Reunion.
Born Steven Crumrine, a young Tracy attended Kent State University when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of Vietnam War protesters, killing four KSU students and injuring nine others. He moved to Los Angeles, where he attended LA City College and enrolled in a comedy workshop led by veteran TV actor Harvey Lembeck.
As Percival Dalton on Little House, Tracy portrayed the love interest of the show’s bratty antagonist Nellie Oleson. He and Alison Arngrim, the actress who portrayed Nellie, became close friends. Rumors erupted that Tracy and Arngrim were romantically involved, which they denied. Years later, Arngrim said that she was the only one on the set who knew that Tracy was gay.
Not long after Tracy told Arngrim that he had AIDS, the tabloid National Enquirer called Arngrim and peppered her with questions, like “How did Tracy get infected?” and “How long did he have to live?” Arngrim said the Enquirer reporter also wanted to know if she had AIDS, too. He thought Tracy could have infected Arngrim during one of their kissing scenes — a common misconception at the time.
Arngrim accompanied Tracy to his medical appointments, candlelight vigils, and just about everywhere. In her book, Arngrim described her experience with Tracy at a Louise Hay “healing workshop” held at Plummer Park in West Hollywood:
“I was surrounded by people in wheelchairs, people whose friends had carried them in on stretchers. Some were even walking around with Hickman ports, the permanently attached tubes that deliver medicine through a hole cut in the patient’s chest,” she recalled. “What on earth did these people think Louise Hay could do for them?”
She said her skepticism abated when Hay told the crowd that she was angry and disappointed that people were falsely claiming that she could magically “cure AIDS” and other diseases. Hay urged them to seek medical attention and take the advice of their doctors seriously. Arngrim and Tracy became fans of Hay.
Tracy also sought assistance from many of the service agencies that had recently sprung up in and around West Hollywood, including AIDS Project Los Angeles, Project Angel Food and LA Shanti. Tracy inspired Arngrim to get involved.
“I went to AIDS Project Los Angeles and signed up for hotline training, which consisted of weeks of classes with homework and a five-page final exam. I had hated school, but now I was finally studying for a reason,” she said.
Arngrim started working for APLA’s AIDS hotline and ultimately joined the organization’s speakers’ bureau, becoming one of the most popular speakers on the subject of HIV and AIDS. Tracy, meanwhile, tended to his declining health and worked when he could.
Six months before his death, he performed in the Los Angeles theater production of AIDS/US: Portraits in Personal Courage. The piece featured true stories of having AIDS or losing family members to AIDS. Tracy was the only professional actor in the production.
“Then one night in November 1986, Steve called,” wrote Arngrim. “He told me what I had been dreading for several months: he had very little time left, and his mother and sister were coming to take him home to Florida. He wanted to die at home … Less than a week later, on Thanksgiving Day, Steve Tracy died.”
Tracy’s ashes were brought to Los Angeles and scattered under the Hollywood sign, under the letter “D,” per his wishes.
Arngrim continued to work with various AIDS organizations all over the country.
Goh Choo San, a Chinese ballet dancer and choreographer with the Washington Ballet, dies of AIDS-related illness at his New York City home. He was 39 years old.
Learn More.
As the Washington Ballet’s first resident choreographer, Goh worked with the company from its 1976 founding until his death. Goh’s distinct style emphasized technique and musicality over plot and blended Eastern movement with classical ballet technique, showcasing the dancers’ strengths that company founder Mary Day had cultivated in her studio.
“Those of us in Washington who witnessed his artistic blossoming over the past 11 years … have an enormous legacy to be grateful for,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Alan M. Kriegsman in his tribute to Goh in The Washington Post. “And his works — 34 ballets created since 1973, 14 of them expressly for the Washington Ballet — will live on and transmit his genius to posterity.”
Raised in Singapore with eight older siblings, Goh followed in the path of an older brother and sister who were training in the art of dance. After graduating from the University of Singapore with a degree in bio-chemistry, Goh travelled to Europe and joined the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, where he was eventually promoted to soloist.
While still a dancer with the company, Goh created his first ballets and began drawing the attention of dance aficionados, including that of Mary Day, who was starting a new ballet company in Washington, DC. Day offered him a position in 1976 with her newly founded Washington Ballet.
“It is no exaggeration to call [Goh’s] choreographic ascent meteoric,” wrote Kriegsman. “Within two years of his arrival, he had choreographed six ballets for the Washington company. He had also attracted the attention of Mikhail Baryshnikov, who met with Goh in Washington, watched him work and laid the groundwork for a major commission for American Ballet Theatre.”
The commissioned work became the 1981 ballet Configurations, which was danced by Baryshnikov and a contingent of ABT dancers at Lisner Auditorium as part of the Washington Ballet’s historic “Golden Gala.” The creation and performance of the work were documented by London Weekend Television and is now available as Baryshnikov: The Dancer and the Dance.
Goh’s choreography for Configurations is considered a concrete example of his command of the classical dance vocabulary and his ingenuity in creating striking imagery. The ballet is set to Samuel Barber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Piano Concerto, a score that is difficult to play and even more difficult to dance to.
”He is intensely musical, and his ballets are all marked by a first-rate command of structure and fluency,” Anna Kisselgoff, chief dance critic of The New York Times, wrote in 1980. ”He concentrates on speed, intricacies of movement, difficult toe work and streamlined partnering. His base is strongly neo-Classical with a sleek contemporary look, incorporating modern-dance idioms and unexpected gestures, wrist rotations, interpolated academic steps that burst out of the usual flow of movement, acrobatic tumbling within a partnering technique and subtle nuances.”
In 1982, he would choreograph In the Glow of the Night, a ballet set to music by Bohuslav Martinu that would be praised as Goh’s most perfectly realized work. In 1986, Unknown Territory — his last completed ballet — was touted as an important work for both Goh and the Washington Ballet.
“Every two years since his arrival in Washington in 1976, he’s come up with a breakthrough of sorts: the propulsive abstraction Fives in 1978; the distilled romanticism of Lament in 1980; a fusion of these contrary impulses in the 1982 In the Glow of the Night; his first full-length narrative work, Romeo and Juliet, in 1984 (for the Boston Ballet); and now the richly exotic Unknown Territory,” wrote Kriegsman in 1986, not realizing that this work would be Goh’s last.
In 1992, five years after Goh’s death, the Choo San Goh & H. Robert Magee Foundation was formed to provide annual scholarships and grants for new dance works in an effort to further develop choreographic talent. The foundation also oversees the licensing of Goh’s ballets in performances by dance companies throughout the world.
In 1997, the Singapore Dance Theatre commissioned a monograph on Goh entitled Goh Choo San, Master Craftsman in Dance. It contains a detailed overview of Goh’s life in written text and photos of his ballets. The company also added to their repertoire twelve of Goh’s works, bringing his identity as a Singaporean choreographer back to his homeland.
Lyle Loder, member of the congregation of the Hollywood United Methodist Church, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 37.
Learn More.
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.
AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power/Los Angeles (ACT UP/LA) meets for the first time in West Hollywood.
Learn More.
Inspired by ACT UP/New York and energized by the 1987 March on Washington, about 400 activists packed Fiesta Hall in Plummer Park to form a local chapter of ACT UP. Drawing many members of the Lavender Left, ACT UP/LA decided to follow New York’s model of utilizing non-violent direct action as a means to draw media attention and challenge the status quo.
At the first meeting of the chapter, the membership voted to hold a demonstration against the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for its policies restricting the movement of persons living with HIV.
In the months ahead, the chapter would train its members in civil disobedience techniques and form support teams to track confrontations and arrests.
According to member David Lacaillade, “Hundreds of demonstrations later, ACT UP/LA has had a major impact on AIDS care in Los Angeles County and Southern California. At its peak, ACT UP/LA operated a public office, published a newsletter, had a mailing list of approximately 2,200 names, and met weekly in the city of West Hollywood.”
December 8, 1987
LA County Approves $1.5-million AIDS Hospice & Home Care Program
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ decision to offer AIDS hospice and home care services is met with cheers from the audience, which included dozens of people living with AIDS.
Learn More.
At the recommendation of the LA County Commission on AIDS, the supervisors and the county Department of Health Services took action at its meeting to expedite $1.5-million in funding for local hospice and home care programs.
The AIDS Commission also recommended March 1 deadline for implementing the program, which would provide those needing care with an alternative to hospitalization. At Supervisor Ed Edelman’s recommendation, the Supervisors ordered county staff to investigate Barlow Hospital as a potential location to house a fully integrated AIDS-care facility, according to the LA Times’ coverage of the board meeting.
Meanwhile, cases of AIDS continued to grow at a troubling rate. The LA Times reported that in October 1987, the county reported 192 new cases of AIDS and most were receiving care from hospitals. Because of the lack of alternative care facilities, most deaths in the county due to AIDS-related illnesses were reported to occur in hospitals, away from home and hospices.
December 10, 1987
UK Gay Newspaper Targeted in Arson Attack
The offices of Capital Gay, a London free weekly newspaper serving the LGBT community, are firebombed. No one is ever charged for the crime.
Learn More.
The offices were throught to be targeted, because of the strong stance Capital Gay editors took against Section 28, “the most serious legal attack on our rights since male homosexuality was outlawed more than 100 years ago.”
But aside from their strong editorials opposing Section 28, the editors also sponsored the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard and involved itself in events in the wider gay community in London.
Capital Gay was among the first publications to feature a regular column on HIV/AIDS, which was started in 1982 by Julian Meldrum. Meldrum was also the archivist for the Gay Monitoring and Archive Project, which collected evidence of discrimination and police arrests.
Editor and founder Michael Mason would later recall that local police did not appear to undertake a serious investigation of the arson. Local officials were also less than sympathetic.
Elaine Kellett-Bowman, a conservative Member of Parliament, publicly supported the firebombing, saying she was “quite prepared to affirm that it is quite right that there should be an intolerance of evil.”
Capital Gay would resurrect itself following the fire and continue publishing until June 1995, becoming Britain’s longest-running gay newspaper.
December 29, 1987
LGBTQ Political Leader Shelley Andelson Dies
Sheldon “Shelley” Andelson, a leader in the gay community and a fundraiser for politicians such as Senator Edward Kennedy and presidential candidate Walter Mondale, dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 56.
Learn More.
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.
“Joah taught a weekly class, an introduction to contemporary dance that involved technique and improvisation,” Hennessy writes. “Joah, thanks a lot. Thanks for welcoming me, for steering me into the future and away from the past…. You were my first authentically intuitive man.”
The Joah Lowe collection — which includes theater, performance and dance ephemera, performance and dance production notes, and related art and artifacts from Lowe’s work — is stored at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. The collection includes material collected by Charlie Halloran, a dancer who worked with Lowe and who subsequently died in 1993, also from AIDS-related illness.
After Cosmopolitan Magazine publishes an article by a psychiatrist claiming that women with “healthy vaginas” did not have to worry about contracting HIV, 300 activists gather outside the magazine’s New York headquarters to express their outrage.
Learn More.
The demonstration was organized by the women members from the largest radical AIDS organization in the US, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). On a cold winter day, hundreds of activists distributed 5,000 fact sheets and called for a boycott of the magazine.
Two two months later, Cosmopolitan published its first article on safer sex practices for women .
This was ACT UP’s first protest that specifically targeted the issue of women and AIDS. But there was more to come.
The discovery of HIV in 1984 led to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to broaden slightly the definition of AIDS in 1985. However, the definition largely excluded women because it failed to reference the opportunistic infections most commonly experienced by women with AIDS. infections.
This resulted in women being excluded from most HIV/AIDS clinical trials and also perpetuated the falsehood that only very promiscuous women or women who used IV drugs could get HIV.
Activists began demanding that the CDC broaden its AIDS definition again, so that it could include women, first through attempts to talk with CDC leaders and then through letter-writing campaigns. Tired of having demands ignored, ACT UP organized two massive demonstrations in 1989 and 1990 in Atlanta, at the headquarters of the CDC.
Hundreds of activists were arrested carrying banners reading “Women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it.”
Activist pressure to study the disease among populations other than gay men finally led the CDC to announce in 1991 a new study that would include women—the Spectrum of Disease Study. Representatives of ACT UP were allowed to participate in the design of the study and the organization provided 60% of the female participants, according to Gilbert Elbaz, author of Women, AIDS, and Activism Fighting Invisibility.
– – – – – – – Sources: Gilbert Elbaz, author of Women, AIDS, and Activism Fighting Invisibility. https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-d-etudes-americaines-2003-2-page-102.htm
January 15, 1988
ACT UP Chapter Forms in San Francisco after Crushing LaRouche Initiative
Already a fertile breeding ground for LGBT activism, San Francisco becomes the latest city to start its own chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).
Learn More.
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.
January 27, 1988
Ian McKellen Comes Out on U.K. Radio to Oppose Section 28
As news of Section 28 — a new law that prohibits the acceptance of homosexuality in schools and local governmental entities — spreads through the LGBTQ+ community, actor Ian McKellen decides to come out on live BBC radio to demonstrate his personal stake in his opposition to the law.
Learn More.
Broadcast live on this date in 1988, McKellen was interviewed along with Section 28 supporter Peregrine Worsthorne. Early in the broadcast, the interviewer asked McKellen, “So you would just like to see Clause 28 disappear altogether?”
McKellen responded, “Oh, yes. I certainly would. Yes. I think it’s offensive to anyone who is, like myself, homosexual, apart from the whole business of what can or cannot be taught to children.”
When Section 28 supporter Worsthorne said the law would not have “any very serious effect on the Arts,” McKellen countered with an example of how homophobia was already impacting the country’s theater landscape.
“You are familiar with the play The Normal Heart, an American play about AIDS in the early days of AIDS in America, which had a huge impact on people’s knowledge of that disease, not just in America but when it was recently seen here in England, at the Royal Court Theatre and in the West End,” McKellen said.
“The Devonshire County Council has recently removed £10,000 from the grant to its local arts center, because it proposes to do that play,” McKellen argued. “And it’s in the light of that sort of, we call it, censorship, we call it restriction, we call it too strong expression of opinion, I would have thought, which makes us fear what the effect of this Clause, if it ever happened.”
February 12, 1988
First AIDS Drug Released under New FDA Rules
Trimetrexate becomes the first AIDS drug given pre-approval distribution status under new FDA regulations.
Learn More.
Trimetrexate was used to treat pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in AIDS patients who could not tolerate standard treatments.
February 15, 1988
Neighbors Fight to Eject AIDS Hospice from Hollywood
After a long-time Hollywood resident leases his single-family home to a non-profit AIDS hospice, neighbors begin to mobilize to force its closure.
Called Hughes House after Shawn Hughes, the first City of West Hollywood employee to die of AIDS, the hospice was one of only two in Los Angeles available exclusively for AIDS patients, although additional AIDS hospices were in the works to open later in 1988 and 1989. Shawn Hughes’ mother attended the event to show her support of the hospice, along with media representatives and AIDS activists.
Disgruntled neighbors also attended the event, according to the Los Angeles Times, “milling around the fringes of the press conference.”
Opposed to Hughes House opening in their neighborhood and angry with the facility’s plan to care for a total of six AIDS patients in the three-bedroom home, the neighbors provided the Times reporter with a litany of complaints, ranging from alleged zoning violations to the possibility of lowered property values.
“Our problem has nothing to do with AIDS,” one neighbor said. “It has to do with R-1 (single-family zoning) conformity … It’s the same as if somebody put in a body-and-fender shop in your neighborhood.”
Los Angeles City Councilperson Michael Woo, who attended the hospice opening event, would become the target of of much of the residents’ anger.
Woo, however, defended the hospice location, saying he had obtained an opinion from the city attorney’s office stating that hospices could be operated in residential zones as long as they are no larger than six beds.
“A hospice is not a hospital,” Woo told the LA Times. “It is a place where (AIDS patients) can die with respect and dignity.”
LA Times reporter Bob Baker pointed out, “The conflict is symptomatic of why Los Angeles County has so few AIDS hospices, where patients can die in an environment far more sympathetic and less expensive than a hospital. In addition to a lack of governmental assistance — it was only late last year that the county Board of Supervisors voted to release $1.5 million to support alternative-care AIDS programs — the few existing hospices created with private funds or contributions have been placed in commercial areas or low-income neighborhoods.”
This marked the beginning of a long fight between Hughes House and its neighbors, the latter who would ask the city’s Zoning Board to close down the hospice. In its first year, Hughes House would provide hospice care to numerous people, including famous television performer Wayland Flowers.
February 19, 1988
Michael Cappara, Founder of City Centre Ballet, Dies
Michael Cappara — a dancer, choreographer and teacher — dies of AIDS-related illness in San Diego at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Cappara brought serious dance credentials to San Diego in the 1970s by founding a local chapter of the National Ballet Academy and then the City Centre Ballet Company. At both companies, he performed, choreographed and taught.
Starting dance at the age of five, Cappara won scholarships early on to study at the nation’s top dance schools, including the American Ballet Theatre School in New York City and the National Ballet of Washington, DC.
His career took him across the U.S. and to Europe, Canada and Mexico. Prior to moving to San Diego to found his own dance company, he danced with the Oakland Ballet Company and the San Francisco Ballet. Women dancers preferred to be partnered with Cappara because of his strength and technique.
Noel Baron, Cappara’s dance partner in San Diego for more than ten years, said, “He was a gift to all dancers in the region,” a man “so giving that he would go to extremes to assist and find opportunities for dancers.”
20,000 March in Manchester Against U.K.’s Section 28
As the conservative government prepares to enact Section 28 to disenfranchise members of the LGBTQ+ community, 20,000 activists take to the streets of Manchester to protest the law.
Learn More.
Section 28 targets the teaching of school children, with the bill prohibiting the promotion or “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” It also banned government funding that supported LGBT events, services and programs.
Paul Fairweather, who worked for Manchester’s city council, recalls how he helped organize for what would become one of the largest LGBTQ+ demonstrations in the country’s history.
“There was a sense that the whole community was under threat,” Fairweather told The Guardian. “There were also lots of questions about Section 28’s possible impact on gay bars and clubs, as well as concerns about the attitude of the police force.”
Concerns about police hostility deter people from joining the demonstration. About 20,000 people marched, and the event revitalized Manchester’s LGBTQ+ movement.
March 2, 1988
Bay Area Artist Chuck Arnett Dies
Community artist Chuck Arnett dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 60.
Learn More.
Formerly a dancer with the National Ballet in New York, Arnett relocated to San Francisco in the 1960s and established himself as an artist and a central figure in the early leather scene. His murals covering the walls of local leather bars like The Stud and the Tool Box (pictured) inspired observers to compare Arnett to Toulouse-Lautrec.
Arnett’s interior murals at the Tool Box were the establishment’s best-known calling card. According to the LGBT Historical Society in San Francisco, one set of Arnett’s murals were located along the south-facing, Harrison Street walls, and two additional mural panels were painted on the glass storefront windows on the west-facing, 4th Street walls.
The Harrison Street murals became internationally known in June 1964 when photographs of the interior of the Tool Box were featured in Life Magazine in a feature article entitled “Homosexuality in America.” The article described San Francisco as “The Gay Capital of America” and inspired many gay leathermen to move there, according to the Leather History Timeline.
Unfortunately, Arnett’s Tool Box artwork was on display for only a brief time. The Tool Box closed in 1971 and the building (along with the Harrison Street murals) was torn down in 1975. The panel that is pictured here was painted on wood and was able to be removed prior to the destruction of the building. A San Francisco couple purchased the panel at a garage sale in the 1990s, and it was donated to the GLBT Historical Society in 2021.
The San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley consists of works of art along Ringold Alley honoring leather culture. One of the works of art is a black granite stone etched with a narrative by Gayle Rubin and a reproduction of Arnett’s Tool Box mural. Another of the works of art is bronze bootprints along the curb which honor Arnett and 27 other icons of the leather community.
March 3, 1988
Teen Ryan White Testifies before President’s Commission on AIDS
Ryan White, the Indiana teenager who has become a national spokesperson for AIDS education, testifies before the President’s Commission on AIDS about the stigma he has endured.
March 1988
Ron Woodroof Founds Dallas Buyers Club
Ron Woodroof founds what would become known as the Dallas Buyers Club and begins distributing AIDS medication through an illegal underground network.
Learn More.
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.
March 1988
Gay Activist Group — GUTS — Shames Dallas City Council
Members of the Gay Urban Truth Squad (GUTS) take over an empty lot and transform it into a “potters field” to put a spotlight on the Dallas City Council’s inadequate funding of HIV/AIDS programs.
Learn More.
Thirty-five activists from GUTS, an offshoot of the Dallas Gay Alliance, brought to the abandoned construction site about 500 hand-painted white crosses bearing the names of Dallas County residents who had succumbed to AIDS and hammered them into the dirt in the early hours of the morning.
Led by activists William Waybourn, Bill Hunt, Bill Nelson and John Thomas, GUTS was known for staging protests to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in such a way that “streets were never blocked, no one was arrested,” wrote Kimberly Goad for D magazine in 1996.
The spectacle they created at the intersection of Lemmon and Cole avenues in Dallas remained in place for weeks, drawing attention to the issue of HIV/AIDS funding, and the lack of it, in the city, according to the Dallas Observer,
The lot had been abandoned by a developer that had already dug a large hole into the property, according to former GUTS member Bill Monroe, and it was receiving media attention as a notorious eyesore in the community. Responding to the unwanted community attention, the Dallas City Council voted to allocate $500,000 to fill the hole.
GUTS was appalled that the City Council could throw this kind of money at an empty lot when, earlier the same year, the council members designated just $55,000 toward AIDS programs at a time when local residents were sick and dying of AIDS.
So, once the hole was filled and started growing grass again, GUTS converged on the location to construct a potters field with over 500 white crosses to represent the number of HIV cases in Dallas at the time. Some of the crosses bore the names of people that the activists personally knew.
They also posted two large banners on the site that read “The City of Dallas Spent $500,000 Filling This Hole” and “The City of Dallas Spent $55,000 on AIDS.”
The theatrical demonstration worked. Media swarmed the makeshift potter’s field and it was featured on the evening news.
Waybourn, one of the organizers, told The Dallas Observer that the city was so embarrassed by the demonstration, council members increased funding for HIV/AIDS programs to $552,000 the following year.
March 30, 1988
NYC Choreographer Arnie Zane Dies
Arnie Zane, the co-artistic director of Bill T. Jones-Arnie Zane Dance Company, a leading postmodernist dance troupe, died of AIDS-related illness at his home in Valley Cottage, New York. He was 39 years old.
Learn More.
Zane was born in the Bronx and attended public schools in New York City, receiving an undergraduate degree from the State University at Binghamton. Zane began working with Bill T. Jones in 1971, and they formed the American Dance Asylum with Lois Welk in 1973 in Binghamton, New York.
“They made an unlikely team: Jones is tall and muscular and his dancing expansive, while Zane, short and wiry, leaped about the stage in bursts of nervous energy,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
After touring together in the U.S. and abroad, the two choreographer-dancers formed the Jones-Zane company in 1982 and appeared in that year’s Next Wave festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Through much of the 1980s, the company drew critical acclaim for its stylish, punchy dance that incorporated narrative and text set to music by noted post-modernist composers. Zane and Jones’ choreography often explored issues such as racism, religion, sexism, and the nuclear age.
Zane held two Creative Artists Public Service Fellowships: for photography in 1973 and for choreography in 1981. He also was awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1983 and 1984.
In 1986, he and Jones were recipients of New York’s Dance Performance Award (the “Bessie”) for their 1985 season.
Following Zane’s death, Jones kept the name of the company the same. Published in 1990, Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane is a collaboration by the two men, examining their work together.
“The reader of Body Against Body is left to contemplate the toll the disease is taking in the arts community and to reflect on what the premature death of so many young artists means to the performing arts, to their audience and to humanity,” wrote Charles Solomon in the LA Times.
Also in 1990, Jones (who was also diagnosed as HIV-positive) created the now canonical work, D-Man in the Waters, which explored the grief, loss and existential fear shared by many in the dance community at that time.
Florida Governor Supports Quarantine of HIV-infected People
Florida Governor Bob Martinez voices his support for state legislation that would permit health officials to confine people with AIDS.
Learn More.
Florida Gov. Bob Martinez called for the quarantine of AIDS sufferers who risk infecting others.
“AIDS carriers who refuse to inhibit their contacts, who refuse to stop spreading this fatal disease, should no more be allowed to roam free than criminals armed with a deadly weapon,” Gov. Martinez declared during a joint session of the Florida Legislature. ‘The time has come to quarantine those whose character and conduct are a clear threat to society.’
The legislation pending in the state House and Senate was introduced to provide $1.1 million to the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, which would use the funds to lock up six juveniles and up to 22 adults who tested positive for the virus and were deemed by state officials to “behave in ways likely to spread the disease,” according to United Press International (UPI) reporting.
If passed, the legislation would permit confinement of any person with AIDS whose behavior was considered dangerous to public health.
“What [Gov. Martinez] is doing is sending up a trial balloon for the nation,” AIDS activist Bob Kunst told UPI. “We’ve got to knock it down real fast.”
Kunst added that state legislators should instead award $1.1 million to AIDS service providers and education campaigns.
State Senator William Myers, chair of the Senate Select Committee on AIDS, endorsed the quarantine proposal. A similar but more modest bill was introduced in the House, but it was expected to be quashed by House leaders who opposed the large detention facilities sought by the Social Services Department.
Representative Lois Frankel, chair of the House Select Committee, told UPI, ‘That’s not how we’re going to stop the spread of AIDS. We know that education of high risk groups, education in the schools — that’s how we’re going to stop the spread of AIDS.”
April 15, 1988
Pentagon Transfers HIV+ Soldiers to Ft. Hood Barracks
The U.S. Department of Defense transfers 50 soldiers who tested positive for HIV since their enlistment to Army barracks in Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, and confines them there.
Learn More.
The HIV-positive service members were lodged in a special barracks wing known on base as “the HIV hotel” and “the leper colony,” according to reporting by Newsday, which was reprinted in the Los Angeles Times. Most of the men were housed on the third floor of Building 21006.
In the first story of its kind, Newsday reporter Laurie Garrett interviewed John O. Brisbois, a former service member who “escaped” the barracks in October 1988.
“The Army did everything possible to make me want to leave,” Brisbois told Newsday. “I feel I don’t have a future anymore. I don’t want to die, but I get so depressed.”
The DOD began testing its troops for HIV in October 1985, at the urging of Maj. Robert Redfield, chief scientist for the Army’s AIDS research effort.
Redfield, who in 2018 would be appointed by President Donald Trump to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Newsday, “The reason we have done what we have done is that we think it’s good medicine — and it’s medicine that might work in the civilian sector, as well.”
Fort Hood was the largest tank and artillery post in the world, and its commanding general in the mid 1980s was Lt. Gen. Crosbie Saint. It was Lt. Gen. Saint who made the decision to consolidate all soldiers testing positive for HIV into one barracks, according to author Randy Shilts (1951-1994) in his 1993 book Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf War.
“Saint maintained that the segregation was necessary to preserve the combat readiness of his other units,” Shilts wrote.
When the 50 HIV+ service members suddenly arrived at Fort Hood, the 38,000 soldiers already on the base quickly found out why they were there. The result was unbridled discrimination and harassment of anyone housed in the barracks, according to Shilts.
“To make matters worse, the 50 soldiers were not allowed to leave the barracks at night,” Shilts wrote. “The HIV Hotel was more a prison than a hotel. Any infraction of the rules earned a disciplinary hearing.”
The HIV Hotel was shut down after Laurie Garrett’s exposé was published in April 1989, according to Shilts. The media attention also caused the Inspector General to order an investigation and determine that Army regulations had been violated. However, no disciplinary action was issued against the officers who had caused the violations.
Meanwhile, the HIV+ service members were quietly reintegrated into military housing, and Lt. Gen. Saint was promoted to a command post in Europe.
Shilts reported that Saint was overheard to boast, “I will have no trouble controlling the troops in Europe. After all, I ran the largest leper colony in the United States here at Fort Hood.”
Between 1985 and 1988, the DOD had identified nearly 6,000 soldiers and recruits who had tested positive for HIV. Per DOD policy, all recruits testing positive were turned away. More than 2,200 active service members remained on duty, Shilts wrote.
In December 1988, Colonel John Cruden, chief of the Pentagon’s legislative division, wrote a letter to the DOD’s general counsel, stating, “Maintaining in the active duty force over 2,200 permanently nondeployable combat assets who are certain to progress to medical unfitness in a relatively short period of time is a very unwise personnel policy.”
The Pentagon estimated the cost of maintaining the “nondeployable assets” at $57 million a year.
April 16, 1988
Classical Pianist Youri Egorov Dies
Russian-born pianist Youri Egorov dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in Amsterdam at the age of 33.
Learn More.
Egorov made his mark on the performance of classical music in his own highly individual way. Between the ages of 6 and 17, he studied music at the Kazan Music School and then studied for six years at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1976, at the age of 22, Egorov defected from Russia to Amsterdam. applying for asylum just before a concert in Italy.
The year following his defection, Egorov participated in the Cliburn music competition in Fort Forth, Texas and became an audience favorite. When he was not chosen by judges as a finalist, a group of patrons and Cliburn board members formed an ad-hoc committee to raise money equal to the top prize of $10,000 to further Egorov’s career.
”Mr. Egorov plays in a free, romantic style, and his approach is quite different from that of so many competition winners,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg in The New York Timesafter Egorov’s New York debut.
In the book Great Contemporary Pianists Speak for Themselves compiled by Elyse Mach, Egorov spoke candidly on the topics of rehearsal, pre-concert nervousness, artistic restrictions in Russia, and homosexuality. In Amsterdam, Egorov met Jan Brouwer, who became his long-term partner.
Although he took an apartment in Manhattan in the late 1970s, and he and Brouwer established a residence in Monte Carlo for tax purposes, Egorov counted Amsterdam as his home throughout his 12 years in the West.
When Egorov died in 1988, he had recordings of several performances awaiting release. His partner died about four months after Egorov, and both their remains are interred at Driehuis Velsen Crematorium, Noord-Holland, Netherlands.
Nationally known flamenco dancer Cruz Luna dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 50.
Learn More.
A native of Spain, Luna learned flamenco dancing in cafes there and studied later in Mexico and Los Angeles. He launched his career at the age of 17 with appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Dave Garroway television shows.
Luna danced in an international tour with the Ballet Nacional of Spain and in a Broadway show titled Ole! Ole! He moved to San Francisco in 1959 and performed with the Smothers Brothers and Phyllis Diller. From 1960 to 1974, he operated Cafe Madrid in North Beach and presented flamenco dancers from around the world.
He died at Garden Sullivan Hospital in San Francisco.
New Study: Human Saliva Prevents Spread of AIDS Virus
A new study suggests that human saliva contains substances that prevent the AIDS virus from infecting white blood cells.
Learn More.
In the study, published in the May issue of The Journal of the American Dental Association and reported widely in the media, the researchers tested saliva from three healthy men aged 35, 40 and 42. Researchers determined that the subjects were not infected by HIV and they were not known to be at high risk of infection.
The researchers said the finding might help explain why no cases have been documented in which the AIDS virus was transmitted from person to person through saliva.
The research was led by Philip Fox, M.D., who cautioned that the study results do not eliminate the possibility of HIV infection from oral sex or deep kissing. Dr. Fox explained that the virus could enter the bloodstream through cuts in the mucous membranes that line the mouth or it might be able to infect cells on the surface of mucous membranes.
UT researchers Samuel Baron, Joyce Poast and Miles W. Cloyd sought to confirm the results of Fox’s 1988 study and subsequent studies that showed that proteins in saliva seem to neutralize or disable the AIDS virus, Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the UT study would indicate that saliva inactivates more than 90% of the HIV-infected blood cells by breaking the virus apart into non-infectious components.
May 24, 1988
U.K. Adopts Section 28, Prohibiting Promotion of Homosexuality
United Kingdom authorities enact Local Government Act of 1988, which became notorious for its inclusion of Section 28. The vaguely worded law prohibited local authorities and schools from “promoting” homosexuality and funding lesbian and gay initiatives.
Learn More.
The clause in question prohibited “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”
Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s Prime Minister, said at the time: “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life.”
Section 28 arose within a wider social and political landscape that sought to disenfranchise members of the LGBTQ community. In 1983, 50% of those surveyed agreed that “sexual relations between two adults of the same sex” were “always wrong.” By 1987, the figure had risen to 64%, perhaps fuelled by fears associated with the spread of HIV — which was often characterized as “the gay disease.”
One of the original sources of complaint was from someone who objected to Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, a children’s storybook by the Danish author Susanne Bösche and published in England by Gay Men’s Press. The author’s intention was to give children knowledge about different types of family relationships and she seemed stunned by the subsequent uproar in the U.K.
In 1986, the book was discovered in a library of the Labour-controlled Inner London Education Authority. A National Council for Civil Liberties pamphlet revealed there was only one copy, located in a teachers’ resource centre where access was controlled. Yet an atmosphere of media-stoked paranoia soon arose.
Many LGBT+ people who came of age during the era of Section 28 felt vulnerable to physical and verbal abuse and, because of Section 28, teachers would not step in to protect them.
“School was hard,” said Divina De Campo, a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in the 2019 season. “I got a lot of flak from pretty much everybody in the school. Growing up for everybody was hard, but then you add on being gay and it was just a whole other level.”
May 26, 1988
Surgeon General Launches Nationwide Education Campaign
C. Everett Koop, the U.S. Surgeon General, launches the nation’s first coordinated HIV/AIDS education campaign. It is the largest public health mailing in history.
Learn More.
Between May 26 and June 30, 1988, the Centers for Disease Control mail the pamphlet Understanding AIDS to every U.S. household. Approximately 126 million copies were distributed, reaching at least 60% of the population.
The brochure was produced in Spanish as well as English, and its purpose was 3-fold: to clarify how AIDS is transmitted; to emphasize that behavior, not identification with risk groups, put people at risk; and to stimulate informed discussions about AIDS at all levels of society.
In conjunction with the mailing, the CDC initiated contacts with state health departments and manufacturers of AIDS testing kits. In anticipation of increased requests for information that the brochure would generate, the CDC added up to 1,000 operators to the National AIDS Information Line.
The impact of the campaign on AIDS-related behavior was not fully assessed. Extensive message pretesting and other marketing techniques designed to improve the effectiveness of the brochure, however, helped Understanding AIDS achieve an increase in awareness and concern about AIDS nationwide.
During the process of the campaign, the CDC learned a number of lessons, including the importance of setting a deadline, doing formative research, and achieving a consensus on scientific knowledge.
May 31, 1988
Society of Janus Editor Mark Joplin Dies
Markalan “Mark” Joplin, a well-loved figure in San Francisco’s SM community, dies of AIDS-related illness at Fairmont Hospital at the age of 32.
Learn More.
Joplin was co-coordinator of the newsletter published by the Society of Janus, and also served as an editor. He was also the drummer for the San Francisco Precision Whip Drill Team in the 1987 Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade.
AIDS Hospice Ordered to Move from Hollywood Neighborhood
A Los Angeles zoning administrator rules that Hughes House, one of just a few AIDS hospices in the county, is in violation of zoning laws and cannot remain in the neighborhood where it has operated for five months.
Learn More.
Likening the hospice to a hospital, Chief Zoning Administrator Franklin P. Eberhard ruled that Hughes House is not allowed to operate in the three-bedroom house on the 1300 block of Ogden, a neighborhood of single-family homes.
Previously, Los Angeles building and safety officials said the hospice could operate in its location, because the six-bed facility observes state and city laws which allow up to six unrelated people to share a single-family home. The city has no zoning code that applies specifically to where hospices can be located.
Hughes House responded by filing an appeal to Eberhard’s decision. Ron Wolff, executive director of Hospice Los Angeles/Long Beach, which runs Hughes House, told the Los Angeles Times that he was confident that they would win their appeal on grounds that Hughes House is not a medical facility.
“We feel that, No. 1, it’s a legal use,” Wolff told the Times. “No. 2, the moral imperative is so overwhelming. There needs to be a place for these people to be cared for in the final stages of life.”
June 22, 1988
Gay Vietnam Veteran Leonard Matlovich Dies
Leonard “Mat” Matlovich — an activist who famously said “When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one” — dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 44.
Learn More.
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 Americaand 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.”
Andrew Meltzer, resident conductor with the San Francisco Opera, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 40.
Learn More.
Meltzer made his West Coast conducting debut with the Spring Opera Theater’s 1974 production of Cavalli’s L’Ormindo, according to The Washington Post. He made his company debut during the 1982 summer season with The Barber of Seville and followed up with Cosi fan Tutte in the summer of 1983, La Gioconda during the 1983 fall season, and Die Fledermaus in 1984.
His conducting credits with other companies include productions for Michigan Opera Theater, Edmonton Opera, New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Spoleto Festival USA. Opera fans in San Francisco considered Meltzer a rising star.
At age 39, Meltzer entered a blind test for AZT, but he was one of the participants given a placebo. He was switched to AZT at age 40, but it was too late.
“Anyone who heard him conduct last year’s La Traviata cannot help but feel the tragedy,” said Anthony Turney, administrative director of the San Francisco Opera.
June 1988
U.S. Launches Study on Transmission in Women & Infants
An epidemiologic study of HIV transmission during pregnancy and birth is launched by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Learn More.
The Women and Infants Transmission Study (WITS) captured data on the natural history of HIV infection in pregnant women and their infants. The study followed the women with their infants through the infants’ first few years of life.
Conducted at obstetric/gynecologic and pediatric clinics in Boston, Chicago, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Houston, and San Juan, the first phase of the study captured data from 788 HIV-infected pregnant women and 657 infants born to them.
Of the women studied in the initial phase of the trial, 82% were women of color, which was intentionally representative of infected women in the U.S. The researchers found they needed to be resourceful in finding ways to retain participants, because many in the cohort had low incomes and histories of substance abuse.
In 1993, WITS would receive another $5 million in funding and expand to include participants from additional cities. Over the years, data collected from WITS would become instrumental in determining treatment and transmission prevention strategy for women and infants.
June 28, 1988
German Actor Kurt Raab Dies
Kurt Raab, best remembered for his work with German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, dies of AIDS-related illness in Hamburg at the age of 46.
Learn More.
Born in 1941 in the Bohemian town of Bergreichenstein (now part of the Czek Republic), Raab started life as the son of a farm hand. While attending high school at Straubing, he would befriend Peer Raben, the future composer for many Fassbinder films, and the two would move to Munich together.
Raab would play his first role in Raben’s staging of Antigone, where they both would meet Fassbinder. In 1969, Raab would play the lead role in Fassbinder’s Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? and then go on to perform in numerous other Fassbinder films and TV productions.
Before he died, he worked to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in Germany. In 1987, he discussed his illness in Herbert Achternbusch’s Wohin?, a film about AIDS hysteria. Shortly before his death in 1988, he made Mitten im Leben, a documentary about AIDS, for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen.
The actor was practically quarantined in the Hamburg Tropical Institute, and following his death, his body was frefused burial in Steinbeißen, the Bavarian town where his family had settled in 1945.
His body would be shipped to Hamburg, where he would be buried in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery.
Raab’s last days were recorded for Yearning for Sodom, which he codirected with Hanno Baethe and his former Fassbinder colleague Hirschmüller, and for which Raab would be posthumously awarded the Adolf Grimme Award.
July 9, 1988
Stage & Film Actor Anthony Holland Dies
Actor Anthony Holland, whose health was declining due to infection with HIV, commits suicide in his Manhattan apartment; he was 60 years old.
Learn More.
A graduate of the University of Chicago, Holland had been a member of the original Second City comedy troupe, where he met Joan Rivers, with whom he remained friends until his death.
He made his Broadway debut in 1963 in Lillian Hellman’s comedyMy Mother, My Father and Me. His half-dozen subsequent Broadway roles included Division Street and We Bombed in New Haven. He appeared in many regional-theater productions, as well as Off Broadway productions of Brendan Behan’s ‘Quare Fellow, Eugene Ionesco’s Victims of Duty and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
He gave one of his best performances in The Hunger Artist, Martha Clarke’s 1987 adaptation of several stories by Franz Kafka.
“His soft voice, unpretentiously conversational in tone yet mesmerizingly grave, could be Kafka’s,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times.
In 1979, he gives a standout performance in the film All That Jazz as Broadway songwriter Paul Dann, and appears in scores of other films between 1964-1986.
Holland took his own life just as he was entering the final stages of the disease “in what can only be called an act of sheer bravado,” writes friend David Ehrenstein. He had saved enough medication to facilitate a lethal overdoes.
“Tony had elected to make his exit on a day when he was in a good mood,” Ehrenstein recalled. “He was in New York at that time and friends recall seeing him around town at his usual haunts in high spirits.
Holland had left instructions for the paramedics and even rubber gloves in case they were concerned about handling an “AIDS corpse.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announces it will allow the importation of small quantities of unapproved drugs for people with life-threatening illnesses, including HIV/AIDS.
August 1, 1988
San Francisco Actor Tommy Pace Dies
Tommy Pace, a member of the pioneering Gay Men’s Theater Collective, dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Pace was known locally as a brilliant comic actor with the Angels of Light, a theater troupe that originated as an offshoot of the Cockettes, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
“Tommy was a macho Guido trapped inside a flaming Queen, and he played both roles to the hilt,” wrote friend Dolores DeLuce in RDF magazine. “I met Tommy at Purple Heart Thrift Store on Mission Street, where I noticed him in the mirror trying on a glitter halter over his clothes and flipping his long, dark hair like a girl in the shampoo commercial.”
Pace and DeLuce grew close as they performed together in theatrical events in the late 1970s. After DeLuce moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, their friendship continued over long-distance phone calls.
In 1988, she returned to San Francisco to see Pace when she heard from mutual friends that he was dying of AIDS.
“He refused his morphine drip so he could fully take in these last moments,” DeLuce wrote of her reunion with Pace. “We both knew this was the end for him, but we never spoke of it. Instead, we talked about the glorious days of shows, drag and juicy dish.”
August 1, 1988
U.S. Announces Pediatric AIDS Service Grants
The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration awards $4.4 million in grants to 11 states and Puerto Rico for the first pediatric AIDS service demonstration projects.
Learn More.
The HRSA-funded projects are expected to demonstrate effective ways to:
reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV;
develop coordinated, community-based, and family-centered services for infants and children living with HIV; and
develop programs to reduce the spread of HIV to vulnerable populations of young people.
August 5, 1988
Colin Higgins — ‘Harold & Maude’ Screenwriter — Dies
Colin Higgins — acclaimed screenwriter, director, and producer of films such as Harold and Maude and 9 to 5 — dies of AIDS-related illness at his Beverly Hills home. He was 47.
Learn More.
Best known for writing the screenplay for the 1971 cult movie Harold and Maude and for directing the films Foul Play (1978) and 9 to 5 (1980), Higgins’ last project was co-writing and co-producing with Shirley MacLaine a 1986 television mini-series based on her book, Out on a Limb.
Born on the South Pacific Island of New Caledonia, Colin Higgins lived in Australia until his family migrated to California. He attended Stanford University on a scholarship but dropped out to pursue acting in New York, according to The Legacy Project in Chicago. From there, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and worked overseas for the newspaper Stars and Stripes. Returning to the U.S. in 1965, he re-entered Stanford, where he wrote a rough treatment for the story of Harold and Maude as part of his Master’s thesis.
Harold and Maude was the story of an unlikely romance between a suicidal teenager, played by Bud Cort, and an eccentric 80-year-old woman, portrayed by Ruth Gordon. The film drew scant attention when it was released in 1971, but went on to become a revival-house and college campus classic.
Higgins, who was openly gay, wrote the TV movie The Devil’s Daughter (1972), followed by a stage version of Harold and Maude, which ran in Paris for seven years. His Hollywood breakthrough occured with his screenplay for the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder movie Silver Streak (1976). Higgins followed this by writing and directing Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase in Foul Play (1978) and then Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lilly Tomlin in the smash hit 9 to 5 (1980). In 1982, he directed the film version of the stage musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, starring Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton.
Following his diagnosis with HIV in 1985, Higgins founded the Colin Higgins Foundation to provide support for LGBT youth. The foundation supports numerous LGBTQ organizations, ranging from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender outreach and AIDS prevention programs.
Since 1988, the Foundation has awarded over 660 grants totaling over $5.8 million dollars to further the humanitarian vision of its founder, Colin Higgins.
Jesse Hollis, the resident set designer at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Hollis’ designs were seen at theater and opera companies throughout the country, including Berkeley Rep, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Magic Theatre.
Volunteers Enroll in Clinical Trials for HIV Vaccine
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Anthony Fauci, M.D., creates the first U.S. cooperative HIV vaccine clinical trials group and begins enrolling volunteers.
Learn More.
NIH established the Office of AIDS Research (OAR), which then launched the AIDS Vaccine Evaluation Group (AVEG) to oversee the first study of an experimental AIDS vaccine.
At the time, researchers and the medical community were hopeful that a vaccine would be quickly developed and rolled out to the general public. But in spite of the optimism expressed by many, Dr. Anthony Fauci published a Public Health Report that warned that developing a HIV vaccine would be difficult. Dr. Fauci listed the following as issues that complicate the development of an effective AIDS vaccine:
– the lack of “an appropriate animal model for AIDS,”
– the absence of a defined protective immune response in persons infected with HIV,
– the long latent period between initial infection and the development of symptoms,
– the existence of multiple strains of HIV, and
– the spread of HIV by way of cell-associated virus.
“When HIV was discovered and established as the cause of AIDS in 1983–1984, many people believed that a vaccine would be easily developed and rapidly deployed. After all, vaccinologists had been very successful in developing vaccines for a whole range of viral diseases,” José Esparza of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wrote in 2013. “However, the paradigm that allowed the development of most existing viral vaccines, which is based on the recreation of the protective immunity that develops after natural infection, does not work in the case of HIV.”
Still today, scientists continue their quest to develop a vaccine. Extensive studies are underway to determine how HIV is able to avoid the immune responses spurred by vaccines. In an article for the Association of American Medical Colleges, David Diemert, M.D. explained the challenge.
“From the very second HIV infects a person, it starts to escape from the immune response,” said Dr. Diemert, clinical director of vaccine research at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
August 9, 1988
Needle-Exchange Program Begins in Tacoma
On a sidewalk in Tacoma, Washington, drug counselor David Purchase sets up the nation’s first needle-exchange program to combat the spread of HIV .
Learn More.
Although secures support from the Tacoma mayor and police chief for his one-man effort, Purchase must pay out-of-pocket for the needles.
Within five months, he would exchange 13,000 clean needles for contaminated ones.
Rodney Price, co-founder of the wildly creative Angels of Light performance troupe in San Francisco, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 38.
Learn More.
Price may be best remembered for his final performance, singing and tap dancing in his wheelchair in the film short Song From an Angel. Made two weeks prior to his death, Price performs a darkly humorous song about his own death, “I’ve Got Less Time Than You.”
Los Angeles Zoning Board Decides AIDS Hospice Can Stay
Reversing a decision by the City of Los Angeles’ zoning administrator, the zoning board voted to allow Hughes House to remain at its location in a Hollywood residential neighborhood.
Learn More.
Following the zoning board’s decision, supporters of the hospice declared the ruling a victory for the rights of the terminally ill. Many of them wore pink buttons bearing the words “There’s no place like home.”
Ron Wolff, executive director of Hospice Los Angeles-Long Beach, the nonprofit group that runs Hughes House, said the hospice acts as a surrogate family for dying patients during the last three or four weeks of their lives.
The ruling of the zoning board ended a months-long attempt by residents to remove the hospice from their neighborhood.
Area residents filed complaints with the city, accusing Hughes House of operating a medical facility. In response, city inspectors visited the hospice three times and concluded that the facility was not violating zoning laws.
Then neighbors began to keep detailed logs of activity at Hughes House, according to the Los Angeles Times, and they reported to the city every occasion they observed of medical supply trucks making deliveries and new patients arriving. In June 1988, the chief zoning administrator sided with the neighbors, agreeing with their portrayal of the hospice as a medical facility, and ruled that Hughes House could not continue to operate in its location.
In the end, however, the zoning board found the residents’ complaints to be lacking in substance when compared to the needs of the people staying — and dying — at Hughes House. Ultimately, members of the zoning board were won over by the fact that Hughes House was providing a service — care for those dying of AIDS — that sadly was much in demand and that few other organizations in Los Angeles could provide.
August 22, 1988
AIDS Deaths Grow to 3,000 & HIV Infections to 30,000 in San Francisco
Topping the number of casualties from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the AIDS death toll in the city reaches 3,000.
Learn More.
Drawing images of “a city under attack … a war … a holocaust,” the Los Angeles Times reported on the growing devastation in the San Francisco community caused by HIV and AIDS.
A March 1988 report by the San Francisco Public Health Department predicted that in five years, as many as 17,000 of the city’s 750,000 residents would either have AIDS or be dead from it.
“The grim projections assume that there will be no dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of AIDS and HIV over the next five years,” Times reporters Victor F. Zonana and Dan Morain stated.
At the time, gay men accounted for 97% of the AIDS cases in San Francisco. The Times article cited a demographic report released by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation that described the city’s gay male population as highly educated (60% with college degrees) and primarily working in professional or management jobs. Zonana and Morain wrote about the actions of local business owners who were bracing for skyrocketing medical expenses and potential labor shortages.
“Some, including Bank of America, have put grief counselors on call to comfort survivors,” Zonana and Morain wrote. “Health coverage has become a major element in labor negotiations. Political analysts suspect gay political influence will wane as more gay men succumb.”
With three times more AIDS cases per capita than New York and 10 times as many as Los Angeles, San Francisco had the highest per-capita rate of HIV infection in the country.
In 1988, New York City had more than 15,000 diagnosed cases of AIDS in its population of 7.2 million, and Los Angeles County had 5,230 diagnosed cases of AIDS in its population of more than 8 million. Both cities were struggling to estimate the number of people who were infected but not yet ill, according to the LA Times, though local health officials thought the number was between 100,000 and more than 200,000.
In comparison, San Francisco officials had a high level of confidence in their estimate of 30,000 infected people, because local organizations working with medical officials established a number of health studies and surveys in the gay community in the late 1970s.
August 23, 1988
Researchers Voice Opposition to Proposal for Mandatory HIV Reporting
Leading AIDS researchers condemn Proposition 102, the latest California AIDS ballot measure, saying it is a dangerous intrusion into their efforts to address the epidemic.
Learn More.
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
August 24, 1988
‘Boys in the Band’ Actor Leonard Frey Dies
Leonard Frey, an actor admired for his vivid and often flamboyant performances, dies of AIDS-related illness at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan at the age of 49.
Learn More.
In 1968, Frey received critical acclaim for his performance as Harold, a bitter, bitchy, gay man who dreads his upcoming birthday, in off-Broadway’s The Boys in the Band. He, along with the rest of the original cast, appeared in the 1970 film version, directed by William Friedkin, as well.
Frey was nominated for a 1975 Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in The National Health. For his role in the film version of Fiddler on the Roof, Frey earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Motel the tailor.
Frey also had a number of screen credits to his name, including films The Magic Christian, Where the Buffalo Roam and Tattoo and the television series’ Mission Impossible, Quincy, M.E. and Barney Miller.
Ronald L. Stone, the major architect of the incorporation campaign that made a city out of the community of West Hollywood in 1984, dies at his home of AIDS-related illness at the age of 40.
Learn More.
Stone was instrumental in turning the 1.9-square-mile wedge of unincorporated Los Angeles County into the first American city to be governed by a gay majority.
“Without him it wouldn’t have happened,” said John Heilman, then-Councilmember of the new city.
Compelled by a vision of open, local government, Stone saw cityhood as the means by which West Hollywood’s 36,000 residents — most of them renters, many of them gay or elderly — could shape key community issues such as zoning, rent control and anti-discrimination laws.
“He was really concerned about having local control over zoning and planning,” Heilman told the Los Angeles Times.
In his 2014 article about the founding of West Hollywood, former WeHoville editor Henry E. Scott, wrote: “It was the construction of a hotel in his neighborhood in 1983, and a county decision to limit the hours at the pool at West Hollywood Park, that prompted Ron Stone, then 37, to take a look at the impact of development and the county’s governance on the area.”
Early on, Stone won the support of an influential renters rights activist, Larry Gross of the Coalition for Economic Survival. A major goal of CES was strengthening renter rights so that people could access and keep affordable housing.
In 1983, Gross was assessing the aftermath of CES’s losing campaign to introduce a rent control ordinance in Los Angeles County. The ballot measure failed to capture the majority of votes, most likely because many of the county’s residents were homeowners, landlords and developers. In West Hollywood, however, the ballot measure passed by a five-to-one majority.
Through its work on the county rent control initiative, CES had assembled a large base of supporters in West Hollywood. Gross and Stone organized canvassers to circulate petitions proposing that West Hollywood become its own city – and one out of every four registered voters signed on. With that petition and economic data, the newly formed West Hollywood Incorporation Committee won the approval of the Local Agency Formation Commission, which assessed the feasibility of West Hollywood as its own city.
Stone also secured the support of the Stonewall Democratic Club and the Harvey Milk Gay and Lesbian Democratic Club, both of which created excitement about the prospect of a city run by LGBTQ officials. But what ultimately united individuals and groups from a variety of backgrounds — seniors on limited incomes, renters, and gay and lesbian residents concerned about discrimination — was the city’s soaring rents and the lack of any effective way to regulate them.
The Board of Supervisors, which at that time consisted of conversative officials, agreed to put cityhood on the Novemer 1984 ballot. Immediately, 44 people announced their candidacy for five seats on the West Hollywood City Council. While 19 of the candidates were gay or lesbian, all of the candidates stated they supported gay rights and rent control of some sort.
Meanwhile, local landlords and developers began to mobilize in opposition of cityhood. One early opponent was Francis J. Montgomery, a local landowner whose family still manages the Sunset Plaza in West Hollywood. Montgomery funded a campaign to try to convince the area’s seniors that cityhood would give LGBT people undue influence. That strategy failed.
Then Montgomery and other landlords and developers formed the West Hollywood Concerned Citizens coalition, and appealed to LA County officials to create a special rent control district for the West Hollywood area. The coalition hoped that the conservative-leaning officials would create rent-control policies that would be weaker than those a new City Council might adopt. That effort also failed.
In the November 1984 election, a majority of residents voted to make their unincorporated area the 84th city in Los Angeles County.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the new city was “heralded worldwide as creating ‘A Gay Camelot’ — the first openly gay-run city in the nation.”
Almost immediately, the city’s newly elected officials and newly hired staff launched programs for a wide range of services for its residents. Among the new programs were services providing hot meals, healthcare, low-cost housing, taxi coupons for senior citizens, early childhood education, and even pet care for people with AIDS. The Metropolitan Community Church, a gay and lesbian faith organization with a worldwide membership of 42,000, moved its headquarters from Culver City to West Hollywood to “be part of this community.”
After the cityhood victory, Ron Stone ran twice for City Council and lost both times. But he remained active in civic affairs, offering advice behind the scenes, attending council meetings and serving on committees.
In 1987, just as the city was beginning to thrive, Stone’s health began to decline. After his death, he would be publicly lauded as “the father of West Hollywood.”
September 3, 1988
“Hooray for Hollywood’ Benefit on Fire Island Supports God’s Love We Deliver
Gloria DeMann and her husband Larry host an extravagant benefit at their bayfront home on Fire Island to raise money for the AIDS service provider God’s Love We Deliver.
Learn More.
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, nourishing 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.
September 22, 1988
Concert Pianist David Anthony Keith Dies
David Anthony Keith, Bay Area concert pianist, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 35.
After refining his act, Flowers’ made a national splash on The Andy Williams Show. From there, Flowers became a regular presence on network TV — although it was not unusual for Madame to get more closeups.
He is best known for the TV series Madame’s Place (1982) and The Hollywood Squares, and also performed in scores of live shows.
Other puppets populated Flowers’ act, but none earned Madame’s notoriety. Among them were a Harlem harlot known as Jiffy, a cranky vaudeville vet named Macklehoney and Crazy Mary, a Bellevue mental hospital escapee.
Sometime in the mid-1980s, Flowers was diagnosed with HIV. He continued to perform until he collapsed onstage during a show at Harrah’s casino in Las Vegas. Eventually, he developed Kaposi’s sarcoma. He made one last visit to his home town in Georgia and then checked into an AIDS treatment facility, the Hughes House hospice center in Los Angeles, where he remained until his death.
ACT UP Shuts Down FDA Headquarters in Rockville, MD
Over 1,000 members and supporters of the activist group ACT UP engage in a massive sit-in that shuts down the Rockville, MD offices of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA is targeted for refusing to release HIV/AIDS medications until tests prove them to be safe and effective.
Learn More.
Arguing that the FDA’s approval process is too slow and that patients dying of AIDS have little to lose by trying experimental medications, ACT UP brings hundreds of its members to the Washington, D.C. area to demonstrate. They manage to stop business as usual for the day, with ACT UP graphics and banners covering the building’s facade.
“Our takeover of the FDA was unquestionably the most significant demonstration of the AIDS activist movement’s first two years,” organizer Douglas Crimp writes in The Atlantic.
In advance of the event, ACT UP groups across the country conduct teach-ins to provide members with knowledge of complicated issues related to HIV/AIDS treatment.
ACT UP then shares this information, along with their demands to the FDA, with the press in the days leading up to the demonstration.
“The FDA action was ‘sold’ in advance to the media almost like a Hollywood movie,” Crimp writes, “with a carefully prepared and presented press kit, hundreds of phone calls to members of the press, and activists’ appearances scheduled on television and radio talk shows around the country.”
On the day of the FDA demonstration, the media shows up in force to get the story and, due to the advance preparation by ACT UP, reporters are able to report it with a degree of accuracy and sympathy.
ACT UP groups from around the country engage all day in skirmishes with the Rockville police, who apparently are ordered to keep the number of arrests low to minimize media drama.
Protesters push at police lines outside the 20-story building, shouting, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and “No more deaths!” as curious workers stare down from windows.
When protesters attempt to enter the building, they are forcibly restrained but not arrested. Even so, police ultimately arrest 176 protestors, most on loitering charges
Eight days later, the FDA announces new regulations to speed up the process. In addition, government agencies addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly the FDA and NIH, began to listen to activist leaders and ask for their input.
October 14, 1988
Poll: Sympathy for PWAs, But Not if Gay or IV Drug Users
The New York Times publishes the results of a poll that suggests that people are sympathetic toward people with AIDS — but not if they are sexually active gay men or use IV drugs.
Learn More.
Of the 1,600 respondents interviewed by NYT/CBS, 75% stated they had ”a lot” or ”some” sympathy for people who have AIDS and 19% said they had ”not much” or ”no” sympathy. (The poll had a margin of sampling error of +/- 3%.)
The level of sympathy declined dramatically, however, when the two groups at highest risk of exposure to the disease were mentioned: 36% with “a lot” or “some” sympathy for “people who get AIDS from homosexual activity,” and 26% for ”people who get AIDS from sharing needles while using illegal drugs.”
NYT reporter Michael R. Kagay wrote: “The most recent poll made it clear that public attitudes toward these high-risk groups are linked to support or opposition to steps that might help to slow the spread of AIDS.”
Kagay then presented the example of the belief of 52% of those interviewed that drug addiction was “more an illness,” compared with 34% who believed that addiction was “more a crime.”
“These views about the nature of drug addiction appeared to influence how respondents reacted to a proposal to give free sterilized needles to intravenous drug users as a public health measure,” Kagay wrote.
The respondents viewing addiction as an illness were more likely to favor free distribution of sterilized needles to drug users, with 52% of these respondents supporting this as a way to slow the spread of AIDS. Only 26% of those who viewed addiction as a crime supported the proposal.
October 1988
For Black Activist Robert Arrington, Life Begins with HIV Diagnosis
After being diagnosed at the age of 28 with HIV, Robert Arrington returns to his hometown of Durham, North Carolina to live out the rest of his days close to family. But instead of dying young, he finds himself embarking on a new path of activism and spiritual leadership.
Learn More.
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 Courierthat 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:
“I want to remind somebody. You are a Survivor. Let that sink in today. Just remember the last battle or war that you survive. The sickness you survive. As the things that people took you through. And you survived it. Now pat yourself on your back … and remember you are a SURVIVOR. We are ready for whatever comes, because we are a SURVIVOR.
Baby I know I Am a SURVIVOR”
October 18, 1988
U.S. Passes Abandoned Infants Assistance Act
The Abandoned Infants Assistance Act becomes law, addressing the issue of so-called “boarder babies.” These infants, many of whom have been perinatally exposed to drugs or HIV, have been either been orphaned or left at hospitals indefinitely by their parents.
Learn More.
The AIA funds projects to support moving the children into foster care or other more traditional living arrangements.
October 25, 1988
San Francisco Ballet Dancer Peter Childers Dies
Dancer Peter Childers, who performed with the San Francisco Opera Ballet, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 32.
Gov. Deukmejian Endorses Mandatory HIV Reporting Initiative
As activists work to educate California voters about the dangers of Proposition 102 – a ballot initiative that would require doctors to report anyone they believe is HIV-positive — the state’s governor announces his endorsement of the proposed law.
Learn More.
Gov. George Deukmejian surprised many with this announcement. Two years prior, he was among the state leaders (which included elected officials from both political parties, top religious leaders, the American Red Cross, and California Medical Association) who denounced a similar ballot initiative, Proposition 64, also known as “the LaRouche initiative.”
“Now virtually the same glittering company of California leaders, with a few added names, opposes Proposition 102, the AIDS initiative on the Nov. 8 ballot — with the prominent exception of Deukmejian,” wrote reporter Kevin Roderick of the Los Angeles Times.
Meanwhile, more and more voters seemed ready to vote No on Proposition 102 on their November ballot.
Back in August, a California poll showed an overwhelming majority of voters — 72% — in favor of the ballot measure, with 22% opposed and 6% undecided. But an October poll suggested that the tide is turning, likely driven by education campaigns by groups like Californians Against Proposition 102 and Life AIDS Lobby.
New polling by the Los Angeles Times showed 45% supporting the proposition, with 36% opposed and 18% undecided.
November 2, 1988
Choreographer to the Stars Howard ‘Howie’ Jeffrey Dies
Dancer and choreographer Howard Jeffrey, who worked with Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood, dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 53.
Learn More.
Known as “Howie” to close friends, Jeffrey danced with American Ballet Theatre and the Ballet Alicia Alonso before assisting Jerome Robbins on the stage and film versions of West Side Story in the 1950s and 1960s, according to Elisa Rolle in LiveJournal.
Jeffrey was the choreographer for Broadway’s Georgy Girl (1970) and the films On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), according to The New York Times.
He was an associate film producer for The Turning Point, The Seven Percent Solution, and Nijinsky. and went on to produce other films and television programs, according to the Los Angeles Times. He produced two of Bette Midler’s films, Divine Madness and Jinxed, and Mel Brooks’ To Be or Not to Be, according to AP News Service.
Jeffrey was also a much-sought-after dance coach, assisting Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961), Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968) and Funny Lady (1975).
Jeffrey was born in Philadelphia, and at the age of 7, moved with his family to Los Angeles, where his mother encouraged him get involved in the entertainment industry. Jeffrey’s first childhood jobs were acting on radio and stage plays. When he was 13, he performed at a dance competition and won a scholarship to Eugene Loring’s American Academy of Dance.
His professional debut was with Alicia Alonzo’s Ballet Theater, touring Europe and South America starting at the age of 18. In the mid 1950s, he moved to New York and danced on and off Broadway.
As a young man, Jeffrey became a close friend of fellow dancer Nora Kaye and eventually Kaye’s husband, who was director-producer Herbert Ross. Jeffrey subsequently assisted Ross in several of his films.
Mart Crowley’s play Boys in the Band was reportedly based on Jeffrey’s birthday party. Two characters are modeled after Jeffery and his roommate Garrett Lewis.
President Ronald Reagan signs the Health Omnibus Programs Extension (HOPE) Act into law, authorizing the use of federal funds for AIDS prevention, education, and testing.
Learn More.
As the first comprehensive federal AIDS bill, it establishes the Office of AIDS Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the AIDS Clinical Trials Group.
November 7, 1988
California Governor’s Endorsement of Prop 102 Backfires
Following Gov. George Deukmejian’s surprise endorsement of Proposition 102, which seeks to compel all people testing positive for the AIDS virus to be reported to the state, the campaign led by the opposition seems to be winning over more voters.
Learn More.
The result of Gov. Deukmejian’s endorsement was to galvanize the opposition to the measure, according to a report by The New York Times.
The governor was served with letters of resignation from three members of his AIDS advisory committee, including Dr. Michael Gottlieb of Los Angeles, co-discoverer of the first AIDS cases in 1981.
”I could not give tacit approval by continuing to serve his administration,” Dr. Gottlieb told the Times.
Dr. Marcus Conant, chairman of the Governor’s AIDS Leadership Committee, and Dr. Laurens P. White, president of the California Medical Association, also publicly spoke out against Gov. Deukmejian’s endorsement.
Even the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. C. Everett Koop, criticized the measure’s main components in media interviews, saying mandatory reporting would serve little purpose since there was no viable treatment for AIDS. Koop expressed concern that forcing doctors to report HIV cases would cause trouble for those seeking treatment.
In addition, four major California universities called for the measure’s defeat and even corporate leaders had their say, with Levi Strauss Associates Inc. and Pacific Telesis Group siding with the opposition.
Meanwhile, Californians Against Proposition 102 and the Life AIDS Lobby intensified their opposition campaign to convince voters to vote No on the ballot measure, organizing rallies against the governor in major California cities.
If passed, Proposition 102 would effectively end confidential HIV testing in California. It would also require those infected to disclose sexual contacts to health authorities within seven days, and would repeal the prohibition on the AIDS virus test for employment and insurance.
The measure was sponsored by Paul Gann, the anti-taxation crusader who contracted AIDS after receiving a blood transfusion, and U.S. Rep. William E. Dannemeyer, a conservative Republican from Orange County.
November 7, 1988
NYC Pilots Controversial Needle-Exchange Program
The New York City Health Department begins a pilot needle-exchange program to address the growing number of HIV infections among people who inject drugs
Learn More.
The program is opposed by many of the city’s black and latinx leaders, who see it as an abandonment of IV-drug-using people of color.
The leaders demand a more comprehensive approach to the issue, proposing more resources for drug-prevention education, addiction treatment, and law enforcement.
November 8, 1988
California Legislators Approve Initiative for Mandatory HIV Testing of Suspects
The California legislature approves Proposition 96, an addition to the state Health and Safety Code which would allow for the mandatory HIV testing of people accused of sexual assault. The initiative would be included on the 1998 ballot.
Learn More.
California Proposition 96 would give people reporting crimes of sexual assault — as well as police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel who have been assaulted in their official capacity — the right to request that the defendant be tested for HIV.
Upon receiving the request, the court would hold a hearing to determine whether
probable cause exists to believe that a transfer of body fluids from the defendant to the victim occurred during the assault or altercation. If probable cause is found, the court would order the defendant to undergo HIV testing.
Proposition 96 is deceptive because it uses the term “probable cause” to justify a search of an individual’s blood, according to a 1990 review of mandatory AIDS testing laws in the Vanderbilt Law Review.
“This term seems to suggest that the statute authorizes a criminal search,” wrote legal scholar Paul H. MacDonald. “The statute, however, does not authorize a court to issue a testing order based on probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed, but instead on probable cause to believe that there has been an exchange of body fluids between defendant and victim.”
November 8, 1988
Ballot Measure to Reduce HIV Rights is Defeated in California
In a resounding win for AIDS activists, California Proposition 102 is defeated. However, Proposition 96 — a measure on the same ballot that also impacts the rights of people living with HIV — passes.
Learn More.
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.”
November 11, 1988
Punk Vocalist John Morris (aka Black Randy) Dies
John Morris, frontman of the Los Angeles punk band Black Randy and The Metrosquad, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 36.
Learn More.
Black Randy’s lyrics gave him a reputation for being as witty as he was offensive with songs about porn, actor Marlon Brando, and Ugandan President Idi Amin. The band was known for its theatrical performances and frequent vocal assistance from various “Blackettes” like Belinda Carlisle, Alice Bag, and Exene Cervenka.
The band released a selection of its vinyl singles and cassette tapes on the 1979 album Pass the Dust, I Think I’m Bowie. In 1981, Black Randy and the Metrosquad appeared in Lou Adler’s satirical punk rock film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, performing their song, “I Slept in an Arcade.”
The band imploded in mid-1982, when Black Randy succumbed to drug and alcohol problems, which were evident in chaotic live shows which even bandmate David Brown could not keep on course, as hard as he tried.
In 2007, Black Randy would be portrayed by Chris Pontius in the Darby Crash biopic What We Do Is Secret.
November 19, 1988
Texas Judge Lightens Sentence of Homophobic Killer
After two gay men are murdered in Reverchon Park in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas, a Texas judge rejects the recommended life sentence for one of the killers, instead imposing the more lenient sentence of 30 years in prison.
Learn More.
In a demonstration of the bigotry and homophobia faced by gay men in America, Judge Jack Hampton of State District Court told The Dallas Times Herald that he gave an 18-year-old murderer a more lenient sentence than prosecutors had sought because the two victims were gay and, the judge said, they would not have been killed ”if they hadn’t been cruising the streets picking up teenage boys.”
Tommy Lee Trimble, 34, and John Lloyd Griffin, 27, were driving through the Oak Lawn section of Dallas on a night in May 1988 when they were distracted by a group of young men shouting at them from the street corner. Not realizing that the group, which included students from North Mesquite High School, had come to the neighborhood to ”pester the homosexuals,” Trimble and Griffin invited the young men into their car.
Witnesses testifed that 18-year-old Richard Lee Bednarski and a friend entered the car with the intent of assaulting them. After the car reached a secluded area of Reverchon Park, Bednarski ordered Trimble and Griffin to remove their clothes and, when they refused, Bednarski drew a pistol and began firing at them. Trimble died immediately, and Griffin died five days later.
A jury found Bednarski guilty of the double homicide. Since Texas law allowed the defendant to choose whether the judge or the jury set the penalty, Bednarski chose the judge at the advice of his lawyer, who said he thought the judge would be more sympathetic.
Judge Hampton said that in determining the sentence, he considered that the guilty party had no criminal record, was attending college and was “reared in a good home by a father who is a police officer.”
In explaining the Nov. 19 sentence to The Times Herald, Judge Hampton said, ”I don’t care much for queers cruising the streets. I’ve got a teenage boy.”
November 22, 1988
FDA Approves Intron A and Roferon A for Treatment of KS
The Food and Drug Administration approves the first drug specifically developed for treating Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), a leading complication of AIDS.
The FDA reported that up to 45% of KS patients receiving large doses of alpha interferon ”responded with a significant reduction in the size of their tumors.” Dr. Kathryn C. Zoon, an F.D.A. official, said that alpha interferon works best in people in the early stages of the disease.
The FDA based its approval on studies involving about 500 patients with KS. Alpha interferon joined AZT and pentamidine as the only drugs approved in the U.S. for the treatment of AIDS or its related conditions. Previous treatments for KS were radiation and other cancer drugs.
Alpha interferon was manufactured as Intron-A by the Schering Corporation of Kenilworth, New Jersey, and as Roferon by Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. of Nutley, New Jersey.
November 25, 1988
CDC Study: One of Every 500 College Students Infected with HIV
One out of every 500 college students are infected with HIV, according to a new study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Learn More.
As part of its series of HIV surveys and studies, the CDC collaborated with the American College Health Association to assess HIV infection in college students. For the first 12,000 students tested, a seroprevalence of HIV of 0.2% was found. The majority of seropositive specimens came from male students.
The tests were conducted anonymously on blood specimens drawn from students at student clinics. The initial results came from student specimens from 17 of 19 participating campuses. The researchers stated that the survey did not include a random sampling of all college students, just students who had blood drawn at their campus health center.
The researchers conclude that “these results demonstrate that HIV infection and the potential for its transmission are present on many college campuses.” They interpret the data to mean that older students and men are at greatest risk in this population.
The colleges participating in the study were:
Central Missouri State University
Emory University
Mississippi State University
Northwestern University
Rutgers University
San Diego State University
Southern Illinois University
University of California – Berkeley
University of Colorado
University of Connecticut – Storrs
University of Georgia
University of Kansas
University of Maryland – Baltimore County
University of Maryland – College Park
University of Massachusetts – Amherst
University of New Hampshire
University of Southern California
University of Texas – Austin
University of Washington
November 28, 1988
Elizabeth Glaser Launches Pediatric AIDS Foundation
Elizabeth Glaser, an HIV-positive mother of two HIV-positive children, forms the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Learn More.
The Foundation funds cutting-edge research that leads to improved treatments for children living with HIV/AIDS and helps to establish protocols to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
Elizabeth Glaser contracted HIV in a blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth to her daughter, Ariel. She and her husband, Paul Glaser (who starred in the 1970s television series, Starsky & Hutch), later learned that Elizabeth had unknowingly passed the virus on to Ariel through breast milk and that their son, Jake, had contracted the virus in utero.
The Glasers discovered that the only HIV treatment drugs on the market were for adults; nothing had been developed for children.
After Ariel lost her life to AIDS in 1988, Elizabeth approached her friends Susie Zeegen and Susan DeLaurentis for help in creating the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Elizabeth would die of AIDS-related illness in 1994, and and to honor her legacy, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation would be renamed theElizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Under this name, the Foundation would become the leading global nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing pediatric HIV infection and eliminating pediatric AIDS through research, advocacy, and prevention and treatment programs.
Elizabeth’s legacy would live on with the Foundation and in her son, Jake, who is a healthy adult and pediatric AIDS advocate.
November 28, 1988
FDA Approves Ganciclovir for Treatment of Cytomegalovirus Retinitis
The Food and Drug Administration approves ganciclovir, a still-experimental medication for the treatment of cytomegalovirus retinitis in AIDS patients.
Learn More.
Issued under the FDA’s treatment investigational drug protocol, the approval allowed for ganciclovir (GCV) to be issued in a clinical setting, with precautions similar to chemotherapy treatment. Manufactured by Roche Laboratories under the brand name Cytovene, the drug was administered to a patient by intravenous infusion over one hour, a time designed to reduce its toxicity.
The U.S. announces a new program which would engage city doctors, group practices and private clinics in federal AIDS research.
Learn More.
Under the coordination of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the program would issue contracts to doctors for the treatment and data collection regarding thousands of AIDS patients, health officials said. The program has received a $6 million budget for its first year.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of NIAID, told the New York Times that the program’s aim was to expand federal research opportunities to doctors and patients who were not affiliated with existing clinical trials. Dr. Fauci said the program was seeking to involve more Black and Hispanic people, as well as intravenous drug users and sex workers.
In the program, patients using potentially effective but unapproved therapies would be monitored. The opportunity for patients to receive access to experimental drugs in community settings would be another component of the program, according to health officials.
December 1, 1988
World AIDS Day is Observed for 1st Time
December 1st is designated by the World Health Organization as “World AIDS Day.”
Learn More.
Supported by the United Nations, World AIDS Day is observed for the first time with the theme “Join the Worldwide Effort.” Today, World AIDS Day continues to be observed.
In 2020, there was a reported 37.6 million people across the globe with HIV. Of these, 35.9 million were adults and 1.7 million were children.
An estimated 1.5 million individuals worldwide would acquire HIV in 2020. This marks a significant decline (30%) in new HIV infections since 2010, but there is still much work to do.
December 6, 1988
Actor Timothy Patrick Murphy Dies
Timothy Patrick Murphy, best known for this role on the prime-time soap opera Dallas during the 1982-83 season, dies of AIDS-related illness in Sherman Oaks, California at the age of 29.
Learn More.
On Dallas, Murphy played the part of “Mickey Trotter.” He started his acting career as an adolescent in several television commercials and from there he went on to act in a mini-series called Centennial.
He soon would land more substantial work, including a part in the 1984 inspirational feature film Sam’s Son, the film biography of the life of actor Michael Landon.
Smith and Murphy had met in the summer of 1984, and they would talk about “the old times.”
“Sometimes, we would just sit quietly, holding hands, nothing needed to be said,” Smith recalled. “I was blessed with good timing; Tim rarely had other visitors when I was there. Even as his health deteriorated, he kept his winning smile and personality.”
On December 6, 1988, Smith would arrive at the hospital to visit his friend and be informed by “a teary-eyed nursing staff” that Murphy had died that day.
Duke Armstrong, a lawyer, leather man and Republican Party activist in the Bay Area, dies of AIDS-related illness at Davies Medical Center at the age of 39.
Learn More.
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.
December 16, 1988
Gay Rights Leader to Texas Judge: ‘We Will Remember’
William Waybourn, president of the Dallas Gay Alliance, tells the Los Angeles Times that outraged voters will be sure to remember on Election Day the judge who lightened the sentence of a murderer because his two victims were gay.
Learn More.
Waybourn said he hopes the light sentence imposed by Texas Judge Jack Hampton will prompt the public to vote against him when he comes up for reelection in two years.
“Judge Hampton said it himself: No one will remember this in 1990. But we will remember,” Waybourn told the LA Times. “I’m sorry for the families of the men who were killed. They don’t deserve this. And Hampton doesn’t deserve to be a judge.”
As early as November 1986, the New York Times began reporting that violent attacks on gay men had increased sharply as the LGBTQ community was becoming more visible because of publicity surrounding the spread of AIDS.
One late night in May 1988, Richard Lee Bednarski joined a group of friends on a drive to the Oak Lawn section of Dallas “to pester the homosexuals.” Bednarski got into a car with two gay men and drove to a park, where he drew out a handgun and “executed” Tommy Lee Trimble, 34, and John Lloyd Griffin, 27.
After a guilty verdit was announced in November 1988, Judge Hampton imposed on Bednarski a 30-year sentence for the murders rather than life in prison. Hampton, a district court judge for eight years, said the sexual identities of Trimble and Griffin influenced his decision to give Bednarski a lighter sentence.
“These two guys that got killed wouldn’t have been killed if they hadn’t been cruising the streets picking up teenage boys,” Hampton told the Dallas Times Herald.
Hampton expressed no reservations about his statements, the newspaper reported.
“Just spell my name right,” Hampton said. “If it makes anybody mad, they’ll forget it by 1990.”
Robert Flowers, executive director of the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct, declined to comment to the LA Times on Hampton’s statements and said the 11-member commission would investigate if a complaint were filed.
“A judge’s discretion is his or her own,” Flowers said. “And generally, we haven’t had too many occasions where the judge has spoken about what his thought process has been (in sentencing).”
Hampton would be voted out of office, but not until 1992. Waybourn of the Dallas Gay Alliance would move in 1991 to Washington, D.C. to launch the Victory Fund, an influential national organization dedicated to electing openly LGBTQ people to all levels of government.
[Photo of William Weybourn from his days with the Dallas Gay Alliance, circa 1985]
December 16, 1988
Singer-Performer Sylvester Dies
Singer Sylvester dies of AIDS-related illness at age 41. Born Sylvester James, Jr., the black performer is known internationally as “the Queen of Disco.”
Learn More.
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.
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.
Devastated when his partner, Rick Cranmer, died of AIDS-related illness in September 1987, Sylvester suspected then that he was HIV-positive but declined to be tested.
As a persistent cough begins to develop into more serious symptoms, Sylvester is unable to tour but continues performing for fans in the Bay Area. Eventually diagnosed with AIDS, he is hospitalized in May 1988 with pneumocystis pneumonia.
Later in the year, Sylvester attends the Castro’s 1988 Gay Freedom Parade in a wheelchair, joining those marching with the “People With AIDS” banner. Passing crowds along Market Street, Sylvester could hear his name shouted out again and again. He continues to give interviews to the media, seeking to raise awareness about the pandemic’s impact on the black community.
A month later, Sylvester would die in his home at the age of 41. He had planned his own funeral down to the details of how he would be dressed (in a red kimono), how his body would be displayed (in an open coffin), and where the service would be held (in his church, the Love Center, with a sermon by the Reverend Walter Hawkins).
Max Robinson, the first Black network news anchor in the U.S., and a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists, dies of AIDS-related illness at Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C. He was 49.
Learn More.
In July 1978, Robinson rose to national prominence when he became a co-anchor of World News Tonight on the ABC television network. The program had three anchors: Frank Reynolds in Washington, Peter Jennings in London and Robinson in Chicago.
In the early 1970s, Robinson was a co-anchor for the ABC news affililate in Washington, WTOP (now WUSA).
According to The New York Times, Robinson often spoke on issues of concern to him as a Black journalist. Speaking at Smith College in 1981, he told students that the news media were “a crooked mirror” through which “white America views itself,” and that “only by talking about racism, by taking a professional risk, will I take myself out of the mean, racist trap all Black Americans find themselves in.”
Robinson had been ill with AIDS for about a year, his friend Roger Wilkins told the Washington Post.
“During his battle with the disease, Mr. Robinson expressed the desire that his death be the occasion for emphasizing the importance, particularly to the Black community, of education about AIDS and methods for its prevention,” Wilkins said. “More generally, he hoped that people would recognize the urgency of developing effective treatments of the disease and more humane policies towards its victim.”
John Jacob, an acquaintance of Robinson’s and co-chair of the citizens committee on AIDS of New York City and Northern New Jersey, told the Los Angeles Times: “For a long time this disease was seen as a disease of gays. Clearly, there was not the kind of attention given to it that we (Blacks) need to give it. Clearly, drug use is the major factor causing the disease in Black America.”
Jacob said he didn’t know how Robinson was infected with the AIDS virus, and told the LA Times reporter that he should be more focused on raising awareness about the disease.
“I think the one thing we do know is that if you get it, your sentence is death,” Jacob said. “We have to attack this disease whatever the causes are.”
Dr. Beny J. Primm, a member of the President’s AIDS commission and a longtime friend of Robinson’s, also refused to discuss with the LA Times the circumstances under which Robinson got AIDS.
“What’s important,” Dr. Primm said, “is that Max Robinson died of a disease that certainly could have been prevented had certain precautions been taken. I hope he has not died in vain.”
The first AIDS hospice in California opens in Elysian Park in Los Angeles, down the street from Dodger Stadium.
Learn More.
Furnished with 25 beds, the AIDS Hospice Foundation (which was renamed Chris Brownlie Hospice) opened its doors the day after Christmas to provide 24-hour medical and palliative care to people living through the final stages of AIDS.
From 1988 to 1996, thousands of people suffering through the final stages of AIDS were cared for with dignity and compassion at Chris Brownlie Hospice. The facility was founded on the idea that, if people were going to pass away as a result of AIDS, they should at least have the opportunity for their lives to end as painlessly and with as much dignity as humanly possible.
Located in a former nursing quarters, the hospice was the brainchild of the Los Angeles AIDS Hospice Committee, founded in 1987 by activists Chris Brownlie and Michael Weinstein as well as Sharon Raphael, PhD, and Mina Meyer, MA, two nationally-recognized women’s and gay & lesbian advocates.
A front-door sign reads, “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Straight, Women, Men, Black, Brown, White, Yellow, Red, Young and Old. All Are Welcome Here.”
On Saturday, January 26, 1996, the organization would return the property to the City of Los Angeles with a sunset memorial ceremony celebrating the years of hope and help the hospice gave to thousands of brave people battling AIDS. By 1996, the world of AIDS would be changed; new antiretroviral treatment would mean an HIV-positive diagnosis signified a change in one’s life, not the end of it.
During the ceremony, the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus performed in memory of the hundreds who died there, including 140 chorus members. As the sun set, seven balloons — one for each year the hospice was in operation — were released.
December 27, 1988
Activist-Author Joseph Beam Dies
Joseph Beam — best known for editing In the Life, the first collection of writings by gay Black men — dies of AIDS-related illness three days before his 34th birthday.
Learn More.
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.
California Legislature Enacts Laws to Criminalize HIV
Eight AIDS bills signed into law by Gov. George Deukmejian during 1988 take effect in California, including three that criminalize HIV and one that weakens rules around doctor-patient confidentiality.
Learn More.
The legislation, proposed by anti-gay Republican Sen. John Doolittle, include:
Penalties — SB 1007, which adds three years to prison sentences of those convicted of some sex crimes if they know they are HIV-positive when they commit the crime;
Prostitutes—SB 1007, which makes it a felony for a prostitute to continue working after knowing he or she has been exposed to the AIDS virus; and
Donors—SB 1002, which makes it a felony to donate blood, semen, breast milk or body organs to another person if the donor knows that he or she is infected with the AIDS virus.
Also going into effect is Democratic Sen. Gary K. Hart’s bill, SB 2847, which allows physicians to tell other medical personnel if a patient has AIDS so they can protect themselves.
January 3, 1989
APLA Adopts Austerity Program
Three months after the head of AIDS Project Los Angeles quits amid a cash shortage and staff revolt, the organization adopts an austerity program that appears to be working.
Learn More.
Internal conflicts continue as increasing numbers of people from locations countywide ask the organization for help. At base of the conflict is its mission, which started as a compassionate care program funded by and for white gay men in the Hollywood area. In recent years, APLA finds itself besieged with requests of help from county residents outside the area, including many people of color and heterosexuals.
“We can no longer be all things to all people,” says APLA’s interim Chief Executive Frank Paradise.
Torie Osborn, Executive Director of the LA Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center (now the Los Angeles LGBT Center), says that APLA’s early success led its leaders to believe they could take on anything.
“They set themselves apart,” Osborn tells the LA Times. “Their attitude was ‘we’re the biggest and we’re the best.’ They grew isolated from the community from which they sprang.”
APLA was founded in 1982 and emerged as a pioneer in providing services to people with AIDS at a time when the government provided no support. What began as four volunteers in a living room grew into an organization with a food bank, dental clinic, a 14-bed shelter (“Our House”), a transportation program, a hotline, an educational program and a system of case management.
With a budget of $8.2 million, APLA continues to operate as a volunteer-based organization with paid leadership. The organization is still adjusting from recent moves to replace several of its key paid positions and search for a new executive director.
January 4, 1989
LA Center Resurrects HIV Testing Program
The LA Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center (now the Los Angeles LGBT Center) finds an insurance carrier willing to cover HIV testing and other AIDS-related services at its Edelman Health Center.
Learn More.
The clinic was forced to shut down in December 1988 when Boston-based Lexington Insurance Co. pulled its coverage.
January 10, 1989
LA County Prohibits Discrimination against People with HIV/AIDS
On a 3-2 vote, the LA County Board of Supervisors tentatively approves an ordinance prohibiting employers, landlords, schools and businesses in the county’s unincorporated areas from discrimination based on AIDS.
January 11, 1989
56,000 Dead, No Mention of HIV/AIDS in President Reagan’s Farewell Address
In his farewell address to the nation, the president talks about his accomplishments and regrets during his eight years in office. He neglects to mention the AIDS crisis, which has claimed the lives of more than 56,000 people in the U.S.
Learn More.
Speaking from the Oval Office in the White House, President Ronald Reagan focused his farewell speech on the following topics:
In his speech, Reagan took credit for the country’s economic recovery from the 1981-82 recession and for raising the profile of the U.S. on the world stage. With underlying themes of global power, patriotism and “what it means to be an American,” Reagan spoke about many threats and challenges the country faced during his eight years in office. But he neglected to mention one of the biggest threats facing the U.S. population: the AIDS crisis.
From 1981 to 1989, a total of 26,223 people in the U.S. died of AIDS, and 102,706 people were diagnosed with HIV. More than 95% of those diagnosed with AIDS between 1981 and 1987 died. And on this day when Reagan left office, the U.S. was no closer than it was eight years ago to announcing a cure or vaccine.
From the start, the Reagan administration kept the new disease at arm’s length, avoiding any public acknowledgement of it. In the first years of the epidemic, researchers at the CDC referred to the disease in reports and media accounts as “Gay Related Immune Disorder,” or GRID, which caused many — including political operatives in the Reagan administration — to believe that this was an exclusively gay disease.
Some religious leaders used this as an opportunity to condemn homosexual activity and suggest that the disease was punishment. Jerry Falwell, founder of the ultra-conservative Moral Majority, proclaimed AIDS to be “the wrath of God upon homosexuals,” a view that spread into public opinion.
“The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children,” said Catholic columnist Patrick Buchanan, who would work in Reagan’s White House from 1985 to 1987.
Influenced by religious leaders and his own conservative advisors, Reagan decided that AIDS was a moral issue and one that would not impact his supporters — even after the CDC retitled the disease “AIDS” in September 1982 and started reporting on cases in populations outside the gay community.
“If ever there was a disease made for a Surgeon General, it was AIDS,” said Dr. Koop, who served two terms as U.S. Surgeon General under President Reagan.
According to the NIH, President Reagan and his domestic policy advisers held the view that homosexuals and intravenous drug users brought the disease upon themselves by engaging in conduct they deemed immoral. Those afflicted with the disease were, in their view, “in greater need of moral reform than of new health information or policies.”
From 1983 to 1985, Koop was excluded from the Executive Task Force on AIDS established by his immediate superior, Assistant Secretary of Health Edward Brandt. In advance of press conferences, Brandt instructed journalists to not ask Dr. Koop about AIDS and that the Surgeon General would not answer questions about it.
First Lady Nancy Reagan and her son, Ron Reagan Jr. both tried to convince the president to take a more active approach, according to Karen Tumulty, a political columnist for The Washington Post who wrote The Triumph of Nancy Reagan, in 2021.
“We’d start mentioning it, bringing it up as a topic, starting to get it into his head,” Ron Jr. was quoted in Tumulty’s book, which was excerpted in The Atlantic.
The First Lady knew more about the AIDS crisis than her husband, likely because she was kept informed by her son, a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet in New York City.
“I’m in New York; I’m dancing; I know people who are HIV-positive,” Ron Jr. told Tumulty. “Dancers, fashion designers, people like that. I would talk to her about people, how many people, who these people were. And she began to understand that this is a big deal. This is a crisis. She began to sense that pretending this isn’t happening is not a good way to go.”
In the summer of 1985, the epidemic hit close to home when actor Rock Hudson, a longtime friend of the Reagans, went to France to seek treatment for AIDS-related illnesses.
On July 24, Hudson’s publicist sent a telegram to the Reagans at the White House, asking for their help in getting Hudson admitted to the hôpital d’instruction des armées Percy (“Percy Training Hospital of the Armies”), a military hospital near Paris. The hospital had initially refused to admit Hudson because he was not a French citizen, according to various reports. The White House referred the matter to the U.S. embassy in France.
Months later, on September 17, 1985, President Reagan finally mentioned AIDS publicly when responding to a reporter’s question, calling it a “top priority.” He called for Congress to allocate $120 million in funding for AIDS research, and Congress responded by upping the budget to nearly $190 million.
On October 2, 1985, Hudson died of complications from AIDS at the age of 59. Amid growing calls from the public for Reagan to do more about the disease, the president began asking his White House physician to provide him with information about AIDS, according to Tumulty.
“Some of the president’s more conservative advisers contended that AIDS should be viewed as the consequence of moral decay rather than as a health issue,” Tumulty wrote. “Many of Reagan’s allies on the right were more concerned with identifying and isolating those who had AIDS than treating and caring for them.”
In February 1986, nearly five years after the outbreak of the epidemic, President Reagan finally instructed his Surgeon General to prepare a report on AIDS, according to the NIH tribute to Dr. Koop. During the next several months, Dr. Koop met with numerous groups and experts involved in the fight against AIDS. He sought input from leaders from organizations like the National Hemophilia Foundation and the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, and he also reached out to members of the medical research community, Christian fundamentalists, and hospitalized AIDS patients. He spent a considerable amount of time with Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the leader of AIDS research at the NIH.
Dr. Koop drafted the report in the basement of his home on the NIH campus, with only a handful of trusted staff members as advisers, including Fauci. According to the NIH, Dr. Koop sought to treat AIDS as a public health issue, and not as a moral issue.
Concerned that, if given the chance, Reagan’s domestic policy advisers would remove crucial public health information from the report, such as the advocacy of condom use, Dr. Koop would permit members of the Domestic Policy Council to review drafts of the report and then collect all the copies at the end of the meeting.
On October 22, 1986, Dr. Koop released Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome at a press conference. In his remarks, he emphasized that since education was the best strategy in preventing AIDS and since AIDS was spread primarily through sex, school children from grade three onward should receive sex education.
Members of Congress, public health organizations, and Parent-Teacher Associations would eventually distribute 20 million copies to the public. In plain language, the 36-page report discussed the nature of AIDS and ways in which people could protect themselves, including use of condoms and abstaining from sex.
Reagan’s conservative supporters expressed their shock and dismay at the explicit language in Dr. Koop’s AIDS report, and above all by Dr. Koop’s advocacy for sex education in elementary schools. They said they were outraged by the lack of moral censure in the report. They tried to appeal to Dr. Koop’s conservative views.
But Dr. Koop held firm. In his many speeches on AIDS in 1987-1988, Dr. Koop continued to dispense health advice. He also denounced discrimination against people living with AIDS, calling for fairness and compassion in the workplace, schools, housing, and insurance policies. He publicly denounced the idea of a quarantine for people living with AIDS, calling it unconstitutional and unnecessary from an epidemiological standpoint.
President Reagan continued to remain in the background, content to let Dr. Koop be the mouthpiece for the administration’s policy on AIDS. But the First Lady wanted Reagan to speak out more forcefully, according to Tumulty’s account in her Nancy Reagan biography.
Nancy Reagan believed that she could make this happen when film legend Elizabeth Taylor, whom Nancy had known for many years, asked if the president would give the keynote address at a fundraising dinner for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). The event was scheduled to be held in Washington, D.C. in late May 1987, the night before a large medical conference on AIDS.
At Nancy’s urging, the president accepted the invitation. And then, according to Tumulty, the First Lady recruited Landon Parvin, her favorite speechwriter, to write the keynote speech. But when Parvin tried to arrange a meeting with President Reagan and Dr. Koop to gather their thoughts on the speech, White House staff brought in conservative advisors to weigh in.
At one point, Dr. Koop advised the president to make it clear that AIDS could not be transmitted from swimming pools, telephones, mosquitoes, or food prepared by someone infected with HIV, and he was immediately countered by an advisor who claimed that “the jury is still out.” The meeting continued in this vein.
As the event grew near, conservative forces tried to influence the content of the president’s speech. When asked for his input on the latest draft, Robert Sweet, a senior member of the Domestic Policy Council, crossed out language that said victims of the disease should not be blamed, and wrote in the margin, “Homosexuals and drug users choose their lifestyle — it’s the innocent children, hemophiliacs, and unsuspecting spouses who are the victims.”
On May 31, 1987, President Reagan delivered the keynote address at the amfAR dinner before hundreds of people, some of whom were living with AIDS. His speech was repeatedly interrupted by catcalls and hissing.
In late June 1987, Reagan created the President’s Commission on the HIV Epidemic. But the 13-member panel nearly collapsed in its first few months because of poor leadership and internal feuding. Packed with conservatives whose views did not conform with mainstream scientific thinking about the disease, the commission also included Frank Lilly, an openly gay geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a board member of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and members of the medical community.
In the final year of Reagan’s presidency, policy and programs to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS forged slowly ahead as the infection rate grew exponentially.
In May 1988, Dr. Koop sent a condensed version of his AIDS report to every household in the United States. The distribution of 107,000,000 AIDS pamphlets was the largest mailing in American history and, to the horror of many conservatives, it was the first time that the federal government provided explicit sex information to the public.
Around this time, as the President’s Commission on the HIV Epidemic was preparing to release its report on the federal response to HIV/AIDS, the Reagans met, through a mutual friend, Elizabeth Glaser, the wife of TV star Paul Michael Glaser who had been infected with HIV through a blood transfusion. Glaser, who had not yet disclosed her HIV-positive status to the public, had two children who had also tested positive for HIV.
After Glaser told her story, President Reagan asked her what he should do. According to Tumulty’s account. Glaser said, “I want you to be a leader in the struggle against AIDS, so that my children, and all children, can go to school and continue to live valuable lives; so that no one with AIDS need worry about discrimination. Secondly, you have commissioned a report on the epidemic … I ask you to pay attention to that report.”
Two weeks later, the commission’s report was released. It cited a “distinct lack of leadership” from the federal government and issued 579 recommendations to the president ranging from allocating an annual $3 billion in funding to address the AIDS crisis to issuing human rights protections for people living with HIV/AIDS.
“It was a stunning repudiation of just about every aspect of the Reagan administration’s handling of AIDS, as well as a sweeping battle plan for how the nation might cope with the epidemic in coming years,” wrote Randy Shilts in his book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.
“We criticized the Reagan Administration, suggested attitudes and approaches not comfortable to its leaders, asked for monies that had not been authorized,” wrote Kristine M. Gebbie, who would go on to become President Bill Clinton’s national AIDS policy coordinator in 1993-1994. “It was probably too much to hope that there would be a sudden turn around.”
Despite his assurances to Elizabeth Glaser, President Reagan did not act on the report’s central recommendations.
“Time went by, and nothing happened,” Glaser wrote later. “It was almost unimaginable, but the White House took the report and put it on the shelf. Hope for thousands of Americans and people around the world sat gathering dust in some forgotten corner of some forgotten room.”
When Reagan left office on this day in 1989, he left behind the slashed budgets of public healthcare programs and a public largely bewildered by the nature of AIDS and the ways in which people could protect themselves. In the eight years he was president, a total of 56,223 people died of AIDS-related illness and 102,706 people were infected with HIV.
January 16, 1989
‘Ryan White Story’ Captivates TV Audiences
ABC’s The Ryan White Story, based on the true story of a 13-year-old hemophiliac from Indiana who contracts AIDS through a blood transfusion, airs nationwide to an audience of 15 million.
Learn More.
The TV drama depicts a young Ryan White (portrayed by Lukas Haas, who was nominated for an Emmy for the role) fighting back after being barred from attending school due to his AIDS diagnosis. Emmy-award-winning actor Judith Light starred as Ryan’s mother, Jeanne White.
Ryan White was featured in a cameo as another hemophiliac with AIDS. White would die of his illness about 15 months later, on April 8, 1990.
With its large viewership during “prime time,” The Ryan White Story was able to make a significant impact on how the public perceived issues around HIV/AIDS.
January 19, 1989
Claude Duvall — Founder of Noh Oratorio Society — Dies
Claude Duvall, a Bay Area patron of the arts who personally commissioned works with local composers and artists, dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 47.
Learn More.
A resident of San Francisco since 1973, Duvall founded the Noh Oratorio Society in 1981 to present little-heard musical compositions set to literary works, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
“Unique is the way to describe him,” wrote the Reporter. “No one ever spoke in those tones, dressed as he did, thought along his lines, or carved in the world so special a niche.”
The Noh Oratorio Society flourished in San Francisco during the 1980s, largely due to the dedication and creative direction of Duvall. Not only did he personally commission works for the Society, he served as calligrapher, actor, stage director, and litterateur for various productions. The Society’s wide range of artistic interests was grounded in the importance of the human voice and the use of language.
Among the Society’s productions were Michael McClure’s !The Feast! (1982), Chaucer’s Parlement of Fowles (1987), Edith Sitwell and William Walton’s Façade (1987), and Robert Duncan’s Faust Foutu in 1989. The musical-literary productions were presented in various venues in the Bay Area over the course of 15 years.
In 1987, the Society commissioned a concert of Ladies Voices, an opera set to words by Gertrude Stein with music by Charles Shere. Ladies Voices premeired at the Berkeley Art Center with sopranos Judy Ruth Hubbell and Anna Carol Dudley, and mezzo-soprano Marcia Gronewold.
On behalf of the Society, Duvall also published Noh Quarrter, a short-lived and highly admired literary magazine that promoted poetry, essays, short fiction, and experimental prose that was intended to be read aloud.
January 21, 1989
Protesters Hold Weeklong Vigil at LA County Medical Center
About 150 protesters hold a weeklong vigil in front of Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, which hospitalizes an average of 50-60 persons with AIDS at any given time and has a reported caseload of 6,240 PWAs.
Learn More.
Demontrators blast the facility’s inadequate care and treatment of PWAs, including misdiagnosis, miscalculated prescriptions, and insufficent capacity.
Demanding that the center create a 50-bed AIDS ward within six months, the activists stage a mock AIDS ward with cots and a soup kitchen, and then hold candlelight vigils at sunset.
In response, an aide to LA County Supervisor Mike Antonovich tells the Los Angeles Times that the County does not have enough money for expanded AIDS services.
On the seventh day of the protest, LA County Supervisor Ed Edelman, who represents West Hollywood and the Westside’s Third District, would come to the event and demand that the County begin to provide “necessary care” for people with AIDS.
Calling the revelation that LA County has more than $8 million of unspent AIDS funding “intolerable,” Supervisor Edelman promises to meet with ACT UP/LA and county officials.
“We can’t afford to keep the status quo,” he says.
But when he’s jeered by some in the crowd, he says, “It’s not just up to me,” and abruptly leaves.
January 21, 1989
NYT Fashion Columnist John Duka Dies
John Duka, a journalist who wrote with humor and grace about fashion and style, dies of AIDS-related illness in his Manhattan home at the age of 39.
Duka began his journalism career in the research department of Esquire magazine. He also worked for Simon and Schuster, Home Furnishings Daily and New York magazine before becoming a columnist at The New York Times.
As a NYT style reporter from 1979 to 1985, he brought a sharp eye and a leveling wit to the world of fashion. His weekly column, “Notes on Fashion,” documented the parallel rise of downtown chic and uptown hauteur, as well as the grand presentations of Paris and Milan. He treated fashion as ”an international sport,” from the punk parade on London’s King’s Road to the retro chic of Republican Washington.
A May 1984 column began: ”One of the requisite skills for sitting at a fashion show is being able to roll your eyes, talk to the person behind you, chew mints and say, ‘Yves Saint Laurent did it better years ago’ all at once.”
But Duka also interviewed celebrities like no one else could. In 1985, he published a very intimate portrait of film star Elizabeth Taylor, who had spent the previous year recovering from drug addiction and alcoholism. In 1984, Duka interviewed Sting, who revealed he was finding his transition from pop star to film actor to be terrifying.
Ruth La Ferla, fashion reporter for The New York Times, recalled: “The son of a Greek waiter, he had, in the course of a two-decade career as a reporter, ad man and public relations guru, fashioned a character, a wry, roguish admixture of Cary Grant and the Duke of Windsor. He was the devil in pinstripes, peppering his columns with the lacerating barbs and dishy mots that made them a must-read for the glitter set.”
Duka left The Times in 1985 to become a founding partner at Keeble Cavaco & Duka, a fashion publicity business that eventually became the most powerful fashion PR agency in the city. He continued to write for magazines like Vanity Fair, Elle and Interview, and he wrote a column, ”Duka’s Diary,” for HG magazine.
It has been speculated that Duka was the model for the character of Felix Turner, the closeted New York Times writer in Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart. Duka and Kramer were acquainted, but Kramer never confirmed that Duka was the inspiration for Felix.
“Larry never said to me, ‘This play is about John Duka,’ but some people did,” said Richard Kornberg, the publicist for the original Public Theater production in 1985. “And some of us just thought it.”
La Ferla, Duka’s former colleague at The Times, observed, “He retained a capacity for self-deprecation — much like Felix in the play.”
Just as in The Normal Heart, as Felix lies dying, he quips, “I should be wearing something white … It should be something Perry Ellis ran up for me personally.”
January 1989
Activist Michael Callen Defends Accusations with Proof
AIDS activist Michael Callen publishes in the People With AIDS Coalition Newsline a letter from his physician, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, and his pathology report of his Kaposi’s sarcoma diagnosis.
Learn More.
“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.
February 2, 1989
ACT UP Protests FDA Protocols for DHPG, Forcing Policy Reversal
ACT UP protests the FDA’s new protocols for the drug DHPG (Gancyclovir) that would deny many current DHPG users from continuing to access the drug.
Learn More.
The action results in the FDA granting access to DHPG under “compassionate use” while the agency reconsiders its methods.
The next day, the FDA would formally authorize pre-approval distribution of aerosolized pentamidine for the prevention of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), conceding to the demands of AIDS activist Michael Callen and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend.
February 7, 1989
Senate Hearings Examine Governmental Response to HIV/AIDS
Sen. Ted Kennedy, chair of the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, holds a series of five oversight hearings to examine how the federal government is combating AIDS.
Learn More.
Education, care, and drug development for HIV/AIDS are key areas of focus of the hearings.
The FDA, CDC, HERSA and Samuel Thier, president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, all testify.
February 10, 1989
Dancer-Choreographer James Tyler Dies
Dancer, singer and choreographer James Tyler — who soloed with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company and the Arnie Zane Company — dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 48.
Learn More.
Tyler also co-founded the men’s dance company Mangrove, and worked with Blake Street Hawkeyes and Ruth Zaporah.
Op-ed by ACT UP Exposes LA County Healthcare Failures
The Los Angeles Times publishes “Fumbling on AIDS Causes Waste, Suffering,” an op-ed by ACT UP Los Angeles members Peter Cashman, John Fall, and Enric Morello about the devistating failures of the LA County healthcare system.
Learn More.
“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.”
February 20, 1989
Doctor Skirts NIH Delay in PCP Treatment Protocol
When a CDC statistician tells AIDS activist Michael Callen that 30,534 Americans have died of AIDS-associated Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP), Callen’s physician responds with information indicating that many of these deaths could have been prevented with existing (but “unapproved”) treatment.
Learn More.
Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, Callen’s doctor, would later write about treatment to prevent PCP with “a drug that had been known to prevent this kind of pneumonia since 1977.”
The doctor would blame NIH Director Dr. Anthony Fauci for the delay in this treatment being available on a widespread basis, saying that Dr. Fauci “wanted data from a clinical trial of Bactrim for PCP prophylaxis in AIDS before he would recommend its use.”
Dr. Sonnabend says he refuses to wait for the NIH to collect data and reach its conclusions, revealing that he is already prescribing Bactrim (also known as Septra, Septrin or co-trimoxazole) and Dapsone to patients he routinely deems to be at risk for PCP, with positive results in his patients.
Years later, looking back at this time, Dr. Sonnabend would write: “People were dying of PCP at a terrifying rate; I and some other physicians could not wait for these recommendations.”
February 21, 1989
Jazz Great Miles Davis Publicly Denies Tabloid’s AIDS Claim
After the supermarket tabloid The Star publishes a story claiming Miles Davis “has AIDS,” the 62-year-old jazz icon releases a statement through his publicist saying the story is untrue.
Due to poor health, Davis had cancelled his winter tour and spent time in a hospital near his Santa Monica home, according to Davis biographer Quincy Troupe.
“I once asked [Davis] point-blank if he had AIDS, and he angrily denied it,” wrote Troupe in Miles: The Autobiography (1989). “I do know that he was always suffering
from bad cases of some mysterious flu-like virus that sometimes confined him to bed, without visitors. Also, a short time after the story in The Star appeared, when I asked him about some pills he was taking, he said they were AZT.”
A few years later, in June 1991, Davis made an appearance at the JVC Jazz Festival in New York, but he was unable to hit the notes his fans grew to expect from him. It would be his final appearance.
“Mr. Davis was incapable of sustaining more than a few notes at a time,” wrote New York Times music critic Peter Watrous. “The spareness seemed less an editorial decision than a decision handed down by physical constraints.”
Shortly before his death at the age of 65 on September 28, 1991, Davis denied being HIV positive in a SPIN magazine interview. The cause of Davis’ death was given as the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure, according to reporting in The New York Times.
February 23, 1989
Arsonist Destroys AIDS Center in Dallas
A petty criminal sets fire to the AIDS Resource Center, destroying the center as well as the offices of the Dallas Gay Alliance, an adjacent clothing store, and a popular country-western bar.
Learn More.
Dale Wesley Biddy, aged 26, broke into the offices of the AIDS Resource Center, located at 3920 Cedar Springs Road in Dallas, to steal the organization’s computer equipment. In what he later described as a “last minute decision,” Biddy lit two highway flares and placed them on stacks of paper before he fled, according to a historical account in The Dallas Way.
“The fire went to five or six alarms very quickly – one of the largest fires in Dallas history at that time,” William Waybourn recounted for The Dallas Way. During that year, Waybourn was president of the Dallas Gay Alliance.
“The fire department suspected arson from the very beginning, and (colleagues) Bill Hunt, John Thomas and I were all considered suspects and held for lengthy questioning by the arson investigators,” he said.
After the fire was put out, members of the Dallas Gay Alliance and the AIDS Resource Center surveyed the damage and immediately realized their computers were missing.
“Several months later we got a call from someone asking if we were the Dallas Gay Alliance, and we said yes,” Bruce Monroe, a member of the DGA, told The Dallas Way. “He said ‘We just bought a computer from someone and turned it on, and the computer’s welcome screen said Welcome to the Dallas Gay Alliance.'”
The caller was from Video Technical Institute, a local vocational school. Once VTI confirmed the computer was stolen property, the school turned it in to a local branch of the Dallas Police Department, and provided police with the name of the seller, Dale Wesley Biddy, who happened to be enrolled at the school. The police contacted Biddy in late May, asking him to come to the station for a police interview.
Biddy was a 26-year-old resident of nearby Carrollton and, ironically, gay. He had recently served time in prison for credit card fraud and passing bad checks, and the phone call from the police made him realize that he would likely be heading back to a jail cell.
Instead of going directly to the police, Biddy walked to the offices of the Dallas Voice, the local LGBTQ weekly newspaper, and presented its editors with a signed confession.
In his letter, Biddy apologized for setting the fire and expressed remorse for the damage he caused, estimated at $150,000 to the AIDS Resource Center alone, according to reporting in The Dallas Morning News.
The Resource Center was founded in 1983 as a response to the AIDS crisis escalating in the Dallas community. According to the center’s website, the center was created as the services branch of the Dallas Gay Political Caucus (later known as the Dallas Gay and Lesbian Alliance) and was initially called the Foundation for Human Understanding. The center’s focus was education and service, and a goal of achieving equality, recognition and equal rights for the gay and lesbian community in north Texas.
In 1985, the AIDS Resource Center was created to provide prevention education, legal services, a food pantry, clothing, household goods and emergency funding. Three years later, the center established the Nelson-Tebedo Health Clinic for treatment, clinical drug trials and HIV testing.
After the 1989 fire, the center would restore the Cedar Springs Road location to house the health clinic and food pantry, and move the rest of the organization to a former church on Reagan Street.
February 26, 1989
Madonna & Sanda Bernhard Join Dancefloor at APLA Fundraiser
Wearing sunglasses, a black jacket, a white tee shirt adorned with a huge cross, and denim shorts, iconic performer Madonna dances with the crowd and lesbian friend Sandra Bernhard at AIDS Project LA’s Dance-A-Thon at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
February 28, 1989
Pediatric Cases Grow to 1,440, with Blacks & Hispanics at 76%
The CDC identifies 1,440 AIDS cases among children under 13 years old, of whom 800 have died. Nearly 76% of the pediatric AIDS cases are black and Hispanic.
February 28, 1989
AIDS Anthem ‘Love Don’t Need a Reason’ Released
AIDS activist and singer Michael Callen releases his album, “Purple Heart.”
Learn More.
The album features the song “Love Don’t Need a Reason,” an AIDS anthem Callen co-writes with Marsha Malamet and Peter Allen.
“I feel compelled to get the message out: AIDS is not an excuse to give up on love,” Callen tells Gay LA Times health reporter Victor Zonana.
* * * *
Lyrics for “Love Don’t Need a Reason”:
If your heart always did
What a normal heart should do
If you always play a part
Instead of being who you really are
Then you might just miss
The one who’s standing there
So instead of passing by
Show him that you care
Instead asking why
Why me? And why you?
Why not we two?
‘Cause love don’t need a reason
Love don’t always rhyme
And love is all we have for now
What we don’t have is time
If we always believe
All the madness that we’re taught
Never questioning the rules
Then we’re living lies we bought so long ago
How are they to know?
It’s not who’s wrong or right
It’s just another way
And I don’t wanna fight
But know I’m gonna stay with you till the end
With you my friend
‘Cause love don’t need a reason
Love don’t always rhyme
And love is all we have for now
What we don’t have is time
I’ll hold you close
Time can’t tear us apart
Forever, I will stand by you
We’ve got to start with the beat of one heart
Together, we will see this through
‘Cause love don’t need a reason
Love’s never a crime
And love is all we have for now
What we don’t have
What we don’t have is time
March 1989
WHO Estimates Total AIDS Cases Worldwide at 400,000
Reported AIDS cases total 142,000 in 145 countries. However, the World Health Organization estimates that there are as many as 400,000 cases worldwide.
March 9, 1989
Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe Dies
Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, known for his erotic, sometimes controversial works, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 42.
Learn More.
In the mid-1970s, as the NYC music scene gave rise to New Wave, Mapplethorpe created austere black-and-white album covers for Patti Smith and the group Television.
He credited his close friend Smith with helping embolden the homosexuality of his early photographic images that dealt with sexual audacity — from sadomasochistic scenes with chains and black leather to an oversized image of male genitals resting atop a pedestal — and that were produced on a large scale.
Soon he would join Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine as a staff photographer, and draw attention for his flattering celebrity portraits.
Despite his diagnosis in 1986 with AIDS, he accelerates his creative efforts, broadens the scope of his photographic inquiry, and accepts increasingly challenging commissions. The Whitney Museum of American Art would mount Mapplethorpe’s first major American museum retrospective in 1988, one year before his death.
The tragic news that Mapplethorpe is ill coincides with the zenith of his critical acclaim as a photographer.
“In my experience, even the most optimistic artists are unable to keep the pain and sadness of AIDS from occasionally surfacing in their art,” writes Paul Martineau, associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
“Mapplethorpe was no exception,” Martineau continues. “While studying his photographs, I noticed a perceptible shift in the emotional tone of his self-portraits occurred in 1986: the year he was diagnosed with AIDS. In 1988, while the disease wreaked havoc on his body, Mapplethorpe used the camera as a means of taking artistic control over what was happening to him.”
In February 1989, Mapplethorpe would speak openly to Vanity Fair contributor Dominick Dunne.
“I’m quite frustrated I’m not going to be around to enjoy [my success],” Mapplethorpe tells Dunne. “The money’s coming in, though. I’m making more money now than I’ve ever made before.”
In his feature on Mapplethorpe, Dunne writes about how the photographer’s health status had become the topic of speculation in January 1987, when New York aristocrat and art collector Sam Wagstaff died of AIDS-related illness.
“Mapplethorpe, the principal inheritor of Sam Wagstaff’s fortune, had once been Wagstaff’s lover and later, for years, his great and good friend,” Dunne writes.
Mapplethorpe tells Dunne that he has two nurses on twelve-hour shifts that cost him $1,000 a day and he has been on AZT for two years. He expresses concern about friends who are facing the same illness with fewer financial resources, specifically his black friends.
“Most of the blacks don’t have insurance and therefore can’t afford AZT,” he says. “They all died quickly, the blacks. If I go through my Black Book, half of them are dead.”
The year before his death, Mapplethorpe establishes the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to fund HIV/AIDS research. In its early years, the Foundation created medical facilities and programs, including the Robert Mapplethorpe Laboratory for AIDS Research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, the Robert Mapplethorpe Residential Treatment Facility at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Center for HIV Research at St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York.
Serving as the first president on its board of trustees, he established mandates of furthering the recognition of photography as an art form having the same respect as painting and sculpture and supporting AIDS and HIV medical research.
In late winter 1989, Mapplethorpe is in Boston for a medical treatment when his condition worsens, according to Susan Arthur of the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City, which represents the artist.
He died at New England Deaconess Hospital at the age of 42. His body was cremated and his ashes are interred at St. John’s Cemetery, Queens in New York City, at his mother’s grave-site, etched “Maxey.”
In 2011, the Mapplethorpe Foundation would donate its archive to the Getty Research Institute and give a collection of artworks to the J. Paul Getty Museum in partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Richard R. Hamilton, M.D., one of San Francisco’s first openly gay general practitioners, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in Orange, California. He was 44.
Learn More.
Affectionately called “Dr. Dick” by his clients, Dr. Hamilton authored The Herpes Book (1980) and was well-known for his expertise in treating sexually transmitted diseases in gay men. He fostered a professional climate in his office of understanding, acceptance and support, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
When AIDS appeared in the Bay Area, Dr. Hamilton responded by focusing on finding effective treatments for AIDS-related illnesses. He was one of the founding members of the County Community Consortium, an organization of local AIDS care providers. He also was a member of the State of California’s AIDS Advisory Committee and the AIDS Advisory Committee of Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center.
March 11, 1989
Chasen Gaver, Washington DC Poet, Dies
Poet and performance artist Chasen Gaver dies of AIDS-related illness at his Washington, DC home. He was 35.
Learn More.
Chasen Gaver was best known for his performance work that combined poetry readings with theatrical touches such as costumes, lighting and sound effects. Gaver had given performances in more than 100 locations in the Washington, DC area since moving there in the mid-1970s, according to The Washington Post.
In early 1988, he and Washington artist Judy Byron put on the show In Common: Arlington County Observed at the Arlington Arts Center. The show, which celebrated the ethnic and cultural melting pot of Arlington, Virginia, featured recorded poems by Gaver set against murals and paintings by Byron. Among Gaver’s poems included in the production were “Personality Cult,” “Daddy!” and “Jumping to Conclusions.”
Gaver had also collaborated on shows with jazz pianists, dancers and actors, and spent three years teaching his performance poetry technique to junior high students in DC public schools.
In addition to his literary career, Gaver worked as a paralegal for the Federal Trade Commission until 1987 and received the FTC’s award for distinguished service. He contributed articles and reviews to The Washington Blade, and was a member of Black Artists/White Artists, Black and White Men Together, and the National Organization for Women.
March 1989
West Hollywood Settles HIV Discrimination Lawsuit
The City of West Hollywood settles an HIV/AIDS discrimination case brought by Paul Jasperson, who filed suit against the city and Jessica’s Nail Salon two months earlier, alleging HIV discrimination.
Learn More.
Jaserson’s civil action against the salon, a test case for the West Hollywood’s new HIV discrimination ordinance, is on appeal, with support from Los Angeles, Santa Monica and the American Civil Liberties Union.
March 17, 1989
TV-Film Actor Merritt Butrick Dies
‘Star Trek’ film actor Merritt Butrick dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 29.
“I’m part of a legend,” said Butrick about his work on the Star Trek films. “I gave what I had to give at the right time and place for my own personal gratification. I look at my resume at this point and it reminds me of how well I’ve done in the few years I’ve done it.”
Butrick had just been cast in ST II after starting work as a regular on the short-lived but critical and cult favorite 1982 “new wave” high school series Square Pegs, playing Johnny “Slash” Ulasewicz opposite an equally young Sarah Jessica Parker and Jamie Gertz.
At the time of his death, he had recently received critical praise on stage for his role as a male prostitute in the play Kingfish.
March 19, 1989
Mike Rasfeld, Chicago Recording Artist, Dies
Michael “Mike” Rasfeld, a Chicago recording artist who created the ultimate hang-out for the music community, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 37.
Learn More.
Rasfeld started the Acme recording studio in 1973, and in the years that followed, he became an important link among people in the Chicago performing arts scene.
“I first met Michael Rasfeld in 1971, when he was running sound and lights for the Godzilla Rainbow Troupe at the old Kingston Mines Theater,” wrote Albert Williams for the Chicago Reader.
An unofficial offshoot of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York, Godzilla Rainbow Troupe was pursuing a pansexual, fantastical, outrageous style of theater and served as a launching pad for several of Chicago’s most distinctive talents.
Rasfeld’s recording studio, located in a storefront in the Lakeview neighborhood, achieved some notoriety in 1983 when it produced the novelty song “The Curly Shuffle” by Jump’n The Saddle.
Rasfeld attended a live show of Jump’n The Saddle, where the audience went wild for their song “The Curly Shuffle.” He offered to record and co-produce the song and release it on Acme Records, according to the Mike Rasfeld website.
Once recorded, Rasfeld pushed “The Curly Shuffle” to Chicago radio stations and almost instantly it became the Number 1 record in the city. By November, it was the Number 15 song in the U.S.
Then Atlantic Records signed Jump’n the Saddle to an album deal, and Acme was booked to work on the album. Rasfeld also went on tour with the band to be their sound technician. But when it became apparent that there were no more novelty hits on the album, Atlantic decided not to promote the tour or the album.
Still, the advance from Atlantic gave Rasfeld some financial relief for his business. Better yet, he was able to bring notable musicians — including Pinetop Perkins, Magic Slim, and Dizzy Gillespie — into Acme to record.
In 1988, Rasfeld invested in CD mastering technology and became the only studio in Chicago able to make the special audio master for CD’s. The same year, he began teaching a recording class at the studio for Columbia College.
That was also the year Rasfeld was diagnosed with AIDS. His last project was a jazz record by veteran Second City music director Fred Kaz.
March 20, 1989
Visual AIDS Founder William Olander Dies
William Olander, the senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, dies of AIDS-related illness in Minneapolis at the age of 38.
Learn More.
Olander arrived at the New Museum in 1985, and specialized in performance art and video, especially post-modernist language and theory.
Olander’s 1986 exhibition “Homovideo: Where We are Now” included several videos responding to the spreading of the AIDS virus. In 1987, he invited the group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to present an installation in the museum’s window on Broadway near Prince Street.
ACT UP’s artist group, Gran Fury, responded to the opportunity with “Let the Record Show.” The exhibit juxtaposed information and statistics on AIDS with indifferent, callous or manipulative responses to the epidemic from national figures, all bathed in the glow of a neon sign that proclaimed “SILENCE = DEATH.”
In 1988, Olander and three friends founded Visual AIDS, the only contemporary arts organization dedicated to raising AIDS awareness by producing and presenting visual art projects, exhibitions, public forums and publications — while assisting artists living with HIV/AIDS. Visual AIDS was one of the first national initiatives to record the impact of the AIDS pandemic on the artistic community.
Olander lived in New York but had returned to Minneapolis to be with his family during the last months of his life. His longtime companion, Christopher Cox, would die 18 months later, on September 7, 1990.
Olander’s name on the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt reads: “Let the record show that there are many in the community of art and artists who choose not to be silent in the 1980s.”
To honor Olander’s ongoing legacy, Visual AIDS presents the “Bill Olander Award” annually to artists living with HIV.
Pop star Madonna includes a leaflet titled “The Facts about AIDS” in the sleeve of her album Like a Prayer.
Learn More.
The leaflet, which described HIV/AIDS as “an equal opportunity disease,” delivered straight-forward information for everyone to consider, such as: “People with AIDS – regardless of their sexual orientation – deserve compassion and support, not violence and bigotry.”
This was followed by three simple facts on how you could get infected with HIV, and then an equally simple message urging her fans to use condoms.
Like A Prayer was Madonna’s fourth studio album and it was considered her most introspective release to date, a “confessional album.” The album received universal acclaim from music critics and fans, but the inclusion of the safe sex pamphlet was considered controversial, according to In magazine.
Luckily, Madonna seemed to thrive in controversy, and the sly move only strengthened her bond with the gay and trans communities.
With roots in the dance world, Madonna had already lost a number of close friends to AIDS by this time, including her best friend and former roommate Martin Burgoyne. In August 1986, Burgoyne was diagnosed with AIDS-related complex (ARC), as it was called then. Madonna said that as Burgoyne’s health declined, she helped care for him, paid his medical expenses at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and leased an apartment for him close to his medical caregivers, according to Attitude magazine.
She said she will never forget how, on November 30, 1986, she held Burgoyne’s hand while he died. He was only 23 years old.
“Madonna would ultimately teach me more about sex than I ever learned at school,” wrote Savas Abadsidis in HIV Plus magazine in 2018. “It’s probably hard for younger folks to recall a world where Madonna didn’t exist — so it’s equally hard for them to understand what an indelible impact she had.”
April 7, 1989
Bay Area Classical Singer Elwood Thornton Dies
Elwood Thornton, a baritone who performed with Oakland Symphony, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 45.
Learn More.
Thornton also sang with the San Jose Symphony, and performed at the Midsummer Mozart Festival and other local classical music events.
First HIV-information Center Opens in West Hollywood
The nation’s first HIV-information center opens at the West Hollywood Library, offering access to current, accurate and often expensive materials about AIDS treatment and prevention.
Learn More.
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.
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.
April 18, 1989
Ron Rose, WeHo Activist Who Founded Being Alive, Dies
Ron Rose, founder of a life-embracing support group for people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles. He was 37.
Learn More.
After Rose became dismayed at the frustration and hopelessness that was the focus of many AIDS support groups, he founded Being Alive, an organization that encouraged members to celebrate what life was left to himself and other HIV-positive patients.
Diagnosed with HIV in 1985, Rose also served as a member of the City of West Hollywood’s Gay and Lesbian Advisory Task Force, appointed by then-mayor Abbe Land.
Rose founded the West Hollywood Annual Candlelight AIDS Vigil and Rally, and was co-chairman of the National Association of People with AIDS, a member of the board of directors of Aid for AIDS and coordinator of the 1989 Heart to Heart National Conference.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Rose described the goal of Being Alive was “getting people that were being isolated back doing things.”
Community members would gather for a memorial service at Plummer Park in West Hollywood the following Sunday.
Winner of the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the Broadway hit A Chorus Line, James Kirkwood Jr. dies in his Manhattan apartment of AIDS-related illness at the age of 64.
Learn More.
Born in 1924 to a Hollywood acting family, Kirkwood followed his parents into show business at the age of 14. He appeared in dozens of plays and films, pausing only to serve a three-year stint in the U.S. Coast Guard. He performed on stage in Panama Hattie and Wonderful Town, and played opposite Tallulah Bankhead in Welcome Darlings.He also had roles in the films Mommie Dearest, Oh, God, Book II, and The Supernaturals.
Together with Nicholas Dante, Kirkwood wrote the text for A Chorus Line (1975), which became one of the longest-running musicals in the history of Broadway. He also wrote the comedy, Legends, in which Mary Martin and Carol Channing toured in 1986 and 1987.
Just before his death, he had finished a nonfiction book about his experiences, entitled Diary of a Mad Playwright.
A memorial service was held for Kirkwood at the Shubert Theater, 225 West 44th Street, on June 1, 1989.
Gay Rights Activist and Political Operative Peter Scott Dies
Peter Scott, a champion of gay rights, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Los Angeles home. He was 50.
Learn More.
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.
June 1989
Virgil Pearson-Smith, Dancer with Metropolitan Opera, Dies
Virgil Pearson-Smith, a dancer with the New York Metropolitan Opera Ballet, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Pearson-Smith performed with Dance Spectrum during the 1970s and then moved to New York to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera Ballet.
In 1981, during the peak of his talent, Pearson-Smith danced in Parade: An Evening of French Music Theater, a ballet choreographed by Grey Veredon to music by Erik Satie.
“Parade must be the most unlikely smash-hit production ever seen at the Metropolitan Opera,” gushed New York magazine.
With sets designed by David Hockney, direction by John Dexter, and performances by a large ensemble cast, the production surprised and thrilled New York audiences.
Christopher Bernau, who was one of the first openly gay actors in the world of TV soap operas, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 49.
Learn More.
Most famous for his role as Alan Spaulding on Guiding Light, Bernau delighted audiences with his portrayal of a complex villain with the “vices of the middle class” and “virtues of industrial America.”
Bernau trained in the drama department at the University of California Santa Barbara before getting his big break, appearing in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s 1962 production of Antony and Cleopatra. In 1964, he joined the national tour of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
These roles, in addition to performing at Canada’s Stratford Festival, led to an appearance in a story arc on cult Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows from 1969 to 1970. On the show, he created the role of Philip Todd and appeared in 22 episodes.
His most famous role, however, was that of villain Alan Spaulding on the soap opera Guiding Light, a role he played from 1977 to 1984 and again from 1986 until shortly before his death in 1989. Bernau began performing on Guiding Light in 1977 while he was still in the Cherry Lane Theatre production of The Passion of Dracula. In the comic take on the vampire tale, Bernau performed the title role and was credited by The New York Times as achieving “a fine. balance between the awesome and the ridiculous.”
Bernau continued to work on Guiding Light for as long as he could after being diagnosed with AIDS.
Two weeks after his death, cast members held a memorial service for Bernau in Manhattan. On Friday, July 13, 1989, the closing credits of that day’s episode of Guiding Light included a tribute to Bernau and his work.
June 16, 1989
CDC Issues Treatment Guidelines for PCP Prevention
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issues the first guidelines for preventing Pneumocystis cariniipneumonia, known as PCP, an infection which often leads to the severe illness and death for people living with AIDS.
Learn More.
The guidelines recommend a regimen of two compounds to prevent the onset of PCP: trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and pentamidine. The CDC bases its recommendations on a study of 60 adults living with AIDS, which suggest that those who received treatment have fewer episodes of PCP and lived longer, compared with untreated patients.
Trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, a combination of the antibiotics sulfamethoxazole and trimethoprim, commonly causes side effects in patients that include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and loss of appetite.
Pentamidine, given as an aerosol in a nebulizing device, commonly causes adverse effects including coughing, difficulty breathing, difficulty swallowing, and chest pain or congestion.
The Public Health Service recommends physicians to start this treatment with:
any HIV-infected adult patient who has already had an episode of PCP, and
those whose CD4+ cell count is less than 200/mm3 (or less than 20% of total lymphocytes).
CD4+ cells would soon be referred to as “T-helper” or “T4 cells,” because one of their main goals is to send signals to other kinds of immune cells, which then destroy infectious particples.
Patients with CD4+ cell counts of less than 100/mm3 (or less than 10%), as well as patients with oral thrush or persistent fever, are at particularly high risk for PCP, the report states.
According to HIV.gov, a healthy T cell count should be between 500 and 1,600 T cells per cubic millimeter of blood (cells/mm3).
June 21, 1989
Geoff Mains — Author of ‘Urban Aboriginals’ — Dies
Geoff Mains — author of Urban Originals, a ground-breaking book about the leather community — dies of AIDS-related illness at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco at the age of 42.
Learn More.
Mains drew on his extensive knowledge of anthropology and human psychology, as well as his own sexual and social experiences, to present a sex-positive and intimate look at the leather community.
“Urban Aboriginals was an instant classic the moment it appeared in the spirng of 1984,” wrote Mark Thompson of Daedalus Publishing, which issued the third edition of book in 2002.
“Its author was a little known Canadian writer, Geoff Mains, who wove an audacious mix of theory and lived experience to explain the gay male leather scene. Mains introduced the notion of endorphins, recently discovered opium-like chemicals in the central nervous system, as a critical component of S/M sexuality. He furthered his insight by linking the social behaviors of this little understood subculture to the tribal rites of indigenous societies around the world. parts biochemistry lesson, anthropological study, and candid journalism, the book opened a gateway of revelation that is still being felt to this day.”
After completing Urban Aboriginals in 1984, Mains settled in San Francisco and wrote stories and articles for Drummer magazine. His 1989 novel, Gentle Warriors, would be his final work.
“Mains shed bright and positive light on areas of human experience previously kept in the dark by society’s sexual taboos,” wrote the Bay Area Reporter. “His message has done much to combat the ignorance and fear that cloud issues of radical sexuality, and has brought self-respect, hope and a sense of community to leather-identified people worldwide.”
Prior to settling in San Francisco, he was a faculty member in the Forestry Department of the University of British Columbia. There, he worked closely with environmental groups in Canada and the U.S. He received a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Toronto.
CDC Updates Guidelines on Transmission Prevention for Healthcare Workers
The Centers for Disease Control releases updated guidelines to help prevent the transmission of HIV and Hepatitis to healthcare and public safety workers.
Learn More.
The guidelines are a response to recently enacted legislation, the “AIDS Amendments of 1988” in the HOPE Act of 1988, passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan on Nov. 4, 1988.
The legislation calls for the Secretary of Health and Human Services, acting through the Director of the CDC, to “develop, issue, and disseminate guidelines to all health workers, public safety workers (including emergency response employees) … concerning methods to reduce the risk in the workplace of becoming infected with the etiologic agent for AIDS, and circumstances under which exposure to such etiologic agent may occur.”
The report states that, as of September 1988, a total of 3,182 (5.1%) of the 61,929 adults reported to be living with AIDS are employed in a healthcare setting. Of the healthcare workers with AIDS, the means of HIV acquisition is “undetermined” for 5% of them (169 workers), suggesting that infection occurred in the workplace.
Of these 169 health-care workers with AIDS, 44 are interviewed directly or have other background information available about their cases. The occupations of these 44 are:
nine nursing assistants
eight physicians, four of whom are surgeons
eight housekeeping or maintenance workers
six nurses
four clinical laboratory technicia)ns
two respiratory therapists
one dentist
one paramedic
one embalmer
four others who did not have contact with patients
Eighteen of these 44 health-care workers report parenteral (i.e., not delivered via the intestinal tract) and/or other non-needle-stick exposure to blood or other body fluids from patients in the 10 years preceding their diagnosis of AIDS. None of the exposures involve a patient with AIDS or known HIV infection.
June 25, 1989
Stephen Hassenfeld, CEO of Hasbro Toys, Dies
Stephen D. Hassenfeld, the chief executive officer of Hasbro who restored the company’s reputation as the world’s largest toy manufacturer, dies of HIV-related illness at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. He was 47 years old.
Learn More.
Hasbro’s domination of the toy manufacturing field in the 1980s was attributed to Hassenfeld’s aggressive acquisition of other toy manufacturers, such as Milton Bradley, Playskool, Child Guidance toys, and Coleco Industries, the maker of Cabbage Patch dolls.
The company’s success was also based in large part on the success of its G.I Joe line of 3½-inch plastic soldiers and of Transformers, toys that converted from vehicles to robots.
Hassenfeld was the first-born son who became Hasbro’s chief executive after his father died in 1980, according to Family Business magazine. Over the course of a decade, he would build Hasbro into the largest toy manufacturer in the world, rated #1 by Forbes.
“Hasbro had also cultivated the casual culture of a family business in style as well as fact — the kind of company where executives wear open-collared sport shirts to the office, and where employees are invited to Hassenfeld weddings and bar mitzvahs and given financial help for sickness, college bills, or family problems,” wrote Dan Rottenberg of Family Business magazine.
In late July 1987, Hassenfeld’s declining health forced him to miss ten weeks of work, and he did what he could to manage the company from his New York apartment. He returned to the office in October, announcing that he had endocarditis, a heart condition, and was fully recovered.
Over the course of the next year, however, Hassenfeld took steps to protect the company in the event that he should die. Most significantly, Hassenfeld and his brother Alan reorganized the company’s management structure in December 1988, just six months before Hassenfeld’s death.
When Hassenfeld was hospitalized in May 1989, Hasbro stock shot up in heavy trading amid rumors that the company would be sold. Alan Hassenfeld summoned an emergency board meeting and vowed to maintain the company’s family identity, according to Family Business magazine.
Within two weeks of Stephen Hassenfeld’s death, the board elected Alan to succeed him as chairman and CEO.
“My brother taught me a lot — probably almost everything I know about this business,” Alan told Family Business magazine. “This isn’t meant to sound hokey, but many times if I’m trying to think a situation out, I’ll still sit and talk to my brother. In some cases, I don’t totally admit that my brother’s not here.”
Stephen Hassenfeld’s legacy continues with the charitable organizations he established during his lifetime: the Hasbro Charitable Trust, Hasbro Children’s Foundation, and the Stephen D. Hassenfeld Children’s Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders, according to Ken Gault of Think Queerly.
June 26, 1989
Chief Researcher Calls for Access to Experimental Treatment
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), endorses giving HIV-positive people who do not qualify for clinical trials access to experimental treatments.
Learn More.
In a front-page article by Gina Kolata in The New York Times, Dr. Fauci calls for a new system that would allow patients far greater access to experimental drugs.
This marks a major turnaround in government policy, which restricts access to experimental drugs with the reasoning that patients would have no reason to join a clinical trial if they could get a drugs by other means.
Since his early involvement in developing treatment for HIV/AIDS, Dr. Fauci had adhered to the National Institutes of Health policy that research need not focus on the immediate welfare of patients.
“It was clear to me that Fauci was inclined to enforce the paternalistic medical tradition in which he had trained: doctors and scientists were unquestioned authorities, and drug development had to follow a rigid process that included animal testing and rigorous clinical trials. Otherwise, the benefits and the risks of these drugs could not be adequately assessed,” writes Michael Specter in his profile of Dr. Fauci for The New Yorker in April 2020. Specter covered the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post in the 1980s.
AZT (azidothymidine) was the only approved drug available to treat HIV/AIDS, but it had harsh side effects. When new clinical studies began, involving cocktails of AZT and similar compounds, tens of thousands of people asked to participate. But volunteers were rejected if they used other experimental drugs. And many more didn’t have the means to get to facilities and practitioners conducting the clinical trials.
“They started becoming amazingly iconoclastic and confrontational, and that scared the hell out of the scientists, who were fundamentally quite conservative,” Dr, Fauci tells Specter in The New Yorker profile. “When they were demonstrating on the NIH campus, disrupting Wall Street, disrupting St. Patrick’s Cathedral, instead of listening to them, scientists withdrew.”
However, Dr, Fauci decided to look beyond the activists’ furious rhetoric and style, and began to listen to what they had to say.
“And what they were saying made absolutely perfect sense,” Dr. Fauci says.
Faced with mounting evidence that his cautious approach made no sense, he reversed himself and promoted activist demands for more access to experimental treatments.
In the process, “Fauci transformed from a conventional bench scientist into a public-health activist who happened to work for the federal government,” writes Specter.
June 28, 1989
Rep. Dannemeyer Reads ‘What Homosexuals Do’ into Congressional Record
Given permission to address the U.S. House of Representatives for one minute on the subject of “Homosexuality,” Rep. William E. Dannmeyer commences on an hours-long diatribe about “the gay agenda.”
Learn More.
Apparently upset that gay men are attempting to “delude the public into viewing homosexuality as an innocuous alternative lifestyle,” the six-term Republican Congressman from Orange County, California insisted on reading into the Congressional Record his statement titled “What Homosexuals Do.”
In his statement, Rep. Dannemeyer dove into graphic descriptions of the sex acts he believes all gay men engage in “two or three times a week.” He contrasted these sex acts with the traditional family values he equated to “the heterosexual ethic” evoked in biblical scripture.
He also denied scientific research that indicated that homosexuality is inherent in individuals from birth and advocated for laws that prohibit homosexual sex acts. In Dannemeyer’s view, homosexuality is, psychologically, a “deep pathology,” but one that can in effect be cured because “counseling can steer people away from that lifestyle.”
He closed his very long statement with the following:
“As long as I have the pleasure to serve in the U.S. Congress, I will con- tinue to affirm the heterosexual ethic at every turn, with every subtly, with every bit of imagery I can conjure, with the help of good people across this Nation, as well as with the help of a majority of my colleagues in Congress, and also by the grace of God.”
Dannemeyer’s speech drew fire from several of his colleagues, including Rep. Andrew Jacobs Jr. (D-Ind.), who found it “unspeakable.”
Eric Rosenthal, political director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, told the Washington Post, “Dannemeyer has opposed every single public health consensus about fighting AIDS from every responsible public health official, from (former surgeon general C. Everett) Koop to the AIDS commission to the National Academy of Sciences. Dannemeyer has been on the other side from day one.”
Rosenthal expressed hopefulness that the majority federal legislators were not like Dannemeyer and would support legislation that funds AIDS research and services.
“People like Dannemeyer and (Senator Jesse) Helms intimidate their colleagues into voting against us, but most members know that’s not what they ought to do, and they really go out of their way to avoid being homophobic,” Rosenthal said. “I think there’s an underlying sense of fairness in the American people. They don’t necessarily understand lesbians and gays very well, but deep down is a strong opposition to discrimination.”
Washington Post, “Out of the Cloakroom: The Anti-Gay Crusade” by Phil McCombs, January 25, 1990
July 25, 1989
Studio 54 Creator Steve Rubell Dies
Steve Rubell, co-founder of the world-famous Studio 54 nightclub, dies at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York at the age of 45.
Learn More.
Owning and operating Studio 54 in Manhattan from its opening on April 26, 1977 until 1979, Rubell and his business partner Ian Schrager hosted celebrities, society figures and crowds of clubbers. The nightclub became the global epicenter of the disco craze and featured live appearances by music stars like Grace Jones, Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor.
The venue’s location at 254 West 54th Street was an opera house in the 1920s, and then became a television studio in the 1950s and 1960s, housing productions of the game show Password and the children’s show Captain Kangaroo.
The space was converted into the world’s most famous nightclub by Rubell and Schrager, who met while attending Syracuse University. Behind the scenes, public relations expert Carmen D’Alessio lured celebrities she knew from the fashion industry to come to Studio 54 and play. With connections like Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote, D’Alessio built a buzz around the club that drew attention from the media and throngs of young people hoping to cross the velvet ropes into a world where anything could happen.
Rubell often worked the club’s front door, selectively admitting celebrities and spurning others queued outside. In January 1980, Mr. Rubell and Schrager were sentenced to 3½ years in prison for tax evasion, but they reduced their sentences by turning in several other club owners. They sold Studio 54 shortly after their release from prison in January 1991, and then opened a new club, the Palladium, which would become just as popular.
In the film Studio 54 The Documentary, Rubell’s brother, Dr. Donald Rubell, said, “I was the one who told him he had AIDS.”
Dr. Rubell recalled that his brother had “vague symptoms” of HIV infection, and so he administered the test.
“You have to remember at that time AIDS wasn’t a disease,” he says. “It was a condemnation. So he wouldn’t let me tell our parents.”
Rubell’s funeral at the Riverside Chapel on Amsterdam Avenue and 76th Street would be attended by some of his most famous patrons, including Calvin Klein and Keith Haring. His body is buried at Beth Moses Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.
Race car driver Tim Richmond dies of AID-related illness at the age of 34.
Learn More.
One of auto racing’s brightest stars, Richmond is the inspiration behind much of the film Days of Thunder, starring Tom Cruise.
The 1980 Indianapolis 500 rookie of the year, Richmond was involved in an Indy car crash where his car was sliced in two at Michigan International Speedway, and was persuaded to switch to stock cars. By 1986, Richmond would win seven races in three months.
Shortly after his most victorious season, Richmond would suffer a near-fatal bout of pneumonia and receive a diagnosis of HIV-positive. Still, Richmond would regain his health enough in 1987 to return to NASCAR for an eight-race run that brought him wins at Pocono and Riverside, California.
Unaware of his illness, other drivers accused Richmond of being a drug user and persuaded NASCAR to test him. When drug tests were inconclusive, NASCAR asked to see Richmond’s medical records. Richmond refused and filed a defamation suit against NASCAR that was settled out of court when it was ruled that his medical records were relevant to the case.
In 1988, NASCAR would suspend Richmond for what the organization said was violation of its drug policy. Although NASCAR later lifted the ban, Richmond would never drive again.
According to the film Tim Richmond: To the Limit, Richmond spent his final days in seclusion. After Richmond’s death, numerous women would claim that he infected them with the AIDS virus.
Amanda Blake — TV’s Miss Kitty on ‘Gunsmoke’ — Dies
Actress Amanda Blake, best known for the TV role of the red-haired saloon proprietress “Miss Kitty Russell” on Gunsmoke, dies of AIDS-related illness at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento. She was 60.
Learn More.
Blake, who was born Beverly Louise Neill in 1929, had suffered from AIDS symptoms for about a year. Her doctor, Lou Nishimura, M.D., told the New York Times that he did not know how she had contracted the disease.
Although Dr. Nishimura listed AIDS as the cause of Blake’s death, it was not made public. When when Blake’s will declared her entire estate, $400,000, be given to the non-profit organization PAWS (Performing Animal Welfare Society), members of Blake’s family contested the will in court and tried to prove Blake was mentally incompetent.
Pat Derby, who oversaw the PAWS preserve in Sacramento for unwanted performing animals, feared that the legal fight would cause the true circumstances of Blake’s death to be twisted in the media, so she released the AIDS story herself to People magazine.
The year before her death, Blake moved to the 20-acre animal preserve to live with Derby and devote her life to working with their animals.
CDC reports that the number of reported AIDS cases in the United States has reached 100,000.
September 7, 1989
Fashion Designer Angel Estrada Dies
Angel Estrada, a Spanish-born designer whose label featured glamorous gowns, dies of AIDS-related illness in Manhattan at the age of 31.
Learn More.
Estrada started his clothing label in 1983, after his designs for his sister became covetted items in the NYC nightlife scene,
Estrada’s aesthetic was to combine a simple, form-fitting silhouete with bold details. His clothes were sold in stores such as Bergdorfs and Saks at prices ranging from $800 to $2,000. His first collection appeared on the cover of the November 1986 issue of Vogue.
Born in Barcelona, Estrada moved to New York with his family when he was three years old. He attended the Parsons School of Design and worked part time as a hair and make-up designer until he was able to set up his own business.
After Estrada’s death, his sister Virginia took over his business, assumed the design responsibilities. The Angel Estrada brand, which had focused on custom-made evening dresses, transitioned to a sportswear line and also entered a licensing arrangement with a Japanese company, Kindwear, to make clothing in Japan.
Jack Smith, of ‘Flaming Creatures’ Notoriety, Dies
Jack Smith, a pioneer of underground cinema and the director/ cinematographer of Flaming Creatures, dies of AIDS-related illness at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. He was 57.
Learn More.
Smith was considered by many to be the founding father of performance art, and was recognized as a master photographer. The most famous of Smith’s works is Flaming Creatures (1963), a film that prompted a series of New York Police Department raids on downtown screenings of the 45-minute film.
During a screening of Flaming Creatures on March 3, 1964, police seized the 16mm print and the projection equipment, and arrested event producer Jonas Mekas, theater manager Ken Jacobs and ticket taker Florence Karpf on charges of obscenity.
In the trial that followed, esteemed writer Susan Sontag would testify on behalf of the defense to the film’s status as a work of art. Sontag saw Flaming Creatures as an intentionally outrageous and funny spoof of Hollywood B movies, but she also insisted that the film was “a small but valuable work in a particular tradition, the poetic cinema of shock.”
”The only thing to be regretted about the close-ups of limp penises and bouncing breasts, the shots of masturbation and oral sexuality, in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures is that it makes it hard simply to talk about this remarkable and beautiful film, one has to defend it,” Sontag wrote in the April 13, 1964 issue of The Nation.
However, New York officials considered some scenes to be pornographic and copies of the 45-minute movie were confiscated wherever it was screened. The movie gained additional notoriety when footage was screened during Congressional hearings and right-wing politician Strom Thurmond mentioned it in anti-porn speeches.
Filmed on the roof of Smith’s Loisaida studio apartment with reportedly stolen film stock and a basic 16mm camera, Flaming Creatures represented the independent spirit of The New American Cinema.
Film Affinity USA/UK wrote: “The orgy scene in the film is perhaps the greatest combination of art and film. [It] plays like a tragic meeting of the old America with the freshly birthed new morality in America. What is even more remarkable is the ‘earthquake’ caused by Smith’s shaking camera at the end of the orgy. It is as if the world is opening up on Smith’s creatures and swallowing them and all their perversions. The spirit of the film is the reason it should be preserved for generations to come.”
Apart from filmmaking and occasionally appearing in his own work, Smith worked as an actor. He played the lead in Andy Warhol’s unfinished film Batman Dracula, Ken Jacob’s Blonde Cobra, and appeared in several theater productions by Robert Wilson. He also worked as a photographer and founded the Hyperbole Photographic Studio in New York.
After his last film, No President (1967), Smith turned his attention to performance art. He also spent the months leading up to his death transforming his home into an elaborate stage set for a never-to-be-filmed work, Sinbad in a Rented World.
About a month after Smith’s death, friends held a memorial service at Performance Space 122 in the East Village.
New York performance artist and AIDS activist Penny Arcade tried to preserve Smith’s apartment as a museum dedicated to Smith and his work, but the effort failed. Smith’s archival works were legally awarded to his estranged sister and ultimately purchased by the Gladstone Gallery in New York
September 19, 1989
National Commission on AIDS Convenes
The National Commission on AIDS meets for the first time at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Learn More.
At the meeting, witnesses testify on the problems facing AIDS patients and what the government is doing in response.
The meeting is facilitated by June Osborn, M.D., who would chair the commission from its inception through 1993. Dr. Osborn, who serves on WHO’s Global Commission on AIDS, has extensive experience advising the CDC and the FDA on vaccines for diseases such as influenza, hepatitis, and polio. Osborn would go onto write numerous articles and give many speeches on AIDS and HIV public healthcare policy.
The National Commission on AIDS consists of 15 members: five appointed by the Senate, five by the House, two by President George W. Bush, and the secretaries of Health and Human Services, Defense, and the Veterans Administration.
Perhaps the most recognizable member of the National Commission on AIDS, is former NBA star Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson. However, Johnson would resign from the commission in September 1992, writing to President Bush: “I cannot in good conscience continue to serve on a commission whose important work is so utterly ignored by your administration.”
Johnson’s resignation is preceded by another six months earlier of Harlon D. Dalton, a Yale Law School professor who is the only other African American appointed to the commission. In March 1992, Dalton would complain about the lack of action from black politicians, saying, “Any high-visibility politician can point to the one time a year where [AIDS] is mentioned. But there haven’t been any votes there. Gay black men don’t exist, black men don’t vote and babies don’t vote.”
At its first meeting, Chair Osborn gives recognition to Rep. J. Roy Rowland, who she refers to as “the Father of the Commission.” Rep. Rowland is the principal sponsor of the legislation that created the commission on Nov. 4, 1988.
Other members include:
Dr. David E. Rogers, head of the New York City Mayor’s Task Force on AIDS and New York State’s AIDS Advisory Council
Diane Ahrens, Minnesota local government official
Rev. K. Scott Allen, a Baptist minister, coordinator of the AIDS Interfaith Network in Dallas
Don C. Des Jarlais, a NY physician who advocates for needle-exchange programs
Eunice Diaz, community affairs director of White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles
Mary D. Fisher, appointed by Bush to replace Magic Johnson in October 1992
Donald S. Goldman, New Jersey attorney, author on ethical issues involved in AIDS treatment
Charles Konigsberg, Jr., director at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment
Belinda Mason, journalist who dies of AIDS-related illnesses in September 1991
The commission was established by a statute enacted November 4, 1988, with the aim of “promoting the development of a national consensus on policy concerning AIDS.”. It produced several reports over the next 4 years.
The commission approaches its work through numerous hearings, covering the following topics:
healthcare, treatment, and international aspects of the HIV epidemic;
Federal, State, and Local responsibilities;
the Southern California epidemic;
social and human issues;
Executive and Legislative branch issues;
current research and clinical trials;
HIV epidemic in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico;
African American communities;
Pediatric and Adolescent HIV;
Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual communities among Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders;
Women and HIV disease and civil rights;
religious communities response; and
risks of transmission in healthcare settings.
September 20, 1989
Drummer Movie Critic Kenny Lackey Dies
Kenneth J. Lackey, film critic for Drummer magazine, dies of AIDS-related illness at San Francisco’s Hospice By The Bay at the age of 35.
Learn More.
By day, Lackey was on the editorial staff of Desmodus Inc., publishers of Drummer. By night, he was the star server at Church Street Station, charming the after-bar crowds and taking dozens of meal orders without writing anything down and never making a mistake.
“If you ever had a question about a film, a star, a producer or director (including Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony Award winners), Ken was the man to ask, including a biographical sketch thrown in for good measure!” wrote the Bay Area Reporter.
Prior to moving to San Francisco, Lackey attended George Washington University, where he studied theater, and worked as a model in New York.
October 11, 1989
Actor Paul Shenar – Alejandro Sosa in ‘Scarface’ – Dies
Paul Shenar, best remembered for his performance as the drug lord Alejandro Sosa in Scarface, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 53.
Learn More.
Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Shenar moved to New York City after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. He debuts on Broadway in Tiny Alice as Brother Julian, and continues to work on the NYC stage for several years.
In 1965, Shenar would move to Philadelphia to help found the American Conservatory Theater, where he is not only a regular performer throughout his career, but a teacher and advisor as well.
From there, roles on television and the big screen would follow. In 1975, Shenar portrays Orson Welles in the television movie The Night That Panicked America, receiving received some of the best reviews of his career. He continues working steadily on television through the end of the decade, and in the early 1980s starts receiving feature film roles.
In 1983, Shenar delivers a memorable performance as the diabolical Colombian drug lord Alejandro Sosa in Brian De Palma’s Scarface. Other notable roles are Dr. Lawrence in Luc Besson’s The Big Blue (1988), Joshua Adams in Deadly Force (1983), Paulo Rocca in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Raw Deal (1986), and Ben Gardner, the father of a troubled Kristy McNichol, in Alan J. Pakula’s Dream Lover (1986).
Shenar would die in West Hollywood.
October 14, 1989
Stage & Film Actor Michael Carmine Dies
Critically acclaimed actor Michael Carmine dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in Manhattan. He was 30 years old.
Learn More.
Born in Brooklyn, Carmine graduated at the age of 16 from the High School for the Performing Arts in 1975, and then attended the California Institute for the Arts.
Carmine won critics’ praise for his performance in Off Broadway and Broadway productions of Reinaldo Povod’s play Cuba and His Teddy Bear. He created the role of Papo in another Povod play, La Puta Vida.
Among his screen credits are Batteries Not Included, Scarface and Turk 182; on television, he appeared in episodes of Search for Tomorrow, Hill Street Blues, M*A*S*H, and Miami Vice. His final TV appearance was in 1988’s Tour of Duty, and his final film role in Longtime Companion was released nearly a year after his death.
October 19, 1989
Level 42 Guitarist Alan Murphy Dies
Alan Murphy, a U.K. guitarist with a long pedigree of contributions to new wave bands, dies of AIDS-related illness at Westminster Hospital. He was 35.
Learn More.
Murphy played guitar with Kate Bush, Go West, Mike + the Mechanics, and Level 42, among many others.
Murphy’s big break came in late 1978, when he was invited to audition for the Kate Bush band as a second guitarist for an upcoming tour. He was nervous, according to the Alan Murphy tribute site, because he wasn’t familiar with Kate Bush’s quirky musical style.
“Alan was offered the job, mainly he felt due to Kate being impressed with the way he made whale noises,” according to Lenny P.
After touring in 1979 with Kate Bush, Murphy joined her in the studio to record tracks for Never for Ever (1980). This was the first album he had worked on as a full-fledged band member and not just a studio musician.
Murphy also formed a band called The Stapleton All Stars, named after a London pub called The Stapleton. They later changed the name to SFX. The Fender guitar company arranged for the band to play their products during pub promotions from 1981 to 1983.
In 1984, Murphy performed a guitar solo on Nick Heyward’s single “Warning Sign.” Next, Peter Cox and Richard Drummie formed Go West and brought in Murphy to help them build their sound. Chrysalis released Go West’s eponymous 1985 album and Daning on the Couch (1987). On the latter release, Murphy played keyboards, guitars, guitar solos, percussion on various tracks.
While touring in the U.S. with Go West, Murphy began to feel fatigued and sought medical care at a stop-over in San Francisco. Go West front man Peter Cox later realized that it was at that time when Murphy likely learned he was HIV positive.
In 1987, Murphy joined Level 42 — already an established act on the Polydor label — and performed on the 1988 album Staring At The Sun, which was recorded at Miraval studios in France.
“We had a new album, a hit single with ‘Heaven In Our Hands,’ and it all looked like business as usual, but with a slightly rockier edge,” Level 42 bass guitarist Mark King told The Express in 2016.
“But then, sadly, within 18 months Al Murphy became ill with AIDS and died in 1989. It was awful.”
Shortly before his death, Murphy played acoustic guitar on a Kate Bush cover of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin hit “Rocket Man,” and in 1991 it was released as a track on Two Rooms, a John/Taupin tribute album. The music video featured a guitar and lit candle on an otherwise empty chair.
October 26, 1989
Cynthia Slater — Founder of Society of Janus — Dies
Cynthia Slater, co-founder of the leather/SM organization Society of Janus, dies of AIDS-related illness at Pacific Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco. She was 44 years old.
Learn More.
A few months before she died, Slater received an award from Shanti Project, which recognized her for her AIDS activism on behalf of women with AIDS/HIV specifically and all people with AIDS generally.
Before Slater became an AIDS activist, she stirred up controversary as the founder of Society of Janus, the still-active leather/BDSM organization that often rattled anti-pornography feminists and the religious right during the 1970s and early 1980s.
While working as a dominatrix in the early ’70s, a client’s spouse asked Slater for more information about her husband’s interest in BDSM. Sensing that there might be a widespread interest in such things, Slater and her partner, Larry Olsen, started the first version of the Society of Janus in 1972 by running a classified ad in the back of a counter-culture newspaper, The Berkeley Barb.
Ten people showed up for the first meeting of what would become the Society of Janus, and Slater said she was excited about connecting with others who shared interests that until then had been kept secret.
“There was this isolation pressing in on me, and I felt the need to get together with people with whom I could exchange information, and get a little support from besides,” said Slater in an 1983 interview.
According to the Leather Hall of Fame, Slater did almost all of the work in the first phase of the organization. She published out a newsletter, held meetings at her home, provided food, and cleaned up after. As Janus took shape, Slater developed an approach to the theory and practice of SM.
As an early proponent of SM safety, she hosted Janus Society safety demonstrations during the late ’70s, cultivating a space for women within the male-dominated scene established within the leather/kink/fetish culture. According a tribute to Slater in Living in Leather’s website, Slater coined the term “SM 101,” referring to the safety demonstrations and classes she presented.
While most of her activities were local, Slater influenced many people who became active safer-sex education. Slater’s teachings, ideas, and lessons were re-created by others at regional and national organizations, especially in the late 1980s as the AIDS epidemic spread.
Slater was well-known in many of the Bay Area’s fringe communities, and in 1980, she was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe. When safe sex education was being developed by gay communities in the early 1980s, Slater and bisexual activist David Lourea visited presented bathhouses and sex clubs in San Francisco to present safer-sex education workshops.
In 1985, Slater learned she was HIV+ and she was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987. During this period, she became more involved with Shanti Project and began attending support groups. She wrote an article for Shanti’s newsletter encouraging PWAs to not remain isolated or seek “sameness” when it came to getting support.
In her article, Slater noted that while not faulting PWAs for doing so, there is a risk of eliminating others “until we end up an association of one.”
Even when tending to her declining health, Slater continued to advocate for other PWAs to connect across difference and find commonality among people with diverging agendas. She also fought to bring attention to the lack of resources for women living with AIDS/HIV in San Francisco. Despite the city’s reputation for being the leading place for compassionate care for PWAs, women were often overlooked by outreach efforts and service programs.
In an 1989 television interview about her award from Shanti Project, Slater told reporters: “The numbers [of women with AIDS] are changing … and it’s a discounting the value of individuals. How many women have to die before we start to count?”
“We who are facing life-threatening illness also find ourselves examining issues that most folks don’t readily look at: ‘What is death?’ ‘What does my life mean?’ ‘Who am I?’ ‘What do I really need and is that different from what I want?’
“In our support group, it’s not so much that the questions we ask are the same as it is that we share an awareness that we don’t seem to have forever for the exploration. These bonds are the earth of our common meeting ground … We have no basis on which to stigmatize each other, for when we do so we are oppressing ourselves.”
Skaters Raise Funds for HIV/AIDS with ‘Skating for Life’
Olympic champions and other world-class skaters assemble in New York City to perform in “Skating for Life – A Celebration of Champions,” a benefit for HIV/AIDS support programs.
Learn More.
Featuring 24 skaters, the show transformed the New York State Armory at Lexington Avenue and 26th Street into a winter wonderland with a skating rink and lit holiday trees. The benefit was produced by the Design Industries Foundation for AIDS, which was made up of professionals in the fashion, textile, interior design and related fields.
British figure skater John Curry dazzled the audience with a solo performance that incorporated mime and then again in a romantic duet with U.S. champion skater Judy Blumberg.
“The image of Mr. Curry as the epitome of a ballroom dancer is new,” wrote New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff. “But unwinding in and out of embraces, he and Miss Blumberg, a first-rate dramatic skater, made for a picture in tenderness.”
Curry’s final appearance would be later that month in “Ice Stars’ Hollywood Revue,” a CBS special. He would die on April 15, 1994 from complications of AIDS.
A five-time British Champion and gold medalist in the 1976 Olympics, Curry is still remembered as one of the greatest stylists and artists in figure-skating history.
November 10, 1989
Cult Movie Icon Cookie Mueller Dies
Cookie Mueller, a key member of film director John Waters’ Dreamlanders ensemble, dies from AIDS-related causes in New York City at age 40.
Learn More.
Mueller would meet John Waters at the premiere of his 1969 film Mondo Trasho. Cookie went on to join Waters’ Dreamlanders ensemble and would act in five movies for Waters.
Moving to New York City in 1976, she became a cocaine dealer and writer. She wrote the health column “Ask Dr. Mueller” for the East Village Eye, was an art critic for Details magazine, and wrote the novella Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls, the memoir Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, and several collections of short prose.
Mueller became a muse to many of the photographers and directors of the NYC art/music/film scene. She would have her portrait taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, and appear in Amos Poe’s Subway Riders, Edo Bertoglio’s Downtown ’81 and Michel Auder’s A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking. She also would be featured prominently in her friend Nan Goldin’s iconic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
Goldin would later recall that she was with Mueller on Fire Island in New York when they first learned of AIDS in 1981, referred to as a “gay cancer” at the time. “Cookie just started reading this item out loud from The New York Times about this new illness… we all kind of laughed it off.”
By 1985, many of Golden’s close friends and acquaintances would be diagnosed with the virus, including Mueller.
Goldin would write in ASX: “We were very obsessed with what caused it: There were all kinds of rumors, everything from amyl nitrate to bacon. I was in denial that people were going to die. I thought people could beat it. And then people started dying.”
In 1986, Goldin would photograph Mueller’s wedding to Vittorio Scarpati. An artist who was an HIV-positive heroin addict, Scarpati would create a heartbreaking series of whimsical deathbed drawings of himself and Mueller.
Scarpati would die in 1988, and Goldin would photograph Mueller, by that time walking with a cane, beside her husband’s casket. After Scarpati’s death, Mueller’s health would begin a steep decline.
“When I went to see Cookie in Provincetown, she had lost her voice,” recalls Goldin. “Her laughter and her verbal wit had been so much of her personality. The fact that she couldn’t talk, the fact that she couldn’t walk without a cane was so devastating that I was calling every doctor, screaming at the impotence I felt.”
Shortly before her dealth, Mueller would write in her final column for the East Village Eye:
“Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same, except you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free.”
La Cage aux Folles actor Rémi Laurent dies of AIDS-related illness in Paris at the age of 32.
Learn More.
Born and raised in Suresnes, Laurent starred in a number of French films in the late 1970s and 1980s, but he is best known for his role in the film La Cage aux Folles as Laurent, the son of Renato Baldi.
AIDS-care activist Chris Brownlie, for whom the first Los Angeles County-supported AIDS hospice was named, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Silver Lake home at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Born in Farmington, NY, Brownlie had been active in LGBTQ politics since the early 1970s, when he helped found the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center.
Since the mid-1980s, the one-time greeting card company owner also worked for a variety of AIDS-care projects, including service as a volunteer for AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA) and the Minority AIDS Project. He also helped found the nonprofit AIDS Hospice Foundation, an outgrowth of the 1986 Stop AIDS Quarantine Committee, which defeated a state ballot initiative that would have required detention of those testing positive for the human immunodeficiency virus.
Faced with inaction by the then-conservative Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Hospice Foundation members picketed in front of Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s home. Brownlie, meanwhile, appeared before the LA County Commission on AIDS, emotionally demanding: “You find a way for me to die at home in the arms of my loved ones, or a facility in which my loved ones can care for me in dignity.”
When supervisors eventually voted $2 million for AIDS health care, the Hospice Foundation agreed to operate a facility in Elysian Park at the site of Barlow Hospital’s old nursing quarters.
The 25-bed facility was named the Chris Brownlie Hospice, according to foundation President Michael Weinstein, “because he is a representative of those in the community who have the spirit, courage and grace to fight for those with AIDS.”
The Chris Brownlie Hospice, which had a waiting list in late 1989, was the largest of its kind in the county and offered 24-hour medical service. At that time, construction was under way on another 25-bed hospice to be operated by the foundation on the grounds of Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk.
“If you want a miracle that is better than any drug, work to make life better,” Brownlie said at the start of construction of the Chris Brownlie Hospice.
“Of course, I’ve always hoped that I would not die, that I would live forever,” Brownlie told The LA Times when the facility opened. “But on another level, I actually get a sense of well-being about this experience. Sometimes it becomes very profound in a religious sense at the edges of my consciousness. And this is what the hospice program is about. It will help others accept the fact that death, too, is part of the life experience.”
Shortly after traveling to Sonoma, Arizona for a vacation with his longtime partner, Phill Wilson, Brownlie became very ill and eventually slipped into a coma.
He was cared for at his namesake hospice, where he would occasionally wake up from the coma and talk with Wilson.
“Finally, after about eight or nine days of that, he woke up and he said, ‘Take me home.’ I knew what he meant, and so I said, ‘We’re going home,’ and nobody agreed,” Wilson told PBS’s Frontline in a 2004 interview. “The doctor said no; the nurses said no; all of our friends said no. They didn’t think that I could take care of him.
“I brought him home, and we [got] a little hospital bed and all the supplies, and I kept saying, ‘We won’t need all of that; we won’t need all of that,’ because I knew that he wanted to come home to die. He wanted to come home so that the last minutes would be in our space, and so we brought him home.”
Wilson said he carried Brownlie into the house, put him into bed and sat with him. After taking a short nap at the suggestion of the home nurse, Wilson returned to Brownlie’s room and found him “breathing the kind of labored breathing [where] you can kind of hear death happening.”
Wilson said he climbed into bed with Brownlie and whispered that it was okay now, it was going to be OK, and that he was going to be OK. He sang to Brownlie a favorite song, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
“The words are ‘Let me call you sweetheart/ I’m in love with you/ Let me hear you whisper/ That you love me, too,'” Wilson recalled. “And he took a breath, and then he didn’t take another breath.”
Texas Judge Censured for Homophobic Remarks in Press
The Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct issued a public censure of the state judge who told media he gave a lighter sentence to a killer because the victims were gay.
Learn More.
The censure order imposed on Texas judge Jack Hampton denounced his remarks to local reporters f0llowing his decision to give the minimum 30-year sentence to the murderer of two gay men, Tommy Lee Trimble, 34, and John Lloyd Griffin, 27.
“The commission finds that Judge Hampton’s comments, per se, were destructive of public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary,” the commission’s order said.
Among comments the commission cited:
“Those two gays that got killed wouldn’t have been killed if they hadn’t been cruising the streets picking up teen-age boys.”
“Some murder victims are less innocent in their deaths than others. In those cases, a defendant is unlikely to deserve a maximum sentence.”
“The victims were homosexuals. They were out in the homosexual area picking up teen-age boys. Had they not been out there trying to spread AIDS around, they’d still be alive today.”
Public censure is the strongest action the commission could take short of recommending the 57-year-old Republican’s removal from the bench. Robert Flowers, the panel’s executive director, read a commission report describing public censure as “tantamount to denunciation.”
William Waybourn, president of the Dallas Gay Alliance, commended the rebuke and called for Hampton to step down.
“I believe that it’s certainly a step in the right direction. But Judge Hampton remains on the bench. What is to happen now to gay men and lesbians who come into his courtroom?” Waybourn told the LA Times.
The Dallas Gay Alliance would go onto file a petition with the Texas Supreme Court in an unsuccessful attempt to remove Hampton from the bench. But they, and other LGBTQ+ activists in Texas, would ultimately prevail in November 1992, when Hampton would lose his re-election bid and be replaced by an opponent supported by the LGBTQ+ community and local Democratic Party clubs.
December 1, 1989
Visual AIDS Organizes First ‘Day Without Art’
In response to the worsening AIDS crisis and coinciding with the World Health Organization’s second annual World AIDS Day, Visual AIDS organized its first “Day Without Art.”
Learn More.
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.
December 1, 1989
Choreographer & Activist Alvin Ailey Dies
Alvin Ailey, the African American choreographer and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Ailey School in New York City, dies of AIDS-related illness.
Learn More.
Ailey’s early childhood would be spent in Texas during the Jim Crow era, a time and place that would inspire some of his most iconic choreography. He discovered dance after moving to Los Angeles but didn’t fully commit to the art form at first.
Then, in the mid-1950s, Ailey would join the Lester Horton Dancers, later becoming a choreographer and then director of the company. In 1958, he decided to open his own dance company, establishing the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City.
Ailey and a group of young, black modern dancers perform for the first time on March 30, 1958 at New York’s 92nd Street YM-YWHA. In its first years, the Company would travel to booked performances on what Alvin Ailey called “the station wagon tours” in a vehicle driven by a longtime friend of the Company, Mickey Board.
Over the next 30 years, Ailey would create ballets for many notable companies, including the American Ballet Theatre, Royal Danish Ballet, London Festival Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, and Paris Opera Ballet.
“As common practice at the time, Ailey maintained a closeted persona regarding his sexuality but would utilize his art as an outlet for it,” writes Smithsonian in the website for the National Museum of African American History & Culture.
“His choreographed ballets for AAADT exhibited imagery reminiscent with male and female homosexuality such as juxtaposing same-sex partnering with religious and hypermasculine archetypes.”
Although Ailey dated intermittently, he wouldn’t find long-term companionship while trying to conceal his sexuality from much of the world. And when he dies amid the AIDS epidemic, his doctor reports the cause of his death as a rare blood disease.
Among the many posthumous accolades for Ailey, President Barack Obama would award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, the highest civilian honor, in recognition of his contributions and commitments to civil rights and dance in America.
“Ailey’s work was groundbreaking in its exploration of the African American experience and the enrichment of the modern dance tradition, including his beloved American masterpiece Revelations,” the award description would state.
The Ailey company continues to perform at the New York City Center and tours cities around the world. Ailey’s masterpiece, Revelations, is currently streaming on the dance company’s website.
HRSA Funds States with $20M for HIV Care & Treatment
The U.S. grants $20 million for HIV care and treatment through the Home-Based and Community-Based Care State grant program, introducing HIV care and treatment to many states that have no programs.
Learn More.
In its supporting report, the Health Resources and Services Administration notes that only six states have Medicaid program waivers for the treatment and care of people with HIV/AIDS: California, Hawaii, New Mexico, New Jersey, Ohio and South Carolina. The waiver services cover case management, personal care and adult day care in five of the six states.
States with these programs report that the AIDS-specific waiver enables them to establish a uniform system of services, a network of treatment options, and greater access to home and community-based care for people with AIDS, the report states.
Perhaps most importantly, the programs expand financial eligibility for those needing care and treatent.
The newly announced HRSA grant program provides funding so that all states can adopt and strengthen programs that target AIDS-specific services to those who need them.
December 1989
U.S. Launches Precursor to Ryan White CARE Act
A CDC/HRSA initiative provides $11 million to fund seven community health centers to provide HIV counseling and testing services. This is a precursor to what will be part of the Ryan White CARE Act.
December 17, 1989
Chicago Theater Director Gary Tucker Dies
Gary Tucker, an influential member of Chicago’s theater community, dies of AIDS-related illness in Atlanta. He was 42.
Learn More.
Tucker directed Tennessee Williams’ A House Not Meant to Standfor the Goodman Theatre’s 1980-1981 season.
Williams wrote the play — which turned out to be his last — after Tucker and Goodman artistic director Gregory Mosher worked with him on producing a one-act titled Some Problems for the Moose Lodge. Tucker and Mosher urged Williams to expand the one-act into a full-length play, and the result was A House Not Meant to Stand.
“To many of us, Gary Tucker will always be remembered for his work in less illustrious company and circumstances,” Albert Williams wrote in the Chicago Reader. “Under the name Eleven, he founded and directed the Godzilla Rainbow Troupe, with which [Tommy] Biscotto, [J Pat] Miller, [Mike] Rasfeld, and others did some of their earliest and best work.”
An unofficial offshoot of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York, Godzilla Rainbow Troupe lived up to its name, according to Williams.
“It was monstrous and beautiful; it breathed fire and gave off a glowing wet afterglow; it had a hell of an impact, and it was gone almost as soon as it had started,” write Williams. “In such productions as Whores of Babylon, Turds in Hell, and Tobacco Road, Tucker brought ‘genderfuck’ (aka ‘cosmic drag’) theater to Chicago, mixing and matching sexual identities with a whimsical disregard for propriety or credibility. It was gaudy, cheap, funny, sad, coarse, delicate. Just like Gary Tucker. May he rest in peace.”
Biscotto, Miller and Rasfeld also died of AIDS-related illness in the 1980s.
December 31, 1989
LA Times: Women & Infants Represent Key Groups Hit by HIV/AIDS in LA
The Los Angeles Times releases AIDS statistics that show that Los Angeles has more than twice as many female cases and three times as many pediatric cases as San Francisco.
Learn More.
In a column by Victor F. Zonana, the LA Times publishes newly released data that indicate that AIDS cases and deaths are rising dramatically and reaching new populations. New cases recorded between January and November 1989 (the most recent months data was available) of full-blown AIDS in Los Angeles County totaled 2,274, up 28% from a year earlier.
In addition, planning documents for LA County estimated that by 1992, the cumulative total number of cases would more than double, to at least 19,000, and could rise to as high as 44,000 cases.
Zonana, the LA Times columnist, posed the question: “Will [LA County] go the way of San Francisco, widely praised as a model of compassionate and cost-effective AIDS care? Or will Los Angeles resemble New York City, the third major center of the epidemic, where people are dying in the streets as the unchecked spread of the virus among drug addicts fills public and private hospitals beyond capacity?”
Zonana wrote that one of the unique challenges facing the LA community was the large population of Latinos, some of whom were undocumented and disconnected from health services, and the potentially adverse impact of Roman Catholic Church’s unyielding stand against the use of condoms.
Torie Osborn, then-director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center (now the Los Angeles LGBT Center), expressed her concerns that members of the Latino community were particular at risk of HIV infection as a result of these church teachings.
“In the past two months, our clinic has found 45% (infection rates) among gay and bisexual Latinos,” said Osborn, compared to 17% among Anglo gays. “The figure just leaps out at you … it is really alarming.”
The following are selected AIDS statistics through Sept. 30, 1989 for New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, the three major centers of the epidemic which together accounted for 34.5% of the nation’s AIDS cases.
The data shows that Los Angeles has more than twice as many female cases and three times as many pediatric cases as San Francisco, even though its total caseload is only 11% higher.
New York
Total cases: 22,571
Total deaths: 12,246
Children under 13: 536
Adult women: 2,934
Gay/bisexual contact: 10,916
Heterosexual IV drug use: 6,166
Reported new cases: 4,081
Year-to-date Total White cases: 39%
Year-to-date Total Black cases: 33%
Year-to-date Total Latino cases: 27%
Projected net municipal outlay*: $229.6 million
Los Angeles
Total cases: 8,063
Total deaths: 5,306
Children under 13: 70
Adult women: 244
Gay/bisexual contact: 6,474
Heterosexual IV drug use: 325
Reported new cases: 1,928
Year-to-date Total White cases:65%
Year-to-date Total Black cases: 16%
Year-to-date Total Latino cases: 18%
Projected net municipal outlay*: $20.5 million
San Francisco
Total cases: 7,277
Total deaths: 4,706
Children under 13: 22
Adult women: 91
Gay/bisexual contact: 6,164
Heterosexual IV drug use: 159
Reported new cases: 1,458
Year-to-date Total White cases: 82%
Year-to-date Total Black cases: 7%
Year-to-date Total Latino cases: 8%
Projected net municipal outlay*: $19.9 million
*for AIDS prevention and care, current fiscal year; does not include private contributions, state and federal expenditures or payments from private insurers.
The sources for the LA Times data were the Department of Geography, California State University, Northridge and Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.
January 1, 1990
Fashion Trailblazer Patrick Kelly Dies
Patrick Kelly, the first American designer to be admitted to Paris’ Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, dies at the Hotel Dieu, a hospital near the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, at the age of 35.
Learn More.
Kelly was part of a generation of Black designers who introduced a new energy and perspective into the fashion industry in the 1980s.
“Patrick’s particular contribution was a quirky, surrealist take on design accented by the subversion of racist imagery as an act of Black empowerment and reclamation,” writes Darnell-Jamal Lisby in i-D.
Celebrated for his designs that incorporated references to pop culture and Black folklore, Kelly moved to Paris after becoming frustrated by the lack of support from the fashion industry in New York. Black supermodel Pat Cleveland recalled how she and Kelly first met through a mutual friend:
“[Kelly] made this banana costume for me because he knew I liked to dance like Josephine Baker. So we went out that night, and I did this hair show in Columbus Circle, and I sang like Josephine Baker in that outfit.”
When Kelly told Cleveland about his struggles with the fashion industry, Cleveland said she told him, “You better go to Paris, because there’s no room for Black boys in New York. They’re not going to give you the break you’re going to get in Paris.”
Once in Paris, Kelly’s popularity quickly grew. With a perspective rooted in his experience as a Black man from the South, Kelly incorporated details into his work, such as mismatched buttons, which his grandmother had employed while mending clothes.
As Kelly’s reputation in Paris rose, his popularity among the Black American media grew, too. Ebony magazine published a feature on Kelly’s journey to success in Paris, and Jet magazine regularly covered him, as they did other notable Black designers in America and internationally.
Kelly also incorpated his racial perspective in many elements of his runway shows. At the start of his shows, he would walk onto the runway and spray-paint a large heart on the stage set.
In the gift bags given to the attendees, Kelly would include a “Love List” of items ranging from his favourite foods, like fried chicken, and music from hip-hop to gospel. He would also give everyone a tiny brown doll with molded black hair.
The designer was always seen in outsize overalls — even if the occasion was formal. He wore a bike messenger’s cap, its brim flipped up to reveal “Paris” embroidered on the underside. Kelly acknowledged most every stereotype attributed to Southern blacks.
“It was Patrick’s way of subtly giving his typically predominantly white audiences a brief education on his design process while simultaneously outlining aspects of various Black experiences in the hope of expanding their purview,” writes Lisby in his tribute to Kelly.
In 1985, the first “Patrick Kelly Paris” commercial collection was featured in a six-page spread in French Elle magazine.
Kelly would make history, becoming the first American admitted to the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, France’s prestigious organization of fashion designers. In doing so, he was canonized among the likes of Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Dior.
He is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where his epitaph states “Nothing Is Impossible.”
January 2, 1990
Mercy Killing and Suicide Shock Medical Community
West Hollywood couple Steven Jenkins and his partner Philip Saylor die when they carry out a mercy killing/suicide pact at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Jenkins was 35 and dying of AIDS; Saylor was 40.
Learn More.
Saylor shot Jenkins in the head with a .38-caliber revolver, killing him instantly, and then shot himself, Los Angeles Police Department detective Dan Andrews told United Press International (UPI). When the gunshots rang out, hospital staff and several patients ran to Jenkins’ room and found both dead.
Until last year, Jenkins and Saylor operated Abner’s Yellow Barn Furniture Emporium, an antique shop in Van Nuys, and otherwise lived a relatively private life together in West Hollywood, according to Andrews.
Jenkins had been suffering from AIDS-related illnesses for about two years and was admitted to the hospital in mid-December needing urgent care, Ron Wise, a spokesman for the hospital, told The New York Times, Jenkins was being treated as a terminal patient with ”end-stage AIDS,” according to Wise.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Jenkins’ condition in his final weeks was dire: “Intravenous tubes fed him painkilling doses of morphine. Pneumonia clogged his lungs. A progressive eye disorder blurred his vision, threatening to blind him. Too ill to stand, he was virtually motionless. Sometimes, he would hallucinate.”
Jenkins was cared for in Suite 5906, an intensive care room on the fifth floor of Cedars-Sinai, in a ward with others suffering from fatal diseases, though not necessarily AIDS, according to the UPI story. One month later, in February 1990, the hospital would open a $2.5 million, 24-bed AIDS treatment center designed to treat both the physical and psycho-social components of the disease.
Hospital psychiatrist Dr. Geoffrey Newstadt said coroner’s workers retrieved a note from the scene, adding that it offered no rationale for the act.
“It seems to me very clear that this couple had a suicide pact, and they were going to keep it a secret from everybody,” Dr. Newstadt told the LA Times.
In the days following Jenkins’ and Saylor’s deaths, many in the HIV/AIDS support community expressed sympathy for both men.
Andrew Weisser, a spokesman for the AIDS Project of Los Angeles, told The New York Times that his organization recently recorded as many as five suicides in one month and that the actual number was probably higher. He said suicides were becoming fairly common among AIDS patients and that their suffering was sometimes compounded by rejection by members of their families and others.
Rand Schrader, the chairman of the Los Angeles County Commission on AIDS, told The Times that he wondered if the reason Saylor killed himself as well as his friend was because he also had AIDS.
“As he watched his friend’s suffering, was he saying, ‘Can I face this?'” Schrader reflected, adding, “As one person goes, it is often viewed that the person who goes first may be the luckier one. Who will take care of the survivor if he is also HIV positive?”
David Johnson, the AIDS coordinator for the City of Los Angeles, said that, unlike other fatal diseases like cancer or heart disease, AIDS does not come as an isolated case affecting only an individual.
“It’s a holocaust that is happening to an entire generation in a community,” Johnson said. “The stresses that creates can really make people crazy. All of us in that community are dealing with terrible stress and pain and grief.”
January 24, 1990
Theater Director Leland Moss Dies
Leland Moss, a theater director best known for The AIDS Show, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in San Francisco at the age of 41.
Learn More.
With a group of writers, Moss helped in 1984 to create The AIDS Show (The Artists Involved with Death and Survival Show), an acclaimed series of songs, monologues and short scenes. The show was originally developed to be performed in the streets during the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, but then moved to Theatre Rhinoceros.
The next year, the production was updated with a new title, The AIDS Show: Unfinished Business, and presented in other cities as well. A documentary about the play was made for public television and shown in November 1986.
Moss was a graduate of Beverly Hills High School and a National Merit Scholar. After completing his studies at Harvard University and the London Academy of Music and the Dramatic Arts, Moss moved to New York City and became a resident director at LaMama and Playwrights Horizons.
He was also an advisor to The Public Theatre’s New York Shakespeare Festival and an assistant director to Andrei Serban. His acting credits included playing five characters in the Broadway production of Yentl, according to Playwrights Horizons.
Moss moved to San Francisco in 1981 and connected with the non-profit Theatre Rhinoceros, the first LGBTQ theater company to employ actors under a professional seasonal agreement. Moss would collaborate heavily with Alan B. Estes, the Rhino’s artistic director who was among the first people in San Francisco to be infected with HIV.
Estes provided much of the initial inspiration for The AIDS Show, but he died before the production debuted. However, the Rhino continued to realize Estes’ vision under Moss and the theater’s new artistic director, Kristine Gannon, according to The New York Times.
The 1985 production of The AIDS Show included “It’s My Party,” a popular sketch by Doug Holsclaw about four guys at a slumber party playing Trivial Pursuit and discussing the death of a friend. Moss urged Holsclaw to develop the sketch into a full-length play, which became the award-winning The Life of the Party, the most successful show in Theatre Rhinoceros history. Moss directed the production.
On October 6, 1989, The Life of the Party was performed at the Kennedy Center as part of the proceedings leading up to the three-day display of the AIDS Quilt (also known as the NAMES Project’s National AIDS Memorial) in its entirety on the Ellipse behind the White House.
Moss worked with The Rhino for the remainder of his artistic career.
January 26, 1990
U.S. Updates Guidelines for Reducing Healthcare Worker Exposure
On January 26, the U.S. Public Health Service issues a statement on managing occupational exposure to HIV, including considerations regarding post-exposure use of the antiretroviral drug, AZT.
Learn More.
The CDC issues a report reviewing the PHS recommendations for the management of occupational exposures that may place workers at risk of acquiring HIV infection, with a focus on those administering AZT treatment.
February 10, 1990
Filmmaker Bill Sherwood Dies
Bill Sherwood, a promising filmmaker whose career was just taking off, dies from AIDS-related illness in New York City at the age of 37.
Learn More.
Sherwood is known for his 1986 film — and his only film — Parting Glances, for which he was Director, Editor and Screenwriter. Made for $310,000, the film is a bittersweet romantic comedy that spans a 24-hour period in the upwardly mobile New York gay community.
With its realistic look at urban gay life in the Ronald Reagan era and at the height of the AIDS crisis, many film critics consider it an important film in the history of gay cinema. It was also one of the first American films to address the AIDS pandemic.
In 2007, as a part of the Outfest Legacy Project, a restored print of Parting Glances received its world premiere at the Director’s Guild of America in Los Angeles. The four major stars of the film, Richard Ganoung, John Bolger, Steve Buscemi and Kathy Kinney, were in attendance and participated in a panel discussion after the viewing. Parting Glances was Buscemi’s feature film debut.
Pop artist Keith Haring dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 31 at his LaGuardia Place apartment in Greenwich Village.
Learn More.
Between 1980 and 1989, Haring achieved international recognition and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His first solo exhibition in New York was held at the Westbeth Painters Space in 1981, according to the Keith Haring Foundation.
Throughout his career, Haring devoted much of his time to public works, which often carried social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, in dozens of cities around the world, many of which were created for charities, hospitals, children’s day care centers and orphanages.
Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, its mandate being to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children’s programs, and to expand the audience for Haring’s work through exhibitions, publications and the licensing of his images.
Haring enlisted his imagery during the last years of his life to speak about his own illness and generate activism and awareness about AIDS. By expressing universal concepts of birth, death, love, sex and war, and using a distinctively bold style, Haring attracted a wide audience and assured a timeless accessibility of his imagery. His work has become a universally recognized visual language.
Since his death, Haring has been the subject of several international retrospectives. His work can be seen today in the exhibitions and collections of major museums around the world.
Stephan W. Burns, an actor known for playing Pete Stancheck in Herbie Goes Bananas and Jack Cleary in the TV miniseries The Thorn Birds, dies in Santa Barbara of AIDS-related illness at the age of 35.
Learn More.
In 1984, Burns reportedly received an emergency blood transfusion after being seriously injured in a car accident. Various reports contend that the blood was contaminated and infected Burns with HIV.
Burns wanted to be an actor all his life. At an early age, he began staying up late to watch old musicals on television from his small-town home of Chews Landing, New Jersey. After graduating from high school, Burns moved to New York to study theater while working odd jobs during to pay for his rent and acting classes.
At 6’3″ tall, handsome and naturally athletic, Burns commanded attention at auditions and eventually was cast in the lead role in the national touring production of the Broadway musical Grease. Soon after, he moved to Los Angeles, where he faced much stiffer competition for acting roles. But in 1978, after six months in Hollywood, Burns was offered the title role in the TV special Li’l Abner in Dogpatch Today.
But his breakthrough role would come two years later, with the lead inHerbie Goes Bananas, the fourth in Walt Disney Productions’ Love Bug series. Working alongside veteran actors Vito Scotti, Harvey Korman, Charles Martin Smith, and Cloris Leachman, Burns caught the attention of ABC executives and was cast in the TV drama 240-Robert as a second-season replacement for Mark Harmon.
Unfortunately, an actors’ strike delayed the start of the season and 240-Robert was cancelled after only three more episodes due to poor ratings. But ABC had Burns in mind for another project – The Thorn Birds, a mini-series based on the 1977 best-selling novel by Colleen McCullough featuring a forbidden love story set in the Australian outback. In the drama’s first three parts, Burns played Jack Cleary, an older brother of the lead character Meggie Cleary. The drama would go on to receive several Emmys and Golden Globe Awards.
In 1984, Burns reportedly received a blood transfusion which was contaminated with the AIDS virus while reeiving emergency medical treatment following a car accident. [It should be noted that, other than on Wikipedia and a 240-Robert fan page, information about the car accident and the source of Burns’ subsequent infection could not be verified.]
Burns would have only a handful of acting roles in 1986 and 1987, before succumbing to AIDS-related illnesses and dying in early 1990. A rock musical he was writing called Terminal Hotel would never be completed.
March 17, 1990
Pop Stars Perform in AIDS Benefit Concert at Radio City
The first national AIDS fundraising concert by the pop music community raises about $1.5 million for HIV/AIDS organizations, including the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
Learn More.
In the concert’s finale, Dionne Warwick, Whitney Houston, and about 40 other performers sang “That’s What Friends Are For,” a hit song from 1985 considered the unofficial anthem of those in the fight against AIDS. At the song’s end, Houston and Warwick are seen hugging.
Organized by Arista Records, the benefit concert took two years to come together and, in the process, unearthed troubling attitudes in the pop music community toward gay men and AIDS, according to Entertainment Weekly.
The idea for a benefit concert took off in March 1988, when Grammy Awards committee member Jonathan Tisch and his mother, a volunteer at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, were attending the Grammys at Radio City Music Hall. Tisch’s mother, Joan, said there had yet to be a major rock concert to benefit AIDS. Tisch was recruited then and there to organize the event.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Tisch assembled a group to oversee the event, including two record company presidents, Clive Davis of Arista and David Geffen of Geffen Records.
By early 1989, the group had settled on the idea to produce a superstar concert to be called Rock and a Hard Place, featuring six or so multi-platinum artists. They also agreed on a date for the concert: June 6, 1989.
The first band announced for the concert was the heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses, from Geffen’s label. Shortly thereafter, staffers at GMHC, the concert’s major beneficiary, discovered that the band had recorded a song, ”One in a Million,” that included the lyrics:
“Immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me They come to our country, and think they’ll do as they please
Like start a mini-Iran, or spread some f—in disease
Within the month, GMHC issued a request to Guns N’ Roses to withdraw from the concert. It was a decision that GMHC did not come to easily. David Geffen was a major donor.
Geffen told Entertainment Weekly that GMHC should have let Guns N’ Roses to perform.
”I don’t care what their record was,” Geffen said. ”If you need a blood donor and the only person who can give you a transfusion is Adolf Hitler, you take the blood.”
The incident caused Clive Davis and Arista to take the lead in organizing the event, and the concert date was pushed to March 1990.
“As much as the show reflected the somewhat conservative musical tastes of Clive Davis, it also demonstrated his relentless charitable determination,” wrote music critic Ron Givens in EW. “After volunteering to use his label’s anniversary as the foundation for the benefit, Davis gained the cooperation of nearly every artist he wanted. Everyone agreed to appear for just expense money; none of the artists performed extended sets, and many of them sang with the house orchestra rather than with their own backup musicians.”
During the concert, various actors (Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, and Melanie Griffith) hosted the show and made short presentations about HIV and AIDS.
Goldberg also performed in a bittersweet skit about a girl with AIDS, and Jennifer Holliday dedicated a song from the musical Dreamgirls to that show’s director, Michael Bennett, who died of complications from AIDS in 1987.
The rest of the show featured performances by Barry Manilow, Melissa Manchester, Patti Smith, Milli Vanilli, Daryl Hall and John Oates, and Taylor Dayne.
Outside Radio City Music Hall, members of ACT UP handed out fliers. In the lobby, GMHC distributed safe-sex packets with condoms.
The concert was videotaped and later aired on CBS during television prime-time hours.
March 26, 1990
Iconic Fashion Designer Halston Dies
Halston, one of the most successful fashion entrepeneurs in history, dies of AIDS-related illness at Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco at the age of 57.
Learn More.
Born Roy Frowick Halston in Des Moines, Iowa, Halston led a classic heartland childhood playing in soap box derby races, fishing, visiting farms, and the like. He took an interest in sewing from his mother, and from an early age he showed a special interest in making hats.
His family moved in 1952 to Chicago, where Halston enrolled in a night course at the Chicago Art Institute and took a day job as a window dresser. Halston continued to design hats and finally obtained his break when a small story on his fashionable creations appeared in the Chicago Daily News.
It was at this time that he would take his middle name Halston as his professional moniker. His hat sales took off, and in 1959, Halston left Chicago for New York City to work for the famed French milliner Lilly Daché.
Following that Halston accepted a position at the fashionable store Bergdorf Goodman, where he charmed his clients and made a grand name for himself. In 1962 he designed the famous pill box hat worn by Jackie Kennedy at the President’s Inaugural, making the Halston name a household word.
Later that year he was bestowed the Coty’s Fashion Critics Award. In 1966, Halston designed his first ready-to-wear collection for Bergdorf Goodman and continued creating magic with his hat creations. Women’s Wear Daily heralded him as “New York’s Top Milliner.”
He quickly became the toast of fashion society, including Liza Minnelli, Martha Graham, Lauren Bacall, and Elizabeth Taylor among his close circle of friends and clients.
Halston’s career sky-rocketed during the 1970’s and his designs set the standard for American designers. The Halston name became synonymous with classically cut, simple, spare and elegant designs, a phenomenally successful fragrance line Halston by Halston for women X12 and Z14 for men, and the fabric known as “Ultra suede.” Throughout most of the seventies he epitomized the glamour, as well as the decadence of the era, becoming a central figure in the nightlife scene of New York’s Studio 54 disco.
By 1988, the designer had effectively retired and retreated from the limelight — and it wasn’t long after until he was diagnosed with HIV, according to AP News. After learning of his diagnosis, Halston moved to San Francisco to be cared for by his family, where he reportedly spent his last days touring the California coastline in his Rolls Royce car — which Halston asked his family to auction off after his death in order to donate the proceeds to AIDS research.
Despite his tragic death, Halston’s legacy still lives on today, with his dazzling life story portrayed in films and biopics, including the Netflix miniseries, Halston.
CDC Investigates HIV+ Dentist as Source of Infection
When a young woman in Florida is diagnosed with AIDS, her parents claim she was infected by her dentist during a wisdom tooth extraction, prompting an investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) into the dentist and his medical procedures.
Learn More.
Initially, investigators doubted that the 19-year-old patient could have been infected during the dental procedure, however invasive.
“For one thing, she developed AIDS just two years after the surgery, and only 1% of patients go from infection to full-blown illness that quickly,” wrote Stephen Barr, a researcher specializing in microbiology and immunology, for The New York Times in 1994.
Dr. Acer’s former patient was Kimberly Bergalis, a 19-year-old who told her parents and CDC officials that she was a virgin. Without any other leads , the CDC moved forward with an investigation of the dentist, who had left his practice the year before to tend to his declining health.
On March 29, 1990, a CDC investigator met with Dr. David Acer at his home in Stuart, Florida, and informed him that a former patient had AIDS but no apparent risk factors for infection. She asked Acer for a sample of his blood, explaining that she wanted to compare the former patient’s virus with Dr. Acer’s. He complied.
Using an experimental procedure to compare the genetic strains of DNA, the CDC established a match between Dr. Acer and Bergalis. Even so, one investigator who was Florida’s top AIDS official, Dr. John J. Witte, called the evidence of transmission “scientifically inconclusive.”
The CDC would publish its findings of the DNA match in July 1990 without further verification, pointing to Dr. Acer and his dental practice as the source of Bergalis’ deadly disease. In its report, the CDC suggested that during the dental procedures, “higher titers of virus may have been present in the dentist’s blood and he may have been more likely to transmit virus than earlier in the course of his HIV disease.”
According to medical records, Dr. Acer was diagnosed with symptomatic HIV infection in late 1986 and AIDS in September 1987. While he was in practice, he had no record of peripheral neuropathy, dementia, thrombocytopenia or other bleeding disorder, hand dermatitis, or injury.
Dr. Acer closed his practice in 1989 after his T-cell (CD4 lymphocyte) count dropped under 200. He would die on Sept. 30, 1990 at the Hospice of Palm Beach County at West Palm Beach with his parents at his side. Bergalis would die of AIDS-related illness on Dec. 8, 1991 at the age of 23.
April 8, 1990
Teen Activist Ryan White Dies
Ryan White dies of AIDS-related illness at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianpolis at the age of 18.
Learn More.
White was diagnosed with AIDS at the age of 13, following a blood transfusion in December 1984. Living with his family in Kokomo, Indiana, doctors told his parents that he had six months to live but he proved to be more resiliant.
White became a national celebrity when he and his family fought AIDS-related discrimination following his school district’s refusal to let him return to school.
Along with his mother Jeanne White Ginder, Ryan rallied for his right to attend school and became the face of public education about his disease.
After winning a lengthy court case allowing him to return to his classes, Ryan was taunted and shunned by other students. Vandals broke the windows of the White’s home, and cashiers refused to touch his mother’s hands when making change at the supermarket.
Ryan is considered one of the most effective proponents of increasing awareness about HIV/AIDS, He served as an eloquent spokesman about AIDS to the young people of America, as well as to journalists and, through TV appearances, the general public.
“He valiantly fought against a battalion of bigots who saw AIDS as some kind of divine retribution against gay men and intravenous drug users — two of the largest groups stricken with AIDS during this time,” writes Dr. Howard Markel in PBS’s profile on Ryan Wyite.
He died one month before his high school graduation and only months before Congress passed the legislation bearing his name — the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act. His name would also be given to the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, the largest federal program designed specifically for people with HIV, serving over half of all those diagnosed.
CBS broadcasts AIDS fund-raising concert That’s What Friends Are For during television “prime time.”
Learn More.
The TV special, taped at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, featured “two hours of sweet music and good thoughts,” according to Entertainment Weekly.
In the concert’s finale, Dionne Warwick, Whitney Houston, and about 40 other performers sing “That’s What Friends Are For,” a hit song from 1985 considered the unofficial anthem of those in the fight against AIDS. At the song’s end, Houston and Warwick join in a hug.
The concert was the first national AIDS fund-raising effort by the pop music community and collected about $1.5 million for AIDS organizations. Organized by Arista Records, the show took two years to come to fruition and, in the process, unearthed troubling attitudes in the pop music community toward gay men and AIDS.
At the March 17 concert, Arista President Clive Davis declared the event to be ”a party with a purpose.” The party was to celebrate Arista’s 15th anniversary; the purpose was to fight AIDS by raising money and consciousness.
The serious side of the evening was evident in scattered moments. Outside Radio City before the show, members of the AIDS-activist group ACT UP handed out fliers. In the lobby, a New York City group, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), dispensed brochures and safe-sex packets with condoms. During the concert, the actors who hosted the show (Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, and Melanie Griffith) gave short speeches about AIDS. One of the chairmen of the benefit, Loews Hotels CEO and President Jonathan Tisch, told the audience, ”We must do everything in our power to end this plague.”
Two of the performances reflected the problem that had brought everyone together. Whoopi Goldberg did a bittersweet skit about a girl with AIDS, and Jennifer Holliday dedicated a song from the musical Dreamgirls to that show’s director, Michael Bennett, who died of complications from AIDS in 1987. The rest of the show concentrated, as it was supposed to, on entertainment. Twenty-two current and past Arista acts performed, including Barry Manilow, Melissa Manchester, Patti Smith, Milli Vanilli, Daryl Hall and John Oates, and Taylor Dayne. Some of the live concert music won’t be seen on the TV special, but the notoriously audience-shy Carly Simon will appear in a segment taped before the concert started.
As much as the show reflected the somewhat conservative musical tastes of Clive Davis, it also demonstrated his relentless charitable determination. After volunteering to use his label’s anniversary as the foundation for the benefit, Davis gained the cooperation of nearly every artist he wanted. Everyone agreed to appear for just expense money; none of the artists performed extended sets, and many of them sang with the house orchestra rather than with their own backup musicians. Plus, CBS agreed to air the show in prime time. To accomplish all this took considerable clout. ”Clive Davis is a hero here,” says Katharine DeShaw, director of development at GMHC. ”He was willing to put himself on the line.”
Why did Davis do it? ”The cause,” he says. ”It’s the most urgent health problem facing us in this country. Nobody can remain immune from the effects of this terrible plague.” Davis prefers to give credit to the musicians who performed at the benefit: ”This wasn’t a command performance for Clive Davis. The artists responded openly that this was something they wanted to do.”
And yet it seems puzzling that it has taken this long for the pop music community to stage a major national AIDS benefit. At a time when a wide variety of causes is being embraced by musicians, from the environment to human rights to the ethical treatment of animals, these activists haven’t done very much to fight this major health problem.
There have been exceptions. Royalties from the song ”That’s What Friends Are For” have raised more than $1.5 million for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR). Madonna donated seats at her Madison Square Garden concert in 1987 and raised $250,000 for AMFAR. In Oakland Coliseum last June, the Grateful Dead headlined a 9 1/2-hour concert that raised $500,000 despite selling only two-thirds of the seats available. Various artists, such as the B-52’s and Los Lobos, have done public-service TV ads. But, according to fund-raisers at AMFAR (the most prominent nationwide group raising money to fight AIDS), musicians haven’t done as much as people in movies, TV, or the fine arts. ”Other areas of entertainment have done more, much more,” says a fund-raiser at AMFAR, who asked not to be named. ”I would like to see more support. I’d like to see [artists like] Bono and Sting get up on stage for us. I’d like to see Live-Aid for AIDS.”
As successful as the Arista benefit was, it followed two frustrating years that included a major controversy and one planned event that fell through. Back in 1988, Loews Hotels executive Jonathan Tisch was in the audience for the Grammy Awards at Radio City. Tisch, who headed the committee that brought the Grammys to New York, was chatting with his mother, Joan, a volunteer at GMHC. ”She said that, to her knowledge, there hadn’t been a major rock event to benefit AIDS,” Tisch recalls. ”I asked, ‘Who are you going to have do it?’ She said, ‘You.”’ So Tisch put together a group to chair the event, including two record company presidents, Clive Davis of Arista and David Geffen of Geffen Records.
By early 1989, the organizers had decided to produce a superstar concert the following summer to be called ”Rock and a Hard Place,” featuring six or so multi-platinum artists. In February, the heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses, from Geffen’s label, was the first band announced for the June 8 concert. Shortly thereafter, staffers at GMHC, the concert’s major beneficiary, discovered that the band had recorded a song, ”One in a Million,” that includes this homophobic observation: Immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me They come to our country, and think they’ll do as they please Like start a mini-Iran, or spread some f—in disease
By mid-March, GMHC asked Guns N’ Roses to withdraw. ”We felt that the group would be in total conflict with what we were trying to accomplish,” GMHC’s DeShaw remembers. ”It was an extremely difficult decision. David Geffen is an important person, and you never want to offend a major donor.”
Geffen is still angry about that decision, feeling that Guns N’ Roses would have raised a lot of money. ”I don’t care what their record was,” he says. ”If you need a blood donor and the only person who can give you a transfusion is Adolf Hitler, you take the blood.”
April 20, 1990
ACT UP Takes Over Chicago with Multiple Protest Actions
For four days, the Chicago chapter of ACT UP organizes various rallies and actions that culminate in one of the largest AIDS demonstrations ever held.
Learn More.
Chicago became the home of one of the most important, complex, and effective activist events in the history of AIDS activism.
“The protest brought national attention to the epidemic in the Midwest, shed light on the fact that it wasn’t just young white gay men who were dying, and brought about crucial changes at Cook County Hospital, which, like many urban public health facilities, had lagged in meeting the challenges of the epidemic,” wrote Rebecca Makkai for the Chicago Reader on the 30th anniversary of the event.
On April 20-23, the National AIDS Action for Healthcare event was hosted by the Chicago chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. Activists came to the city from around the country to protest increasingly glaring inequities in the way Chicago’s health care establishment was responding to the AIDS crisis.
Activists were outraged that nearly 10 years into the AIDS epidemic, no effective treatment or cure existed, and the disease was a death sentence. Also inciting the activists was the fact that the most promising new treatments came with a cost of thousands of dollars a month, and insurance companies were effectively excluding members of the gay community from coverage.
“The massive public plea for fair and adequate health care was nothing less than a bid for survival,” wrote Makkai. “The demonstrators’ props were banners, costumes, and mattresses; their motto, emblazoned on T-shirts, was ‘Silence = Death.’ For some, it was their first protest. For others, battling with all they had left, it would be their last.”
Of that time, LGBT historian Owen Keehnen recalled how quickly the health of people infected with HIV would deteriorate.
“In ’88 I started working at Unabridged Bookstore,” Keehnen to the Reader. “People would come in, they’d look fine. They’d come in, they’d look sick. Then they didn’t come back.”
The April 1990 event was the largest, most ambitious action in Chicago since the local ACT UP chapter was founded in 1988.
“There were two issues,” Roberto Sanabria, formerly the director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago and an administrator the Illinois Department of Human Services. “One was that HIV meds were incredibly expensive, so we were going after the AMA (American Medical Association) and the insurance companies. The other was that Cook County Health Clinic had opened up this AIDS ward that didn’t have spaces for women.”
The first day of actions on Friday, April 20 was a “teach-in,” held on the campus at University of Illinois Chicago.
We had one of those big lecture halls, and we had little classrooms for breakouts. This was followed by an all-night performance stage at Cook County Hospital, called the Vigil, where activists could get a meal.
“Just because it was not important to sleep — we were all so young, weren’t we?” said Jeanne Kracher, Activist and former executive director of Crossroads Fund, in her interview with the Reader.
After a weekend of round-the-clock vigils at the county hospital, everyone gathered for a rally at Wellington Church near Douglas Park. The speeches were primarily informational, covering the logistics of various actions and the guidelines for civil disobedience.
“I thought, wow, that took it to a whole new level,” said Sanabria. “I was sitting next to [gay rights icon Ortez Alderson]. I love me some Ortez. Ortez was friends with James Baldwin! And he goes, ‘You’re gonna get arrested with me, right?’ So I was shamed into it.”
As ACT UP leaders left the Sunday night rally, they began to see more clearly what they would be up against.
“Someone handed me a report, saying, ‘I got this from a source at the police department.’ It was presumably the plans for the police, and it was overblown, meant to make us feel like we’d be met with tremendous force,” said Jeff Edwards, who now works with the Chicago Teachers Union.
The march began on Monday, April 23 at 8:00 a.m. with activists gathering at the Prudential Building at Randolph and Michigan. About 250 police officers, 50 of them mounted, were waiting for them. But they were quickly outnumbered by the assembling crowd.
The group proceeded north across the Michigan Avenue Bridge to the headquarters of Blue Cross Blue Shield, then located on St. Clair Street, and ultimately on to the headquarters of the American Medical Association. As the march continued, more and more activists joined them until they numbered almost 2,000.
At first, police officers tried to confine the marchers to the sidewalks, but then the marchers were able to move en masse into the streets. As they marched, they held periodic “kiss-ins,” chanted and played instruments, like drums, woodblocks and tambourines.
Some led chants with a megaphone. There was “Women with AIDS under attack! What do we do? Act up, fight back!” Marching down Michigan Avenue, it was “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping!”
“I remember walking, hearing honks, mostly supportive,” Keehnen said. “Everybody in these office windows was watching.”
Once they reached the AMA’s building at Grand and State, activists staged a die-in. People would lie on the ground while others outlined their body in chalk on the pavement.
“When people do chalk outlines in front of your company, it’s shaming you into the fact that you can call your business whatever you want, but you’re basically making money off sick people,” said Keehnen.
Police responded with brutal tactics, according to the activists. They put activists into headlocks and hurling homophobic insults. Five protesters were arrested outside the AMA, and two dozen more were arrested in front of the building at 333 West Wacker Drive, which housed MONY, another insurance firm.
One of the last actions of the day was the Women’s Caucus’ statement about the lack of beds for female patients at Cook County’s AIDS unit. Women activists took over the intersection in front of Cook County Hospital with mattresses, declaring it the “Cook County Women’s AIDS Unit” since no women with AIDS were allowed treatment in the hospital.
“Suddenly all these mattresses appear in the intersection, and these women put hospital gowns over their clothes and plop down,” said Kracher.
“When people starting hitting the mattresses, somebody handed me the megaphone. I’d move around in the group leading chants,” she told the Reader. “There were two defensive rings around us, the PISD (People with Immune System Disorders) Caucus and the People of Color Caucus, creating a barrier against the police … It was amazing.”
Then, at the County building, something happened that even most of the activists didn’t expect.
“It was Danny [Sotomayor], Tim Miller, Frank Sieple, who’s no longer with us, Paul Adams, who’s no longer with us, and me,” said activist Bill McMillan.
Five ACT UP/Chicago activists had climbed onto a ledge outside the third floor of the County Building and they were holding a banner.
“We walked right past the secretary into an office and moved a desk against the door. It was like being in a Fellini film,” he recalled. “We opened the window and climbed out. Then we unfurled our banner: ‘We Demand Equal Healthcare Now.’”
Quickly, Cook County sheriff’s deputies pushed their way into the room with the breach, and pulled the activists off the ledge.
“The first two guys they dragged through the window, they banged their heads on the floor and roughed them up,” said McMillan. “Partway through, the sheriff got up there. He was running for reelection and didn’t want bad PR, so by the time they got me, he said, ‘We’re not gonna hurt you, son, we just don’t want you to fall.’”
The demonstration that day stopped traffic on Chicago’s major thoroughfares of Randolph, Clark, and La Salle, and drew national media attention.
Steven Migalski, who now teaches psychology at Adler University, said “That day made me an activist. I left transformed. My parents found out I was gay two years later from a CNN interview. The whole family, including my grandparents, saw it during Sunday dinner.”
[photo by Mary Patten, ACT UP Chicago]
May 1, 1990
AIDS Cases Rising Among Heterosexuals
Cases attributed to heterosexual transmission are growing faster than any other category of AIDS cases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Learn More.
The CDC reports that from 1988 to 1989, AIDS cases caused by heterosexual transmission jumped 36%. Of the infected heterosexuals who are women, many give birth to infants who are also infected.
”The heterosexual epidemic is no myth,” Dr. Jerome Groopman, head of the AIDS program at Harvard’s New England Deaconness Hospital, told The New York Times. ”It is real.”
According to the CDC, about 128,319 cases of fully symptomatic AIDS were reported from 1981 through March 1990. Of those, CDC officials estimate that about 6,231 — 5% — have been cases in which the disease was transmitted by heterosexual sex.
The NYT article noted that federal statistics likely reflect an undercount of heterosexual transmission of AIDS, because the CDC’s reporting system is ”hierarchical,” meaning that AIDS cases were attributed to homosexual sex, intravenous drug use and all other risk categories first. Only those that did not fit into these categories were put in the “heterosexual transmission” category.
Thomas C. Quinn, an AIDS researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, told the NYT that there is a rapid increase in heterosexually transmitted disease in several cities, especially those of the East Coast, including Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and Miami.
Dr. Quinn recently presented a paper at an AIDS conference at Johns Hopkins University, where he and his colleagues described syphilis as one of the key factors in spreading AIDS among heterosexuals in the inner city.
The NIAID researchers studied 4,863 patients in two inner city clinics in Baltimore that treat sexually transmitted diseases. Among the heterosexuals who said they did not use intravenous drugs, those who had syphilis were seven to nine times more likely to have AIDS than other patients at the clinic.
In December 1988, NIAID launched the Heterosexual AIDS Transmission Study (HATS) to collect data on male and female heterosexuals at high risk of AIDS who are not IV drug users.
May 2, 1990
Ivy League Professor Jack Winkler Dies
John “Jack” Winkler, who taught classics at Yale and Stanford, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 46.
Learn More.
Winkler’s 1989 book Auctor and Actor — which treats the Latin novel The Golden Ass as a detective story — was named best work of classical scholarship by the American Philological Association. In addition to being a classical scholar, Winkler was also a queer theorist and political activist.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1943, Winkler attended a Jesuit high school, where he first learned Greek. From 1960 to 1963, he studied at St. Louis University, also a Jesuit institution. Upon graduating, he joined the Benedictine religious order, living first at St. Lawrence’s Abbey in Ampleforth, England, and then continuing at the St. Louis priory.
In 1970, Winkler left the Benedictines and decided to pursue a career in classics and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 1974. For the next five years, Winkler taught classics at Yale, where he became an advocate for feminist, gay, and minority causes. He helped to found Yale’s women’s studies program, openly supported the university’s Gay Alliance, and co-produced an LGBT-themed radio show called Come Out Tonight.
In 1977, Winkler was the sole faculty member to help organize Yale’s first Gay Rights Week. That same year, he was the only faculty member to join a class-action lawsuit brought by women students against Yale for its tolerance of sexual harassment of students by faculty. Jack left Yale for Stanford in 1979, and continued to be a leading voice for gay students and faculty.
Upon being diagnosed with AIDS in August 1987, he announced a two-year sabbatical. He spent the last years of his life co-editing essay collections, translating fragments from Greek novels, and publishing his most influential work, Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. He donated half of the book’s income to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
Walter Strickler — also known in the Texas gay rodeo community as “Papa” and “Uncle Bud” — dies of AIDS-related illness at Park Plaza Hospital in Houston. He was 67 years old.
Learn More.
Strickler was a founder of the Texas Gay Rodeo Association, fulfilling a lifelong dream of creating a way to bring gay cowboys and rodeo fans together. He was also owner and operator of the country-western gay bar The Barn, which was located in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood.
For his contributions to the community, Strickler was named a Grand Marshal of Houston’s Pride Parade in 1983, along with Marion Pantzer, co-owner of one of Houston’s first lesbian bars.
Strickler was born in 1922 in Jennings, Louisiana, and studied at the University of Southern Louisiana, Chicago University, and Rice University, earning a Master of Arts degree from Rice. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and then worked for Shell for 30 years as a mathematician, according to his obituary in the Montrose Voice.
As his career at Shell came to an end, he opened The Barn in the mid-1970s. Every day, he would take a seat at the front of the country-western bar and quietly read the newspaper, and this is where friends would often find him. But this belied how busy he was in the community.
In addition to founding the Texas Gay Rodeo Association with his partner Terry Clark, Strickler served as the organization’s Treasurer. He also was a charter member of the Houston Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus (now known as the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus) and a founding Board Member of the Montrose Clinic, which became Houston’s leading medical provider during the AIDS Crisis and is now known as Legacy Community Health Services.
He was Treasurer of the Houston Tavern Guild and an active member of the Bar Owners Association of Texas. Through fundraisers held at The Barn, Strickler helped raise money for the Danny Villa Living Memorial Fund, named for a local performer and humanitarian who died of AIDS-related illness, and which provided financial assistant to people living with HIV/AIDS.
Franklyn Seales, best known for playing the finicky business manager Dexter Stuffins on the sit-com Silver Spoons, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 37.
Learn More.
Born on the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent, Seales studied at John Houseman’s Acting Company in New York in the early 1970s. The 1978 PBS drama, ″Trial of the Moke,″ proved to be Seales’ first big break.
Between 1982 and 1986, Seales played business manager Dexter Stuffins on the NBC-TV sitcom Silver Spoons, in which Houseman played a stoic grandfather. His other television appearances included Hill Street Blues and Amen.
Among his motion picture credits are The Onion Field and Southern Comfort. A versatile performer, Seales took on stage roles in productions that ranged from Shakespeare to the theater of the absurd.
A member of L.A. Classic Theatre Works, Seales performed in unconventional productions, including Conversation at Night With a Despised Character. Following Seales’ performance in this production, Los Angeles Times critic Lawrence Christon said he was “one of America’s most compelling stage actors.”
ACT UP Protests NIH to Demand More HIV Treatment Options
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) protests at the National Institutes of Health, demanding more HIV treatments and the expansion of clinical trials to include more women and people of color.
Learn More.
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.
June 4, 1990
San Francisco Playwright-Actor Dan Turner Dies
Dan Turner, author of several plays at Theatre Rhinoceros and other Bay Area theaters, dies in San Francisco of AIDS-related illness at the age of 42.
Turner was born in 1947 in Bloomington, Illinois, where his father managed the Hotel Rogers. When he was a teenager, his family moved to Cheboygan, Wisconsin, and he began acting in high school drama productions. In college at Fairfield University in Connecticut, he spent a year abroad at Exeter College in England and traveled throughout Europe. After earning his Bachelor’s degree, he volunteered to work in Malawi with the Peace Corps and then in Alabama with the AmeriCorps VISTA program. He was in Alabama when he wrote and produced his early play Cottonmouth.
In the early 1970s, he studied playwriting with Kenneth Cameron at the University of Iowa, writing and producing the play Light Years. He moved to Texas to accept an internship with the Dallas Theater, but quickly found that the program’s leaders didn’t approve of Turner’s openly gay identity and progressive political views.
San Francisco became Turner’s next destination. He joined the productions of both regional and gay theater companies and collectives, and taught a playwriting course at the Eureka Theatre, birthplace of Angels in America. He occasionally traveled to Los Angeles for acting opportunities. A prolific artist, Turner also wrote essays and critical articles for local gay papers, as well as poetry, novels, and short stories. Some of his erotica appeared in gay magazines such as In Touch and Blueboy.
In 1976, Turner contracted hepatitis, and in the same year, he traveled with Tennessee Williams to New Orleans, New York and Cape Cod. Turner became in awe of Williams, who was in failing health and yet woke at 4:00 a.m. every day to write.
“I had been perpetuating (my hepatitis) through this negative mind trip,” Turner later told the Los Angeles Times. “From then on, when my mind said, ‘You can’t do it,’ I’d say, ‘But that’s just your mind.’”
He returned to San Francisco with renewed hope. He wrote and produced three musical plays, two of which (Cinderella II and Comeback) were in collaboration with playwright-novelist Daniel Curzon. He also directed several plays.
In February 1982, Turner was diagnosed wish Kaposi Sarcoma and was one the first patients of Dr. Paul Volberding at San Francisco General Hospital. He befriended AIDS activist Bobbi Campbell and together they laid the groundwork for the organization People with AIDS San Francisco. Both were open about their AIDS diagnosis and began to be sought-after as speakers for community events. In May 1983, Turner and Campbell represented People with AIDS at the second annual AIDS Forum.
Still, Turner continued to be involved in San Francisco theater, and his work began to incorporate his AIDS activism. In 1984, he wrote parts of The AIDS Show at the Theatre Rhinoceros. In 1987, Turner was featured in the televison documentary The Fighting Edge, which addressed how people with AIDS could continue to lead productive lives.
With an eight-year-long illness, Turner was the longest-living known person with AIDS by the time of his death. He outlived his friend Campbell by almost six years.
“He was a shining symbol,” longtime friend Maura Nolan told the Los Angeles Times. “When Dan would walk into the hospital room of some person afflicted with AIDS, it was as if hope walked though the door.”
Clarence Cain, Inspiration for Film ‘Philadelphia,’ Dies
Clarence Cain, whose discrimination lawsuit was one of the inspirations for the 1994 film Philadelphia, dies of AIDS-related illness. He was 38.
Learn More.
Clarence Cain was a lawyer managing a regional office for Hyatt Legal Services, a chain of low-cost legal clinics, when he was fired for disclosing his AIDS diagnosis to his supervisor.
When Cain’s employment was terminated, his coworker and friend Richard Silverberg quit in protest of the firm’s treatment of Cain. Silverberg, then 33 years old and one year out of law school, represented Cain in court.
“Clarence wanted his day in court,” Silverberg told The Washington Post in January 1994. “He would say, ‘I won’t let them get away with it.’ ”
Cain was one of 10 children born in Newport News, Virginia to Lillie Mae Cain, and the only one of her children to attend college.
“Everybody else was playing football, and Clarence had a book stuck in his face,” the Rev. Solomon Wooten told the Daily Press in Newport News in 1994. “He was always very quiet.”
Cain earned a bachelor’s degree and law degree from the University of Virginia. In 1986, Hyatt Legal Services recruited Cain for its fast-track program, according to The Washington Post. After managing Hyatt’s Falls Church office, he was promoted to regional partner and put in charge of 10 offices with 75 employees in the Philadelphia area.
Cain became one of Hyatt’s highest-paid regional partners, able to financially help other members of his family while maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. Then, in July 1987, Cain was hospitalized for more than a week with pneumonia.
He informed his supervisor that he had AIDS, and soon after, Hyatt “switched this young lawyer onto another fast track — one calculated to remove him,” according to U.S. District Judge Raymond Broderick in his court opinion.
During the 1990 trial, Hyatt supervisors portrayed Cain as inept and uncooperative, according to The Washington Post. Hyatt’s founder and owner, Joel Hyatt, testified that he approved of Cain’s dismissal — something the politically ambitious man would come to regret during his 1994 campaign for U.S. Senate in Ohio.
Cain ultimately won his case, and was awarded $107,888 in damages and an additional $50,000 in punitive damages. He died two months after hearing the court’s decision.
June 8, 1990
NYC Dancer Demian ‘D-Man’ Acquavella Dies
Demian Acquavella, a dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Company, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in Brooklyn. He was 32 years old.
Learn More.
A popular figure in post-modernist dance in New York, Acquavella was the inspiration for the 1989 work D-Man in the Waters, a celebration of Acquavella’s determination to fight his illness.
Born in Brooklyn, Acquavella moved to California when he was twenty to major in dance at Santa Monica Community College. He trained with Marjorie Mussman, Cindi Green, Ernie Pagnano and Phil Black, and also studied at the Nat Horne Musical Theater and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. He danced with Lillo Way, Elisa Monte, Miss Mussmann, the Rush Dance company, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater before joining the Jones-Zane troupe.
He became the central figure in Bill T. Jones’ pivotal work when the St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra commissioned Jones to choreograph a dance set to the first movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-Flat Major. By then Acquavella was so sick, he had stopped dancing but he continued to stay close to the dance company.
“At first, Bill was going to call it just Waters,” Acquavella recalled. “But then Bill looked over at me, and changed the title. I will never forget Bill saying I would be in it, even though I could hardly walk.”
D-Man in the Waters had its premiere at the Joyce Theatre on March 14, 1989.
“As he could no longer walk by the time of the debut, I carried Demian onstage, offering my legs as he executed the arm movements of what would have been his solo,” Jones wrote.
After he was too ill to perform, he was known to attend performances and loudly cheer the dancers from his seat.
When codirector LeBlanc was 16, she tells us on-screen in the documentary, she saw D-Man performed. The experience inspired her to become a dancer — and to join Jones’ company.
Now on the dance faculty at Loyola Marymount University in California, LeBlanc chronicles in the film a production of D-Man that she staged with her undergraduate students.
In the documentary, Jones meditates on what the work means now. In 1989, “It was a place to grieve,” he says.
But he believes D-Man is more than “a response to the plague”; it’s an enduring statement about survival and community.
George Stavrinos, best known for his illustrations for New York fashion retailers Barney’s and Bergdorf Goodman, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 47.
Learn More.
In the late 1970s , Stavrinos’ work became familiar to many gay men through his illustrations for numerous magazines, including GQ, Cosmopolitan, and Christopher Street,according to Visual AIDS, a project created in 1988 to preserve a visual record of the work of HIV+ artists.
Stavrinos also provided illustrations for the New York City Opera, and illustrated the cover of a novel by West Hollywood writer Felice Picano as well as an excerpt of Paul Monette’s first novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, which appeared in the August 1978 issue of Blueboy.
Stavrinos was famous for his high-contrast drawings and technical proficiency using pencil. He used the style of Superrealism, a movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s in which art approaches the realism of photography.
His process began with hundreds of photographs of his model in various poses and at various focal lengths using a Polaroid SX-70. He would then create an environment around the model that included a variety of shapes and materials, such as pottery, fans, lights and various geometric designs.
Paul Giovanni — Composer for ‘Wicker Man’ Soundtrack — Dies
Paul Giovanni — a playwright, actor, director, singer and musician best known for writing the music for the 1973 British horror film The Wicker Man — dies of AIDS-related illness at Cabrini Medical Center in New York. He was 57.
Learn More.
Giovanni wrote the music for the The Wicker Man‘s soundtrack, and also wrote the lyrics and performed in the songs “Landlord’s Daughter” and “Gently Johnny. The music was played by a group of six musicians, using a combination of traditional and modern instruments.
The New York Times considered a highlight of Giovanni’s career to be his 1978 Broadway play, The Crucifer of Blood, a Sherlock Holmes drama. He wrote and staged the play, which received a Tony Award nomination for best director. The play would be turned into a movie for TV in 1991, shortly after Giovanni’s death.
But many fans of cult films credit Giovanni with crafting one of the most memorable and haunting musical accompaniments to a film with his soundtrack for The Wicker Man.
“Haunting and warm in both measures, Paul Giovanni’s rustic folk soundtrack for The Wicker Man is the perfect compliment to a dark fairytale,” writes reviewer Laura Thomas. “His enchanting score and its thorough integration within the film’s narrative mean that The Wicker Man oscillates between folk musical and horror.”
Protestors Disrupt Int’l AIDS Conference in San Francisco
The 6th International AIDS Conference in San Francisco erupts in demonstrations, boycotts and dramatic disruptions in protest of U.S. immigration policies that bar people with HIV from entering the country.
Learn More.
“For me, the single most moving episode of the week took place at the conference, when a huge number of the delegates stood up and turned their back on [US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary] Louis Sullivan as he was speaking,” journalist Tim Kingston recalls in an interview with 48 Hills.
For the first time in history, a major policy address got hijacked at an International AIDS Conference.
“Then, all at once, they marched out of the Moscone Center and joined the Pride parade,” Kingston says. “That was such a powerful statement.”
Many of the demonstrations during the conference were organized by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and brought attention to issues the conference failed to address, like the growing infection rate and the lack of treatment programs for women, people of color, and intravenous drug users.
“Three hundred thousand dead from AIDS — Where is George?” chanted activist Peter Staley and other ACT UP members from a conference stage. Soon, others in the packed auditorium joined them.
Bush refused two invitations to address the conference, Staley told UPI science writer Rebecca Kolberg. Instead, the president attended a fundraiser for conservative senator Jesse Helms, who lead legislative efforts to restrict travel and employment of people diagnosed with HIV and AIDS.
For five days, ACT UP stopped business as usual, reported CBS. Members clogged downtown San Francisco, marching to the Immigration and Naturalization building at 630 Sansome Street to protest the travel and immigration ban for HIV-positive people. Activists crashed convention events and disrupted speakers. About 100 protesters were arrested outside the Marscone Center on the first day of the conference.
Even the co-chairman of the conference, John Ziegler, wore a red armband in solidarity with activists and held a moment of silence in support of those who boycotted the conference because of the travel ban.
July 2, 1990
Julio Rivera Attacked & Killed in Jackson Heights, Queens
Julio Rivera, a New York-born Puerto Rican bartender, is brutally murdered inside a schoolyard in Jackson Heights, Queens by three white men from the area. He was 29 years old.
Learn More.
Three men in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights went out armed with a claw hammer, a plumber’s wrench and a kitchen knife, hunting for a gay man to assault. They saw a gay couple walking along the avenue, but they decided to keep looking because they didn’t “like the odds” of a three-on-two fight, according to Richard Shpuntoff, director of Julio of Jackson Heights.
They moved on to the grounds of a local public school known to be a gay cruising area. There they found Julio and killed him. The New York Police Department initially and erroneously classified Rivera’s murder as a drug-related crime.
According to Arianna Martinez of the Latinx Project, Rivera’s murder resembled the deaths of at least a dozen other gay men killed in the Jackson Heights neighborhood in the previous 20 years — and none of them were solved or prosecuted.
Only after LGBT groups and Rivera’s family raised public awareness about the NYPD’s mishandling of the murder case did the NYPD reclassify the death as a hate crime and direct resources to finding the men responsible.
According to testimony by one of the perpetrators, 21-year-old Daniel Doyle, two men — Erik Brown, 21, and Esat Bici, 19 — lured Rivera, into an isolated corner of PS 69’s schoolyard. Brown and Bici beat Rivera with the hammer and a beer bottle, and then Doyle stabbed Rivera. They left Rivera to die of the knife wounds.
Gay activists have been warning since the mid-1980s that physical attacks against gay men were increasing at an alarming pace, and they attributed this to a fear of HIV/AIDS, according to a 1986 report in the Los Angeles Times. LGBT leaders also explained the rise in homophobic violence as a reaction to conservative religious leaders’ claim that the AIDS epidemic was “God’s way of punishing the gay community.”
Almost at the exact time that HIV cases first began to emerge in New York, the LGBTQ civil rights struggle faced a reactionary backlash led by Anita Bryant and Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose “Moral Majority” inveighed against giving rights to gay people. It didn’t help that President Ronald Reagan, a Moral Majority ally, largely ignored the growing crisis in the early 1980s and only responded publicly when it became clear that HIV/AIDS was spreading to the heterosexual population.
In 1992, local gay activists founded the Queens Pride Parade to commemorate Julio Rivera’s death and to raise the visibility of the LGBT community in Jackson Heights. The parade, which takes place annually in early June, attracts up to 40,000 people.
July 6, 1990
Bay Area Comedian Jim Samuels Dies
Jim Samuels, winner of the 1982 San Francisco Comedy Competition, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 41.
Learn More.
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 Concertand 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.
July 7, 1990
Brazilian Rock Star Cazuza Dies
Brazilian rock legend and heartthrob Cazuza dies from AIDS-related illness at his parents’ Ipanema home at the age of 32.
Learn More.
“Cazuza was forced to navigate his way through the trying social and medical realities of living with AIDS in Brazil during the 1980s,” according to Brazil: Five Centuries of Changeby Thomas E. Skidmore.
Prior to the arrival of AIDS in Brazil in 1983, a sexual liberation had taken hold in the country’s major cities. Because the first reported AIDS cases were that of gay men, it would be commonly referred to by Brazilians as a “gay cancer” or “gay plague,” and would cause widespread panic and fear.
“Cazuza would come to embody much of the conversation around (homo)sexuality and AIDS that would consume Brazil in the late 1980s,” Skidmore writes. “Cazuza had relationships with both men and women. He made easy references to kissing girls and having girlfriends, but he neither ascribed to being gay per sé nor denied his interest in men… He would be able to defy the notion that AIDS was purely a gay man’s disease; though he slept with men, he was not necessarily identified, by himself or others, as gay.”
″Fortunately, he died without pain, sleeping,″ his father, Joao Araujo, director of one of the largest record companies in Brazil, would say on television.
Cazuza’s funeral at Sao Joao Batista Church in Rio’s Botofogo neighborhood would draw hundres of fans.
Kaisik Wong, Designer of Counter-Cultural Fashion, Dies
Kaisik Wong, an avant-garde fashion designer who worked in the Bay Area from the 1960s to the 1980s, dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco. He was 40.
Learn More.
Kaisik Wong was the creator of what would become to be known as “wearable art,” but he was relatively unknown outside of the Bay Area. One of Wong’s pieces — a 1973 patchwork vest that was photographed for the fashion book Native Funk and Flash (1974) — would be replicated by a Balenciaga designer in 2002, causing renewed interest in Wong’s work (as well as outrage in the fashion industry over the obvious plagiarism).
Born in San Francisco in 1950, Kaisik Wong grew up in Chinatown. When he was 14, he began silk screening fabrics and making his own clothes, including shoes, hats and belts, according to Wong’s brother Kailey, who spoke to the Los Angeles Times in 2002, when the Balenciaga vest scandal broke.
Kaisik dropped out of high school at 15 to study at the Pacific Fashion Institute. He began taking his design inspiration from other young people gathering in the Fillmore, the Avalon and other meccas of the hippie movement, his brother said.
Wong was just 17 when he moved to New York City in 1967, and began working with designers. He traveled to Paris and met Yves Saint Laurent, Thierry Mugler, and Pierre Cardin. When Cardin asked Wong to work for him, he declined, preferring to focus his energy and talent on creating his own designs, his brother said.
In his travels, he sought out people who celebrated art and spectacle, and found himself in the inner circle of legendary surrealist Salvador Dali. Dali, who had a keen interest in the artistic aspects of fashion, saw Wong’s work and invited him to collaborate on a series of costumes for the Spanish surrealist and his wife, Gala.
For himself, Wong created a costume inspired by the Monkey King, a trickster character in Chinese myth, and wore it when he visited Dali and also to other special events. Wong’s panel for the AIDS Memorial Quilt references the Monkey King, which to Wong was both a costume and persona.
Uninspired by the state of the fashion industry in New York and Paris, he decided to return to the creative wellspring that was 1970s San Francisco, and he launch his own fashion label, Muuntux. His garments used unusual shapes and materials to emphasize the handmade fabrication.
Well-known in the local art and theatrical community, Wong was sought out to create costumes and performance pieces. Surrealist filmmaker (and later photographer) Steven Arnold invited Wong to create the elaborate costumes that are featured in his ground-breaking film Luminous Procuress. Wong also created costumes and set designs for The Cockettes, a multiracial drag ensemble that performed monthly in the “Nocturnal Dream Show” at the Pagoda Palace Theater.
“Wong was the epitome of the outsider as designer,” states the art-fashion blog Undo and Unravel. “Amazingly, he didn’t use patterns to create collections that veered more towards costume than everyday staples that would hang in a closet. Wong often referenced ancient cultures in his work, which was the main source of the fantastical nature of his aesthetic.”
In 1973, Wong closed Muuntux and began producing one-of-a-kind pieces for the San Francisco boutique Obiko, as well as I. Magnin and Henri Bendel. He also began designing for stage performers, such as Tina Turner and Robin Williams (whose comedy career began in San Francisco).
“He helped to pave the way for a more emotional and rebellious glamour in American fashion, injecting the themes of love, funk, surrealism, psychedelic dreams, and mysticism into his dazzlingly obscure designs,” wrote Colby Mugrabi in his tribute to Wong.
In a 1978 interview with New York Magazine, Wong said his whimsical clothing for celebrities and performers had a practical purpose.
“The idea is to get people together and get them in touch with the changing of the seasons,” Wong said. “The clothes in the collection are merely functional versions of what we do in the theater.”
Following Wong’s death in July 1990 from AIDS, his mother insisted on maintaining his workroom exactly as it was and refused to sell any of the finished pieces, according to his brother Kailey.
“His scissors, sewing machine and pins were just the way they were, as if he was going to the store and coming right back,” Kailey told the LA Times.
In 1996, the de Young Museum mounted a retrospective of Wong’s work, bringing together more than 30 of his wearable art looks. And in early 2002, almost 12 years after Wong died, Wong’s brother Kailey received an email from a friend that included a photo of a vest in Balenciaga’s new collection — and he immediately recognized the design as a piece Wong created in 1973.
Having already seen designs similar to Wong’s work in the Star Wars movie franchise, Kailey said he wasn’t all that surprised to see his brother’s work replicated by a Paris-based fashion house.
“I guess nothing is original,” Kailey told the LA Times. “Except maybe Kaisik.”
July 26, 1990
Congress Passes Americans with Disabilities Act
The U.S. Congress enacts the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Act prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities, including people living with HIV/AIDS.
August 12, 1990
Performer Ethyl Eichelberger Dies
Flamboyant actor Ethyl Eichelberger, who turned theatrical conventions upside down in their career as a performance artist, playwright and director, committs suicide. Eichelberger was 45 years old.
Learn More.
Eichelberger was diagnosed with AIDS and chose to end their life on their own terms. Their body was discovered in their Staten Island home by friends Lola Pashalinski and Linda Chapman.
Eichelberger was equally at ease playing characters male or female, including Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, King Lear, Medusa and Klytemnestra.
They wrote more than 30 plays, many of them marked by such Eichelberger trademarks as fire-eating, cartwheels and impromptu accordion concerts.
Eichelberger was born to Amish parents on July 17, 1945, and was named James Roy. After studying theater at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, they attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and worked with Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.
It was here where they perfected their flair for comedy and their craftmanship as a wig maker. In 1975, they legally changed their first name to Ethyl.
Bobby DeBarge, a singer celebrated for his falsetto vocals and a co-producer the band DeBarge, dies of AIDS-related illness at a hospice in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was 39.
Learn More.
DeBarge was the lead singer of the Motown R&B group Switch, and later on, he served as both mentor and a co-producer of his siblings’ band, DeBarge.
Bobby DeBarge was the oldest male of eight DeBarge children born to Robert and Etterlene DeBarge over the course of their 21-year marriage. His mother was a black gospel singer who encouraged her children to hone their musical talents. His father was domineering and physically abusive to members of the family, according to Parle magazine.
Bobby DeBarge started his career as a singer as part of Barry White’s background group, and when White broke up the group, DeBarge and other members formed a group named Hot Ice. In 1977, Greg Williams formed the band Switch, featuring DeBarge and his brother Tommy. Switch managed to get the attention of Jermaine Jackson, and they were soon signed to Motown Records.
Bobby DeBarge released six albums with Greg Williams and Switch members with the last album in 1980. By 1981, DeBarge was overseeing the production of his siblings’ debut album The DeBarges; he also co-wrote with younger brother El the song, “Queen of My Heart.”
The group’s third album, In a Special Way (1983), featured the hit single “Time Will Reveal.” But the group would have their biggest hit in 1985 with “Rhythm of the Night.”
Personal problems, including substance abuse which eventually led to drug trafficking charges in Wisconsin in 1988, plagued DeBarge in later years and took focus away from his musical career. Despite having an amazing voice, Bobby DeBarge didn’t release a solo album until 1995, titled It’s Not Over. The album was released just before he died, and he didn’t get the chance to see the project promoted.
This creates the nation’s largest HIV-specific federal grant program, and the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration is charged with managing the resources,
August 24, 1990
Bay Area AIDS Fundraiser David Lewis Dies
David Lewis, of the Harvey Milk AIDS Education Fund, dies of AIDS-related illness at his parents’ home in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was 38.
Learn More.
From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Lewis lived in San Francisco, where he was an active member of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club and served on the board of the Harvey Milk AIDS Education Fund, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
Lewis was also a member of the leather community and a founding member of The 15 Association of San Francisco. He worked as a clinical counselor, income tax preparer, and smoking cessation program coordinator in the Bay Area until 1989, when he returned to his parents’ home in Vancouver.
Lewis’ body was cremated and his ashes were buried in Point Roberts Cemetery in Washington next to the remains of his partner, James Landsdowne, who died of AIDS-related illness in June 1989.
James K. Heady, owner of Male Image barbershop and Image Leather shop, dies of AIDS-related illness at San Francisco’s Hospice By The Bay at the age of 45.
Learn More.
With the two businesses that he co-owned with his partner, Gary Mootz, Heady worked long hours but still found time to travel and pursue hobbies, according to the Bay Area Reporter. He and Gary often spent time sailing their boat, “The Crisco Kid,” on San Francisco Bay.
Born and raised in Ohio, Heady joined the U.S. Navy in 1964 and served as the launch director for the USS Independence. After the service, he moved to London and worked as a cab driver, and then returned to the U.S. to study architecture. Heady moved from Phoenix to San Francisco in 1977.
September 6, 1990
Rock Musician Tom Fogerty Dies
Tom Fogerty, member of Creedence Clearwater Revival and older brother of frontman John Fogerty, dies of AIDS-related illness in Scottsdale, Arizona at the age of 48.
Learn More.
Born November 9, 1941 in Berkeley, California, Fogerty holds a significant place in rock history. As the rhythm guitarist for Creedence Clearwater Revival, he played on plenty of rock classics and had a solo career.
In the four years the band was together, they never had a #1 single in the U.S. However, the band holds the record for the most number of No.2 chart hits without ever having had a No.1. They also had a U.K. #1 hit with Bad Moon Rising.
At some point in the 1980s, after moving to Scottsdale, Arizona, Fogerty underwent surgery for his back and an unscreened blood transfusion caused him to be infected with AIDS virus. The cause of his death was initially reported as tuberculosis.
In the eulogy that John Fogerty made at his brother’s funeral, he said: “We wanted to grow up and be musicians. I guess we achieved half of that, becoming rock ‘n roll stars. We didn’t necessarily grow up.”
When Creedence Clearwater Revival was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, Tom Fogerty’s widow brought his ashes in an urn.
Lawsuits Filed against Blood Agencies over Tainted Transfusions
The blood services industry braces itself against more than 300 lawsuits regarding people infected with the AIDS virus through blood transfusions.
Learn More.
A small number of the medical negligence lawsuits have been settled for large amounts of money, and another 300 lawsuits are headed to trial, mostly in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported.
While eight years has passed since the first medical reports made connections between transfusions and AIDS, legal cases are only beginning to surface because of the lag time between becoming infected with HIV and onset of physical symptoms. An estimated 26 million people received transfusions between 1977 and 1985, years when the AIDS epidemic spread largely unchecked.
Legal experts expect thousands more cases to be filed in the courts over the next few years as more people discover that they were given tainted blood during the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
In one case, a 5-year-old Arizona boy was awarded $28.7 million — believed to be the largest such award — and several other jury verdicts have been in the range of $12 million.
“These awards are far higher than in other types of cases, because the jury tries harder because of the disease, because they have all personally felt that fear,” attorney Duncan Barr told the LA Times. Barr had defended San Francisco’s Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in several cases.
Plaintiffs have argued that the blood banks ignored scientific warnings about the threat of HIV-contaminated blood, failed to screen out high-risk donors through questionnaires that identified high-risk behavior, and refused to perform tests for other diseases that were often present in HIV-infected donors.
In Los Angeles County, health officials said 194 adults and 36 children have contracted AIDS through transfusions.
The American Red Cross, which collects half the nation’s blood supply, would not comment to the LA Times on how many lawsuits have been filed against it over allegedly tainted blood transfusions.
The Blood Council of Community Blood Centers released a statement saying that most centers were insured only for $2 million to $5 million a year for the years in question, and if the centers run out of insurance funds, they may be forced to increase the cost of blood sales to hospitals or go bankrupt.
September 30, 1990
First ‘AIDS Walk Wisconsin’ is Held in Milwaukee
AIDS activists in the Midwest gather in Milwaukee for the first “AIDS Walk Wisconsin” and raise money for the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin.
Learn More.
Sponsored by the Milwaukee AIDS Project, AIDS Walk Wisconsin drew hundreds of participants to its first event. Milwaukee-area business donated a total of $33,000 to support the event, making it the biggest HIV/AIDS fundraiser in the state.
The Walk’s route, which was a full 10 kilometers, went from Summerfest via Lincoln Memorial Drive to Lake Park and back again. Each of eight rest stops had its own stage and musical entertainment.
The honorary chairpersons of the event were Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist and his wife, Susan Mudd. The event raised money for the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, founded in 1985 to provide comprehensive HIV/AIDS healthcare services.
AIDS Walk Wisconsin would go on to become an annual fundraiser and bring in millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS healthcare services for state residents.
The first AIDS case in Wisconsin was reported in 1983, and reached 100 cases in 1986. By 1991, the number of cases exceeded 1,000. In 1995, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Wisconsin would peak with the cumulative number of HIV cases exceeding 3,000 and cumulative deaths exceeding 2,000.
Milwaukee writer Paul Masterson remembered his first AIDS Walk Wisconsin in 1996: “In the face of all those deaths, the Walk represented hope in those most dire of times …. Bette Midler was honorary chair. I recall her standing on the Mason Street Bridge over Lincoln Memorial Drive waving to the thousands of walkers (there were 10,545 to be precise) who passed underneath.”
Ray Stephens, best known for his starring role in the 1980s TV series The Great Space Coaster, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 35.
Learn More.
Stephens became the lead singer of The Village People in 1985, recorded with the group for their album, Sex Over the Phone, and acted in the movie Village People: New York City.
He was an actor, known for in roles in The Runaways (1975) and Cat’s Eye (1985). He is also heard singing the tune Cat’s Eye during the closing credits of the 1985 Stephen King movie.
Stephens reportedly became infected with the HIV virus ‘ death through the intravenous use of drugs.
October 16, 1990
Virtuoso Pianist Jorge Bolet Dies
Jorge Bolet, regarded as the last of the great romantic concert pianists, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in Mountain View, California at the age of 75.
Learn More.
Bolet was famous for his performances and recordings of large-scale Romantic music, particularly works by Franz Liszt, César Franck, and Frederic Chopin. He also specialized in piano transcriptions and unusual repertoire, including the difficult works of Godowsky.
Bolet, who was born in Havana, had been performing in the U.S. and abroad for years before critics and audiences suddenly recognized him as a great master. In the 1970s, he started to receive rave reviews.
“There may be others who can play the notes, but Bolet, with his roots in an older tradition than most today … has a feeling for the line, the elegance, the suave sound, the tapered phrase of high romanticism that is virtually unmatched today,” Harold Schonberg said of the pianist in a 1978 review for The New York Times.
Bolet parlayed his new-found popularity into a recording contract with Decca and a world tour. At his most prolific, he was giving up to 150 concerts a season.
For London/Decca Records, he made more than two dozen recordings, including nine of piano works by Liszt, according to The Washington Post. He also recorded music by Brahms, Debussy, Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky.
Bolet retired from the concert stage in June of 1989, about six months after learning he was HIV positive. His last Carnegie Hall appearance was on April 16, 1989, and his final performance was a solo recital at the West Berlin Philharmonie on June 8, 1989, according to The New York Times.
His last recordings, made in March 1990, were of two sonatas and selected nocturnes, by Chopin.
A website created as a tribute to Bolet includes a Spotify playlist and complete discography of his work, as well as a detailed biography of the master pianist.
October 24, 1990
Downtown NYC Club Performer John Sex Dies
John Sex, a cabaret performer and performance artist, dies of AIDS-related illness in New York City. He was 34.
Learn More.
With his trademark platinum-blond hair which stood straight up, John Sex was a standout personality of the 1980s East Village art scene. His act combined parodies of schmaltzy Vegas songs with a burlesque edge, and he would typically take the stage in 10-inch platform heels, a shiny zip-up jumpsuit, or cut-out leather pants.
“The character of John Sex was not all that much off from the real John Sex, but more of a mythical version of himself as an omnisexual rockstar parody or phallocentric version of Tom Jones,” wrote Richard Metzger, host of the British talk show Dangerous Minds. “He couldn’t turn it off if he wanted to, which I can assure you, he did not.”
Born John McLoughlin in 1956, he grew up on Long Island and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City as a member of the cohort that included Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1981, he exhibited some of his word-based art at the New York / New Wave exhibition at P.S. 1 and at the Beyond Words show at the Mudd Club.
He switched from painting to performance art after meeting downtown performers Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias in the early 1980s, according to Metzger. He took the stage name “John Sex” after Nomi and Arias gave him that nickname to poke fun at his promiscuity.
With his back-up singers The Bodacious Ta-Tas, Sex created a nightclub act that was equal parts Las Vegas and Times Square. He played to club audiences at the Pyramid Club, Danceteria, Limelight, The Palladium and The Saint. Notable numbers were “Jet Set,” “Hustle With My Muscle,” “Sex Appeal,” “Bump and Grind It,” and “Rock Your Body.
Sex was immortalized in the 1986 book Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene by Steven Hager. In 1988, Sex released a music video of “Rock Your Body” that surprised everyone when it was picked up by MTV. After a few months of the video being played in nightclubs nationwide, Sex started getting paid well for his live performances ($3,500 per gig), Metzger said. Clubs in Palm Beach, Miami, and Atlanta offered to fly Sex in to perform, but soon his health began to deteriorate and he was unable to travel.
“I was the doorman of the upstairs VIP room at [the Mars nightclub] — Vin Diesel worked the front door — and saw the show,” Metzger wrote. “[Sex] was still a high-energy performer, but the medication he was taking made him puffy and his hair had started to fall out, and so he was obliged to cut off his trademark hairdo, fashioning the hair that was left into a jeweled crown.”
John Sex is featured among the artist tributes on the website for Visual Aids, an organization that utilizes art to fight AIDS. In 2017, he was memorialized in Ain Gordon’s show Radicals in Miniature, which featured tributes to Sex and other “unfamous legends” of the 1970s and 1980s downtown art scene.
Craig Russell, Drag Artist and Actor from Toronto, Dies
Internationally known drag artist Craig Russell dies of AIDS-related illness at Toronto Western Hospital at the age of 42.
Learn More.
Billed during the 1970s and 1980s as a “female impersonator,” Craig Russell performed monologues and songs as Bette Davis, Carol Channing, Janis Joplin, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Peggy Lee, and Mae West. Considered “the ambassador of Canada’s gay culture,” he performed his act in Las Vegas, Hollywood, Berlin, London, and Paris.
In 1977, Russell starred in the film Outrageous, which was based on a book about his life as a hairdresser-by-day and drag-performer-by-night. The following year, Russell was awarded Best Actor for his performance by the Berlin International Film Festival. He also won awards at the Virgin Islands Film Festival in both Best Actor and Best Actress categories.
Born in Toronto, Russell was introduced to show business in 1965 by screen siren Mae West when he was 17 years old. He took a part-time job as West’s secretary, but quit several months later to study hairdressing in Toronto, according to The New York Times.
In 1970, at the age of 22, he gave his first performance at a Toronto gay club, impersonating Tallulah Bankhead, wrote The NY Times.
Culture writer Joe E. Jeffreys wrote the following about Russell for the LGBTQ Archives:
“Equally remarkable as the range of his characterizations was Russell’s three-octave vocal range that allowed him to impersonate Barbra Streisand in her own key. He could perform a duet between Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. For his act’s finale, he frequently performed a run-down of all the ladies who had performed in Hello, Dolly!”
According to Jeffreys, fans particularly loved Russell’s impersonation of anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
“As a female impersonator, Russell attempted genuine verisimilitude, but he also added a great deal of his own personality and comic sensibility,” Jeffreys wrote. “His approach lies somewhere between the sharp-witted performances of drag comedians such as Charles Pierce or Lynne Carter and the dead-on likenesses of impersonators such as Jim Bailey or Jimmy James.”
After his award-winning performance in Outrageous, Russell had a one-man off-Broadway show, A Man and His Women, in 1977. He was booked at large and prestigious venues around the world.
However, Russell’s career began to decline when substance abuse and other issues began to interfere with his ability to perform. In 1986, Russell returned to Toronto to film a sequel to Outrageous. It was released in 1987 to mixed reviews.
In 2020, thirty years after Russell’s death, Outrageous Misfits, a book about the life and legacy of Russell was published by Dundurn Press.
_ _ _ _ _
Graphic from the collection “AIDS Awareness: The Fight Against AIDS,” published in 1993 by the comic book company Eclipse Enterprises. The Craig Russell trading card is featured in the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s historical collection.
November 7, 1990
Film Historian Vito Russo Dies
Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 44.
Learn More.
A film historian whose work was the first to examine the portrayal of LGBT people in film, television, and other media, Russo wrote The Celluloid Closet, the consummate reference book on homosexuality in the U.S. film industry. Russo also was a key voice in the creation of both ACT UP-New York and the influential gay and lesbian media watchdog, Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD.
Russo’s 1981 book chronicles the history of depictions of gay people in film, and it was made into an award-winning documentary (1995). The book found its origins in movie nights Russo organized in the 1970s, when he combined the things he loved — community and cinema.
At the time, with the Stonewall riots a fresh memory, such gatherings were political acts. Russo would screen a beloved movie and invite friends to watch — and soon the attendance grew to hundreds of gay people who would applaud favorite lines of dialogue and revel in queer subtext. For many, these precursors of LGBTQIA+ film festivals were a first involvement in queer community.
Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet was published just as AIDS began its devastating march into the lives of many in the community. Seeing entire circles of friends die, Russo returned to his activist roots and devoted himself to education, support and making as much noise as possible.
“Vito participated in every significant milestone in the gay liberation movement, from Stonewall to ACT UP,” said Jeffrey Schwarz, director of the documentary Vito (2011). “He was right in the middle of everything, every step of the way.”
Among the many protests he helped stage that made headlines was one in which Russo and a group of activists descended on New York City officials for a mass marriage, complete with cakes topped by figures of same-sex couples — decades before gay marriage became a national issue and, in some states, legal.
In an homage to Russo, GLAAD recently developed the “Vito Russo Test,” a set of criteria to analyze how LGBTQ characters are included within a film. To pass the Vito Russo Test, the following must be true:
The film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender;
That character must not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity, i.e., they are made up of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight characters from one another; and
The LGBTQ character must be tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect. Meaning they are not there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authenticity, or set up a punchline. The character should “matter.”
DIVA TV founder and Chicano activist Ray Navarro dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 26.
Learn More.
An active member of ACT UP, Navarro famously dressed as Jesus during a protest held on December 10, 1989 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The demonstration called out the Roman Catholic Church’s position on abortion rights, gay rights, and safe sex education.
Already visibly sick, Navarro led protestors in chants (“We’re here to say, we want to go to heaven, too!”) and became the “camp superstar” of the documentary Like a Prayer, which covered the demonstration. Navarro’s activism was also featured in the documentary How to Survive a Plague.
In 1989, Navarro was one of several ACT UP-New York members who founded DIVA TV, a gay and lesbian video activist collective that preserved some of ACT UP’s public displays of civil disobedience. DIVA TV was an acronym for “Damned Interfering Video Activist Television.” Founding members also included Bob Beck, Gregg Bordowitz, Jean Carlomusto, Rob Kurilla, Costa Pappas, George Plagianos, Catherine Saalfield, and Ellen Spiro.
Target City Hall, about a March 28, 1989 ACT UP demonstration against New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s inadequate response to the AIDS crisis;
Pride on the 20th anniversary of the city’s gay and lesbian pride movement; and
Like A Prayer, five 7-minute perspectives on the ACT UP/WHAM (Women’s Health Action Mobilization) December 10, 1989 demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
In February 1990, Navarro presented an AIDS program at the CineFestival in San Antonio, Texas. Shortly afterward, Navarro lost his vision due to cytomegalovirus retinitis, an AIDS-related complication. Shortly before his death in November 1990, he partnered with artist Zoe Leonard to create Equipped, a series of black-and-white photographs of mobility devices paired with provocative phrases.
Posthumously, Navarro’s art was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Navarro’s mother, Patricia, became a member of the Ventura County Board of Supervisors HIV/AIDS Committee and speaks publicly about her son’s experiences.
In memory of Ray Navarro and Gerardo Velázquez, Harry Gamboa Jr. wrote the chapter “Light at the End of Tunnel Vision” for the 2018 book Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion.
Margaret Thatcher Resigns as Britain’s Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister in British history, announces her resignation after 11 years in Britain’s top office, a time during which she opposed the government health secretary’s straightforward approach to AIDS awareness.
Learn More.
British government papers released in December 2015 show Thatcher tried to reign in Health Secretary Norman Fowler’s AIDS awareness campaign in the mid-1980s by urging the elimination of precise explanations of which sexual practices were most likely to lead to HIV infection, according to The Guardian.
In 1985, Fowler submitted a memorandum to the prime minister’s office that provided details about “Don’t Die of Ignorance,” a country-wide public health campaign that included explicit health warnings in large advertisements in the Sunday papers.
Thatcher expressed her opposition in her trademark blue felt pen comments on the memo: “Do we have to do the section on risky sex? I should have thought it could do immense harm if young teenagers were to read it.”
She was particularly alarmed by references to anal intercourse in the campaign’s section titled “What is risky sex?”
When the privy council committee coordinating the government response to AIDS decided to move forward with Fowler’s campaign, Thatcher continued to voice opposition.
“I remain against certain parts of this advertisement,” she wrote to the committee. “I think the anxiety on the part of parents and many teenagers, who would never be in danger from AIDS would exceed the good which the advertisement might do … To place advertisements in newspapers, which every young person could read and learn of practices they never knew about, will do harm.”
Following her objections, the language in the media ads were subsequently amended.
In a 2021 interview the National HIV Story Trust, a British organization that seeks to preserve the history of the AIDS epidemic in the U.K., Fowler said the late Thatcher and her party chairman, Norman Tebbit, “were both neurotic about getting too associated with [AIDS] and too associated sometimes with the people in it.”
Fowler described how the Conservative Party leader expressed concerns about the increasing rates of HIV infection and death, but held “no great sympathy for the subject,” according to Pink News.
In her 2018 book People Like Us, Caroline Slocock provided an alternative view of the prime minister. Slocock recalled that during her time as private secretary to the prime minister, Thatcher eventually visited an AIDS hospice to visit patients dying of illnesses related to the virus.
Thatcher arranged the visit without any media notice, in part because she did not wish to draw focus from the work already being done by Diana, Princess of Wales, according to Slocock.
Slocock, who accompanied Thatcher on this trip, wrote about her recollection of the prime minister’s encounter with an AIDS patient:
“I have never been at the bedside of a dying person before and I feel strongly that family and friends should be there at this moment, not us … [Thatcher] responds by taking a seat by his side, asking questions, expressing sympathy, connecting in a simple and genuine way, to which he responds sweetly. She comes across as more of a mother than a Prime Minister…
“After about ten minutes, we leave him and go into the second room. Inside, sitting in a chair beside his bed, is a young American man, also extremely thin. The virus has attacked his brain too, as it does in the final stages, we are told afterwards, and he is excited and confused. At first he thinks she must be a creation of his own mind, a delusion. But then he begins to believe that she really is Margaret Thatcher, but sent to him miraculously to hear his thoughts and to pass them on to President Bush. He tells her to ring the president. It is imperative that action is taken now to help people like him – that is his message. He is overexcited, it is very difficult to know how to respond, and it is very, very sad.
“Margaret Thatcher is unfazed and behaves as if she has all the time in the world. She places her hand on his arm, asks him a few questions about his life and listens, in a way that demonstrates that she is real, not a phantom, and is there because she cares and wishes him well. He calms down in response. It is simple, human stuff, but I am in awe of it.
“When we leave them, we ask the staff about [the patients’] families. It turns out that neither have felt able to tell their parents that they are gay, let alone that they have AIDS, and so they are dying alone.”
December 1, 1990
‘Night Without Light’ Launches in NYC
The organization Visual AIDS presents its first Night Without Light, organizing cities nationwide to turn off their architectural lights for 15 minutes as visual reminder of the impact of AIDS.
Learn More.
“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.
December 3, 1990
Tim Dlugos, NYC Poet, Dies
Tim Dlugos, a New York City poet affiliated with the St. Marks Poetry Project dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 40.
Learn More.
Tim Dlugos authored eight poetry collections, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (published posthumously in 2011 by Nightboat Books). Born on August 5, 1950, in Springfield, Massachusetts, Dlugos eventually found his tribe at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the mid-1970s.
Dlugos’ published works also include Je Suis Ein Americano (Little Caesar Press, 1979) and Entre Nous: New Poems (Little Caesar Press, 1982). Poet and publisher Ted Berrigan called him “the Frank O’Hara of his generation.”
In 1988, after learning he was HIV-positive, Dlugos enrolled at Yale Divinity School with the intention of becoming an Episcopalian priest. Shortly before his death, Dlugos published his poem “G-9” in The Paris Review, which includes the following passage:
… where my friend’s remains should be there’s just the empty base of an urn. Where are his ashes? His mother hands me a paper cup with pills: leucovorin, Zovirax, and AZT. “Henry wanted you to have these,” she sneers. “Take all you want, for all the good they’ll do …”
December 5, 1990
San Francisco Playwright Robert Chesley Dies
Robert Chesley, whose plays were produced by gay theater companies nationwide, dies of AIDS-related illness at San Francisco’s Mt. Zion Hospital. He was 47.
Learn More.
“There is no one as articulate and passionate about the issues of gay male sexuality as Robert was as a dramatist,” said actor Michael Kearns upon learning of his friend’s death.
Chesley was known for writing the first full-length play about AIDS, Night Sweat (A Romantic Comedy in Two Acts), which was originally produced at New York’s Meridian Gay Theatre Company and received long runs in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
He also wrote Jerker, or A Helping Hand (A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in 20 Telephone Calls, Many of Them Dirty). This play had a reading on Los Angeles’ Pacifica Radio that led to complaints from listeners and a lively censorship debate.
Jerker premiered at the Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles, and then had an eight-month run in New York.
Insurance Rates Soar for Individuals & Organizations Impacted by AIDS
As the cultural arts community continues to be disproportionately impacted by the AIDS epidemic, insurance companies begin to escalate their coverage rates for theaters, museums, film companies, and other purveyors of the arts. It becomes nearly impossible for individuals who test positive for HIV to obtain private health insurance to pay for their medical costs.
Learn More.
Insurance rates went up 400% for La Mama, a nonprofit off-off-Broadway theater company in New York which estimated that 53 people associated with the theater had died of AIDS, according to reporting by the Los Angeles Times. LA Times reporter Sean Mitchell described a similar impact on the film and television industry in Hollywood.
“The incidence of AIDS in Hollywood threatened the jobs and health benefits of some studio employees diagnosed as carrying the virus, as studio executives contended with rising insurance premiums,” wrote Mitchell in December 1990.
A 1986 study of the first 10,000 persons living with AIDS estimated the healthcare costs in their treatment “from diagnosis to death” to average $146,000 (the equivalent of about $425,000 today). The insurance industry quickly responded by adjusting its policies, requirements and procedures for people living with HIV — and also for organizations that the industry considered were at high risk of employing people who would become infected with the virus.
“Before the advent of the AIDS antibody test, insurers were already using supposed indicators of homosexuality as underwriting criteria,” said journalist Deborah Stone in a 1990 article for The American Prospect. “Single men between 25 and 45, particularly if employed in occupations deemed stereotypically gay, were being denied individual policies for life and health insurance.”
Insurance companies began rejecting individual applicants living in urban areas with a significant population of people living with HIV or, alternatively, they would dramatically raise the insurance rates for those already covered by a policy.
“With HIV disease, the health care system is faced with the task of caring for approximately 1 million people in the United States who have a disease that has only been recognized for a few years and whose course, treated or untreated, is still only partly understood,” wrote Albert R. Jonsen and Jeff Stryker in their 1993 report to the National Academy of Sciences titled The Social Impact of AIDS in the United States.
Jonsen and Stryker’s report goes on to describe how a positive HIV test would immediately make someone ineligible for private insurance, because it would be considered an indication of a “preexisting condition.” Also, as many HIV-positive people became ill and could no longer work, their insurance policies would be cancelled by their previous employers.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, private insurance was the primary means that Americans used to pay for health care and to provide for needs that were too big to meet through normal work income and savings. Through private health insurance, American workers created their own social aid, while public social insurance programs — such as Social Security pensions, disability insurance, and Medicaid — were designed only to be safety nets, and not primary sources of support.
And yet, as more people were infected by the virus and became seriously ill, social service programs became the primary source of healthcare for a growing number of people, according to Jonsen and Stryker.
Various proposals were introduced to include HIV as a disease covered by Medicare (similar to end-stage renal disease) and the designation of HIV as a Medicaid-eligible condition, but leaders in the White House and Congress refused to adopt them.
“Such structural reforms have generally been rejected by the executive and legislative branches of state governments on two major grounds: concerns over the equity of HIV-specific funding streams and the potentially large impact on already strained entitlement programs,” wrote Jonsen and Stryker in 1993.
Yet, in 1990, President George Bush signed into law the most important piece of legislation to date that was designed to help people living with disabilities, include HIV. The landmark Americans With Disabilities Act extended protection to people with AIDS.
In his first speech about AIDS, Bush said: “Once disease strikes, we don’t blame those who are suffering … We try to love them and care for them and comfort them. We don’t fire them, we don’t evict them, we don’t cancel their insurance.”
Jonsen and Stryker concluded their report with the following: “The chorus of voices calling for reform of the health care system has been growing louder in the early 1990s, but it seems to have less to do with AIDS and more to do with the realization that many of the working poor and middle class (nearly 40 million Americans) find private health insurance beyond their reach and public programs inadequate.”
January 1, 1991
HOPWA: Federal Housing Assistance Program Launched
Congress enacts the Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS Act of 1991, the first and only federal housing program solely dedicated to providing rental housing assistance for persons and their families living with HIV/AIDS.
Learn More.
Approved as part of the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act of 1990, HOPWA funds short-term and permanent housing, together with supportive services, for individuals living with HIV/AIDS and their families.
A report by the Congressional Research Service titled “Housing for Persons Living with HIV/AIDS,” describes HOPWA as a way to address the financial vulnerability and likelihood of homelessness associated with AIDS.
“Research has indicated that individuals living with HIV who live in stable housing have better health outcomes than those who are homeless or unstably housed, and that they spend fewer days in hospitals and emergency rooms,” the report states.
CDC Report of HIV Transmission via Dentistry Alarms Public
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the transmission of HIV to a patient through a dental procedure performed by an HIV-positive dentist in Florida, releasing a wave of panic across America.
Learn More.
The CDC report described what it considered to be the first known case of clinical transmission of HIV: Kimberly Bergalis, a 19-year-old college student, underwent a molar extraction in December 1987. About two years later, she tested positive for HIV and the CDC was able to match the virus’ strain to that of her dentist, Dr. Jeffrey Acer.
Reported to the CDC by the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS), the case described Bergalis — who said she had never engaged in sexual intercourse — as having no identified risk factor for HIV infection and that, at some time following a wisdom tooth extraction performed by Dr. Acer, she became infected with HIV.
In an open letter to his patients, Dr. Acer wrote: “I am a gentle man, and I would never intentionally expose anyone to this disease. I have cared for people all my life, and to infect anyone with this disease would be contrary to everything I have stood for.”
The CDC suggested that during the dental procedures, “higher titers of virus may have been present in the dentist’s blood and he may have been more likely to transmit virus than earlier in the course of his HIV disease.”
Following the notification, two more of Acer’s former patients would test positive with a strain similar to his. In addition, a third infected patient would be identified by the Florida health department and a fourth would contact the CDC directly to report that she was HIV-infected and a former patient of the dentist.
The Florida health department would then reach out to 1,100 additional persons who potentially were patients of Dr. Acer to offer counseling and HIV-antibody testing. Of them, 141 were tested, and all results were negative. In addition, none of the dentist’s 14 employees tested positive for HIV.
Staff members of the dental office told HRS officials that barrier precautions had been introduced into the practice by early 1987 and that all staff, including the dentist, wore latex gloves and surgical masks for patient-care activities. Staff reported that they changed gloves and washed their hands between most patient contacts; occasionally, however, they washed gloves rather than changed them between patient contacts. Additionally, staff reported that by 1987, all surgical instruments were autoclaved.
Dr. Acer was diagnosed with symptomatic HIV infection in late 1986 and AIDS in September 1987. While he was in practice, he had no record of peripheral neuropathy, dementia, thrombocytopenia or other bleeding disorder, hand dermatitis, or injury.
Dr. Acer closed his practice in 1989 after his T-cell (CD4 lymphocyte) count dropped under 200. He would die on Sept. 30, 1990 at the Hospice of Palm Beach County at West Palm Beach with his parents at his side.
Kimberly Bergalis would spend her final years advocating for the mandatory testing of medical professionals. She is described as “the one AIDS patient the AIDS community will not embrace, a frightening and hostile new public symbol of an epidemic the AIDS community thought it had tamed.”
Larry Gostin, professor of health law at Harvard University, would tell The Washington Post in September 1991, “What Kimberly Bergalis symbolizes is … that AIDS is to be feared and that it can be contracted easily in health-care settings. She has created fear.”
“I’d like to say that AIDS is a terrible disease that you must take seriously. I did nothing wrong, yet I’m being made to suffer like this. My life has been taken away. Please enact legislation so that no other patient or health care provider will have to go through the hell that I have. Thank you.”
Bergalis would die of AIDS-related illness on Dec. 8, 1991 at the age of 23.
February 7, 1991
Bay Area Dancer Antonio Mendes Dies
Dancer and choreographer Antonio Mendes — who performed with the Pacific Ballet, San Francisco Opera Ballet, Marin Civic Ballet and the National Ballet of Portugal — dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 41.
Learn More.
Mendez was also Director of the Redwood Empire Ballet in Santa Rosa, where he also taught. Mendes was fired from the Redwood Empire Ballet when the organization’s board members learned he had AIDS.
Former leading dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, known for his speed, lightness and strong acting ability, Burton Taylor dies of AIDS-related illness in White Plains, New York at the age of 47.
Learn More.
Taylor danced such roles as Captain Belaye in John Cranko’s Pineapple Poll and Arthur Saint-Leon in Robert Joffrey’s Pas des Deesses. Taylor made his professional debut with the Eglevsky Ballet in 1959. He joined the American Ballet Theater in 1962 and the Joffrey in 1969, dancing with the company through 1978.
Lou Graydon Sullivan dies at the age of 39, the first transgender man to die of AIDS-related illness.
Learn More.
Sullivan was an activist and author known for his work on behalf of trans men. A pioneer of the grassroots female-to-male (FTM) movement, he is largely responsible for the modern understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity as distinct, unrelated concepts.
He founded FTM International, and his activism and community work was a significant contributor to the rapid growth of the FTM community during the late 1980s.
Born in 1951 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Sullivan was raised in a very religious Catholic family. At age 10, he started keeping a journal, describing his early childhood thoughts of being a boy, confusing adolescence, sexual fantasies of being a gay man, and his involvement in the Milwaukee music scene.
He continued to express confusion about his identity throughout his adolescence, writing at age 15, “I want to look like what I am, but don’t know what someone like me looks like. I mean, when people look at me I want them to think — there’s one of those people … that has their own interpretation of happiness. That’s what I am.”
By 1975, Sullivan identified himself as a “female-to-male transsexual,” and two years later, he moved from Milwaukee to San Francisco in the hopes he could find “more understanding” and access hormones for his transition. He got a job with the Wilson Sporting Good Company, where he was employed as a woman but presented as a man much of the time. In his personal life, Sullivan lived as an out gay man, but he was repeatedly denied gender affirmation surgery because of his sexual orientation. At that time, transgender people were expected to adopt stereotypical heterosexual opposite-sex gender roles. This rejection led Sullivan to start a campaign to remove homosexuality from the list of contraindications for gender affirmation surgery.
In 1979, at the age of 28, Sullivan was finally able to find doctors and therapists who would accept his sexuality. He began taking testosterone and underwent a double mastectomy surgery the following year. He started a new job as an engineering technician so that he could fully embrace his new identity as a man with new co-workers.
Shortly after undergoing genital reconstruction surgery in 1986, Sullivan was diagnosed as HIV positive and told he only had 10 months to live. He wrote, “I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me I could not live as a Gay man, it looks like I’m going to die like one.”
In June 2019, Sullivan was one of the inaugural 50 American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. In August 2019, Sullivan was one of the honorees inducted in the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood.
Edward Stierle, Joffrey Dancer-Choreographer, Dies
Edward Stierle, a leading dancer with the Joffrey Ballet who recently created two ballets for the company, dies of AIDS-related illness at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. He was 23 years old.
Learn More.
Known to his friends as “Eddie,” Stierle had a reputation for speed, virtuosity, and authentic characterization. New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff described him as “a stunning talent, delving unabashedly into images of emotional turbulence” and pronounced his Empyrean Dances, which premiered just days before his death, as “a rarity, a visionary ballet.”
Born in Hollywood, Florida, Stierle began to study dance at age 4, and enrolled in the North Carolina School of the Arts at age 15. The following year, he won a gold medal at the International Prix de Lausanne Competition, and joined the Basel Ballet, where he danced for a year.
In 1989, he won top honors at the International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi, where he caught the attention of judge Robert Joffrey. Shortly after, Stierle joined the Joffrey Ballet, according to The New York Times. He was 18 years old.
With a height of 5’6″, Stierle was short for a dancer, but he impressed everyone with his strength and grace.
“Dancing with Tina LeBlanc, one of his favorite partners, in La Vivandiere Pas de Six, his ebullient flights through the air resolved themselves in precise landings. As Puck in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, Stierle wove a shimmering, magical skein of leaps and spins. In The Green Table, Stierle’s Profiteer was intrinsic to Kurt Jooss’ classic picture of war’s corruption,” Los Angeles Times art critic Janice Berman wrote in March 1991. “In a company filled with fine performers, Stierle made himself a standout.”
Stierle learned that he was HIV-positive in 1987, and then was diagnosed as having AIDS in late 1990.
Then 22 years old, Stierle told the LA Times: “It changed my life dramatically, but it didn’t ruin it. I didn’t just crumble. In actuality, I started living more.”
His illness caused him to put dancing aside, but he turned his energies to choreography, creating works that were presented during the company’s three-week 1991 season at Lincoln Center.
Stierle said that when he disclosed his illness to the Joffrey company, everyone responded with support and empathy.
The impact of HIV/AIDS had already been felt by the Joffrey Ballet community. The founder of the company, Robert Joffrey, died of AIDS-related illness on March 25, 1988, at the age of 57. At the 1990 premiere of Lacrymosa, Stierle dedicated his work to the memory of Joffrey.
The film Paris is Burning, documenting the Harlem Ballroom scene of the late 1980s, debuts in New York City. The AIDS crisis would come to touch many of the lives seen in the movie.
Learn More.
Directed by Jennie Livingston, Paris is Burning helped shine a light on New York’s ballroom subculture, a vibrant scene where Black and Hispanic gay men, drag queens and transgender women competed in competitions involving fashion runways and vogue dancing battles. The contestants often represented various “Houses,” self-organized groups which served as surrogate families for members of a community ostracised from mainstream society.
The documentary — which took Livingston seven years to fund, make and release — was was an immediate hit with critics and fans of independent movies, and since then, it has become a staple of queer cinema. The appeal of the film transcends time in its thematic core of resilience rooted and thriving in a community cast off by society.
“The defiant joy we witness in the ball walkers at so many moments of the film — despite the AIDS pandemic, racism, homophobia, transphobia, poverty, homelessness, violence, harassment, addiction, and whatever other hardships they may have been dealing with at any given time — was infectious when the film premiered, and remains so today,” wrote filmmaker Michelle Parkerson on the 30th anniversary of the film’s release.
Yet, almost immediately, the film was met with sharp criticism from some of its subjects, who claimed that the filmmaker and Miramax, the film distributor, made considerable profits while they largely remained in impoverished conditions.
Miramax reported more than $4 million in gross earnings from its U.S. theatrical release — modest for a Hollywood film but representing considerably wealth to Ballroom participants. A legal battle between some of the surviving featured performers and Miramax would ultimately be resolved with a payment of about $55,000, divided among 13 performers based on screen time.
The film also drew criticism from feminist scholar bell hooks, who put forth the idea that Livingston – a middle-class, white, genderqueer lesbian – was an enabler of cultural appropriation.
“Much of the controversy has centered on a perceived appropriation of a Black gay subculture by a privileged white filmmaker,” said Parkerson in her article for The Criterion Collection upon its re-release of the film. “It has also involved the perennial question of who has the right to tell someone else’s story, which, I posit, is the lingering dilemma at the doorstep of any documentary project.”
Upon the 2020 re-release of Paris is Burning, Livingston said in an interview that her perspective as the filmmaker was valid, even though she was not a member of the Ballroom subculture.
“My agenda was to tell a great story while not imposing my view, but that is a struggle,” Livingston told Hyperallergic. “Whenever you tell a story, you have that control. In terms of my race, I felt very welcome. I was honored they trusted me, but as a white Jewish person, I knew that I wasn’t from their world. I tried to be the absolute best listener that I could, and it helped to work with a great editor in Jonathan Oppenheim. We tried to balance what people were saying without imposing our own agendas onto the film.”
Most of the film’s subjects died in the 15 or so years following its theatrical release, due to factors like transphobic violence, poverty, and AIDS. Venus Xtravaganza, who was a sex worker, was murdered in a New York hotel room in 1998. In the TV series Pose, Venus would be the inspiration for character Aphrodite Xtravaganza, created by writer and activist Janet Mock to give Venus “a second life.”
Angie Xtravaganza, the Mother of the House of Xtravaganza, died of AIDS-related illness in 1993, as did Dorian Corey. Pepper Labeija died in 2003 of a heart attack. Willi Ninja, who perfected the art of voguing and trained others in the dance style, died of AIDS-related illness in 2006.
“Existing only in memory, enshrined in celluloid, they are and were stars, but they didn’t get to see the fruits of their culture become mainstream and profitable,” writes Canadian film critic Willow Catelyn Maclay. “Rewatching the movie is a bittersweet experience, because there is deep beauty in the ballroom scene, but the sun always rises and parties always end.”
March 14, 1991
Disney Lyricist Howard Ashman Dies
Howard Ashman, the award-winning lyricist “who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul,” dies at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City at the age of 40.
Learn More.
Born in Baltimore in 1950, Ashman would rise to prominence in the musical theater world in 1977, when he became the artistic director of New York City’s WPA Theatre, an off-off-Broadway theater with 99 seats. This is where Ashman’s collaboration with composer Alan Menken began.
Their first musical was Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in 1979 (which Vonnegut himself approved of). Then in 1982, Ashman went on to conceive, write and directLittle Shop of Horrors, again with music by Alan Menken. The musical, based upon Roger Corman’s 1960s-era horror flick, was immediately successful.
In 1986, Howard wrote and directed the Broadway musical, Smile, which featured music by Marvin Hamlisch. Little appreciated at the time, Smile is now considered a lost gem of musical theater and is performed by high schools and amateur groups around the U.S.
Smile closed after just 48 performances, and Ashman decided to accept an offer from Disney Pictures and moved to Los Angeles.
“Here’s what you need to know about Disney in 1986: it was a total mess,” writes Peter Knegt in his column Queeries. “The 1970s and 1980s are what many refer to the company’s ‘dark period,’ peaking with 1985’s massive financial disaster The Black Cauldron.
Ashman showed up just in time to rescue Disney’s animation department. Of the prospective projects presented to Ashman, one grabbed hold of him right away — an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. He took charge of the project and brought in Alan Menken to help him.
“The animation studio was basically shutting down,” Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel in The Little Mermaid, recalled in 2016. “When we did our film, we didn’t even have an animation division over at the lot; they’d been kicked off and in these little cubicles in this run-down place…. It was just unbelievable to think that Walt’s vision was dying.”
It was during production of The Little Mermaid that Howard discovered he was infected with HIV. Despite his illness, he continued to work, giving the story his particular point of view.
In early meetings with Little Mermaid directors Ron Clements and Jon Musker, Ashman made a suggestion that would change cinematic history: What if Sebastian the crab, Ariel’s guardian, was Jamaican?
“Now we can’t imagine hearing ‘Under the Sea’ any other way,” writes Maureen Lee Lenker for Entertainment.
Ashman also steered the animators toward his favorite design option for the sea witch Ursula, one based on drag star Divine.
“And really, to think that an openly gay man inserted a queer icon into the essence of a lead character in a Disney film in the late 1980s is incredibly radical,” writes Peter Knegt. “It would be even today.”
Ashman continued to keep his diagnosis secret, enduring eight-hour days at Disney World doing press. To receive his daily treatments via IV infusion, he had a catheter in his chest. He was expected to go on rides, and was too afraid to tell people that it would be too painful.
Over the next few years, Ashman was pivotal in the renaissance of Disney animated musicals and in the development of The Little Mermaid (Producer and Lyrics), Beauty and the Beast (Executive Producer and Lyrics) and Aladdin (Lyrics), all with music by Alan Menken.
Beauty and the Beastpremiered as an unfinished film at the 1991 New York Film Festival, but Ashman wasn’t there to see it and hear the rapturous applause during the closing credits. He had died eight months before its release.
Ashman’s contributions to the revival of classic Disney animated musicals have been acknowledged by many but were perhaps best expressed by his Disney colleagues, who dedicated the film Beauty and the Beast to his memory: “To our friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul. He will be forever missed.”
Ashman’s numerous awards include two Oscars, two Golden Globes, four Grammys, a Drama Desk and a London Evening Standard. Ashman won his second Oscar posthumously in 1991, for his work on the title song for Beauty and the Beast, and this became the first Oscar given to someone who had died of AIDS.
In 2001, Disney inducted Ashman into its Legends program, an honor reserved for animators, Imagineers, songwriters, actors, and business leaders who made a significant impact on the Disney legacy.
In 2020, Disney+ released Howard, a documentary about Ashman and his work as an award-winning lyricist. Directed and written by Don Hahn, the film tracks Ashman’s rise from a theater-obsessed kid in Baltimore, to his musical highs and lows, and to his untimely death. His story is told through archival photos, song demos, new interviews with family and friends, and a filmed recording session from Beauty and the Beast.
API Service Group Grows from Club Committee to Stand-Alone Org: APAIT
Started as a committee in an Asian-focused gay and lesbian social club in greater Los Angeles, the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT) becomes an independent organization.
Learn More.
Dean Goishi, Joel Tan and Ric Parish took their club committee to the next level of HIV/AIDS advocacy by linking APAIT to a fiscal agent, the Special Service for Groups. With Goishi as the Founding Director, APAIT fought against ignorance, racism, and homophobia to break the silence about HIV/AIDS in the Asian community.
“It was a role that … if I didn’t step up, nobody else would, and we would have been left out and we would have been left behind in services, funds and so forth,” said Goishi in 2023 for Okaeri Voices, an oral history project featuring LGBTQ+ Japanese Americans.
The next year, APAIT would receive CARE Act Title II funds that helped the organization launch Los Angeles County’s first API-focused case management program for people living with HIV/AIDS.
APAIT would also announce its presence to the greater LGBTQ+ community in Los Angeles by participating in the 1992 Pride Parade in West Hollywood, according to APAIT’s website.
March 25, 1991
Marc Connors, Tenor with The Nylons, Dies
Marc Connors, a member of the Canadian a cappella group The Nylons, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 41.
Learn More.
Known for their covers of pop songs such as The Turtles’ “Happy Together” and The Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” The Nylons began performing in 1978. Marc Connors (pictured lower right) was one of the four original members of the group.
“The singers merged elements of doo-wop with R&B; and pop and delivered the package tightly bound in articulate arrangements that favored simple tempos and straightforward tonalities,” wrote Los Angeles Times music critic John D’Agostino in 1991.
After releasing their fourth album, Seamless, in 1984, the group was invited to perform on the Canadian children’s television show Sharon, Lois & Bram’s Elephant Show to sing one of the songs on the album, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” They also attracted new fans in the U.S. from their performance of the theme song to the mid-1980s sitcom Throb, starring comic actor Diana Canova.
“I am dying. It’s now clear I will not recover. I am sad for my parents and especially for Ian. And my sisters, friends and fans. My death will affect a wide circle of people. And yet I’m not really that important or significant. Altho [sic] who is? I guess I most wanted to be someone who contributed to people’s lives, the way I cherish Chaplin or Tchaikovsky or so many book and filmmakers and actors. I’ve had some effect in that area-I’ve moved and excited people. I’m sorry I haven’t left more of an intellectual legacy….
“As I write all this I wonder what it is that I regret, what I could want to live for? I’ve traveled, but not everywhere I wanted. I wanted to go to Africa, to Bali, to know France and speak French for real, to speak Italian. To live in Greece. To be a hit in Paris. To write. I don’t know what. To win an Academy Award. To build a home. To work in wood. To have a theatre company and do good work. To write a symphony. To make a lot of money. To live in Kyoto. To make a wonderful movie, like Miss 1000 Spring Blossoms. To build wonderful low-cost apartment buildings that work to create beauty, nature, friendship and community. To market great healthy food. To help Mom to have that restaurant. To do anything to make them both happy. Build them a house. To really deal with issues and important thoughts of life today in works of art. To add to the world’s faith by disseminating my credo. To beat AIDS. To be a beacon for others to help them believe it can be done and that the spiritual is real. To write my life — in real honesty, all the sexual warts and all. I wish I had been more courageous, less a nervous wreck. A better actor. Less critical of myself, less depressive, unstable. But just as searching. I don’t have many ‘achievements,’ but many satisfactions. I don’t think life is about achievements anyway…”
April 10, 1991
‘Predator’ Actor Kevin Peter Hall Dies
Kevin Peter Hall, a 7’3″-tall actor known for his TV and film roles as monsters, dies of AIDS-related illness a month short of his 36th birthday.
Learn More.
Hall’s enormous stature landed him numerous roles in films and TV as monsters and aliens, most famously as the title role in the 1987 science fiction action film Predator and its 1990 sequel, Predator 2. He is also remembered for playing Harry the Sasquatch in the 1987 film Harry and the Hendersons and in the television series of the same name.
Hall became known in the industry for mastering the technique and art of performing in often-cumbersome masks and costumes.
“When you look at Kevin Peter Hal in that wardrobe, makeup and with that size, and you see him against Arnold [Schwarzenegger] you believe ooh-ooh, Arnie’s in trouble,” Predator co-star Carl Weathers said in The Man Behind the Predatorfeaturette. “He made it work. Kevin Peter Hall really made the thing work.”
In 1990, Hall was reprising his role as Harry for TV when he announced that he had contracted HIV from a contaminated blood transfusion following a car accident. He portrayed Harry for the first sixteen episodes of Harry and the Hendersons before his illness forced him to give up the role.
William Waybourn & Vic Basile Found Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund
HIV/AIDS activists William Waybourn and Vic Basile found the first LGBTQ political action committee to help elect more LGBTQ candidates to public office.
Learn More.
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.
May 7, 1991
NYC Documentarian-Writer Phil Zwickler Dies
Phil Zwickler, who directed documentaries and wrote articles about the AIDS crisis, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in Manhattan. He was 36 years old.
Learn More.
Zwickler’s films included Rights and Reactions: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial, an account of the 1986 New York City Council hearings on the gay rights bill.
The documentary, which Zwickler produced and directed with Jane Lippman, won the Gold Plaque at the 1987 Chicago International Film Festival and a special jury prize at the 1988 San Francisco Film Festival, according to TheNew York Times.
Zwickler also collaborated with the experimental German film maker Rosa von Praunheim on the documentaries Silence Equals Death and Positive. Exploring the the rage and frustration of people with AIDS, the films were screened at the Berlin International Film Festival and then at the New York Public Theater as part of the 1990 Documentary Festival of New York.
For several years, Zwickler was the editor of People With AIDS Coalition Newsline, an international publication written by and for people with AIDS and HIV infection. He also served as a correspondent for the Gay Cable Network, which broadcast on Manhattan cable and in other U.S. cities.
May 12, 1991
Poet-Editor Leland Hickman Dies
Leland (“Lee”) Hickman, a Los Angeles-based experimental poet, dies of AIDS-related illness in his North Hollywood apartment. He was 56 years old.
Learn More.
Lee Hickman was known best as the publisher and editor of Temblor, which was influential in launching the careers of many poets in its five years of publication (1985-1989).
According to internationally recognized poet Bill Mohr, who was a friend of Hickman’s, a history of the Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance of 1948-1992 would be incomplete without a mention of Hickman. As Temblor‘s editor, Hickman was instrumental in introducing poetry fans to the work of “Language writers.” He was also something of an outlaw, at a time when homosexuality was considered criminal behavior.
Leland Ervin Hickman Jr. was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1934. Mohr said Hickman told him that when he was 14, he was sent to a detention site for youth after he was caught having a sexual relationship with an older man. After returning home, he resumed high school and then attended Santa Barbara College (now University of California, Santa Barbara). After a tour in the Army, Hickman moved to New York City to pursue a career in theater. During this time, he was arrested and jailed twice for “solicitation” after approaching men for sex.
He returned to Southern California in 1960 to perform at the Equity Library Theatre West in Los Angeles, and ultimately decided to settle permanently in LA with his partner, the actor Charles Macaulay. For a while, he and Macaulay lived in a house owned by veteran actor Raymond Burr. He began attending Beyond Baroque’s Wednesday night poetry workshop, which was led by John Harris (who would soon open the Papa Bach Bookstore).
In 1966, Hickman’s poetry career began in earnest with the publication of his poem “Lee Sr Falls to the Floor” in The Hudson Review. The poem was inspired by the death of his father from carbon monoxide poisoning six years earlier. Shortly after the poem was published, he received a $500 award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
A short time before Christmas 1971, Hickman gave his friend Harry Northrup a list of poetry to study “to be a good poet.” The list included “Great Books” such as The Book of Tao (also known as Tao Te Ching) by Lao-Tse and the Complete Works of Samuel Beckett, as well as the works of contemporary poets William S. Burroughs and Rimbaud. Hickman also recommended that Northrup “try to learn a language,” like Ancient Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon English, French or Spanish.
In the early 1970s, Hickman was arrested twice for having sex with men in Griffith Park, according to Mohr. Around this time, Hickman was experiencing writer’s block, and was frustrated by his inability to produce new work.
In 1977, Hickman became editor of Bachy poetry magazine, which was published by Papa Bach Bookstore. Three years later, he published a book-length section of his serial poem, “Tiresias,” entitled Tiresias, Great Slave Lake Suite (Momentum Press, 1980) and was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry. Dealing with the gay underworld of the 1970s, the poems were seen by one Times critic as “rough, discomforting, scary.”
After Bachy ceased publication in 1981, Hickman edited two issues of Boxcar: A Magazine of the Arts in 1983-84 and then launched Temblor in 1985. A typesetter by profession, Hickman also designed the magazine, according to the LA Times. In 1988, Hickman received a fellowship in literature from the Broady Arts Fund.
Hickman dedicated himself to long hours at a publishing house, setting type during the day and then staying late into the night to do production work for Temblor. According to Mohr, Hickman had to make great personal sacrifices in order to get the literary magazine published.
The tenth and final issue of Temblor was issued in 1989. By then, Hickman’s health had begun to decline, and he could no longer sustain the energy required to produce what the Village Voice called “an important American literary journal.”
Hickman’s work continues to be re-discovered and re-published. A collection of early poems by Hickman was published posthumously under the title Lee Sr Falls to the Floor (Jahbone Press, 1991) and Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman was published by Nightboat Press in 2010.
Of the latter collection, poet and critic Kevin Killian (1952-2019) wrote: “It is a prophetic, shamanic work fueled by rage, grief and sudden bursts of homosexual feeling. Hickman lived in a dangerous age in dangerous cities, and he was punished, imprisoned, institutionalized for his penchant for public sex.”
The University of California San Diego maintains an archive of Temblor‘s correspondence and manuscripts.
May 19, 1991
26,000 Participate in AIDS Walk in New York City
Starting and ending at Lincoln Center, the Sixth Annual AIDS Walk New York draws 26,000 people and raises approximately $4 million to benefit Gay Men’s Health Crisis and over 50 other local AIDS service organizations
Learn More.
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.
May 21, 1991
A Chorus Line’s Nicholas Dante Dies
Nicholas Dante, who won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award as a co-author of A Chorus Line, died of AIDS in New York City at the age of 49.
Learn More.
Dante started his career as a dancer, appearing in the choruses of shows, including Applause, on television shows and in nightclubs. His experiences became one of the prominent stories in A Chorus Line,” which ranks among the top ten longest-running shows in Broadway history.
His own story — about growing up poor in New York City and feeling scorned and lonely because of his homosexuality — was told by Sammy Williams, who won a Tony Award as best supporting actor for his portrayal of the character, Paul.
Dante described his lonely childhood and his illness in a 1991 Jimmy Breslin column.
“I grew up in the Forties, a Puerto Rican kid on 125th and Broadway, and obviously gay,” he told Breslin. “Nobody would hang out with me … I was terrified to go out where anybody could see me.”
Directed and choreographed by Michael Bennett and with music by Marvin Hamlisch, A Chorus Lie was produced by Joseph Papp for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1975 and then moved to the Shubert Theater, where it had 6,137 performances before closing in April 1990.
By then, three of the show’s five creators had died: Bennett in 1987, lyricist Edward Kleban in 1987, and co-writer James Kirkwood in 1989.
The red ribbon becomes a symbol of compassion for people living with AIDS and their caregivers.
Learn More.
The Visual AIDS Artists Caucus launches the Red Ribbon Project to create a visual symbol to demonstrate compassion for people living with AIDS and their caregivers. The red ribbon would become the international symbol of AIDS awareness.
New York artist Patrick O’Connel and other artists band together and started making art in response to AIDS, calling their collective Visual AIDS. The artists, which hold public events and organized gallery shows to raise AIDS awareness, perhaps make their biggest impact with a simple little symbol: the AIDS awareness ribbon.
The idea started with Marc Happel, a costume designer invited to a meeting of the Visual AIDS artist caucus.
After several trips to upstate NY, where he had seen yellow ribbons tied around trees to honor servicement, Marc thought that Visual AIDS could do something similar, to acknowledge the war at home. Marc proposed that the group fold a ribbon and pin it on their lapels; the group decided that the ribbon ought to be red — the color of blood.
A local ribbon supplier donated spools of red grosgrain ribbon, and Visual AIDS began cutting, folding, and pinning. The Visual AIDS Artist Caucus members held what they called “ribbon bees” — like a quilting bee, where a bunch of people gathered to work.
The looped, inverted-V shape came after trying out numerous styles. Visual AIDS would hand-cut, fold, and pin thousands of ribbons, all just to hand out for free, attached to pamphlets.
On Sunday, June 2, Visual AIDS (working with Broadway Cares and Equity Fights AIDS) would launch the Red Ribbon project at the 45th Annual Tony Awards.
The Tonys host, Jeremy Irons, wore the red ribbon, and so did many winners, presenters and guests (Daisey Eagan, Kevin Spacey, Penn and Teller, Tyne Daly, Mercedes Ruehl, Jerry Zaks, Joel Grey, Keith Carradine, and more).
The guests and presenters were asked not to speak directly about what the red ribbon meant. This resulted in media curiosity and the red ribbon became an overnight phenomenon.
June 3, 1991
Tommy Lasorda Jr, Son of Dodgers Manager, Dies
Thomas Lasorda Jr., the only son of the Los Angeles Dodgers iconic manager, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Santa Monica home. He was 33 years old.
Learn More.
The cause of Lasorda Jr.’s death was reported to be “pneumonia and severe dehydration,” although it was widely known that he was gay and had AIDS. Lasorda Jr.’s death certificate read: “Immediate cause: a) Pneumonitis – 2 weeks. Due to: b) dehydration – 6 weeks. Due to c) probable Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – 1 year.”
After his son’s death, Lasorda Sr. publicly denied that his son died of AIDS, claiming that his illness was cancer, and asked that all charitable donations in Tommy Jr.’s name go to the Association of Professional Ball Players of America.
“My son wasn’t gay,” Lasorda Sr. told Peter Richmond, who wrote about the complicated father-son relationship for GQ magazine in 1992.
“I was FURIOUS!” West Hollywood journalist Karen Ocamb wrote on The AIDS Memorial Instagram page. “Tommy Jr. was a fashionista around WeHo … I was so furious at this deliberate homophobic erasure especially at a time when the announcement could have done so much good.”
Lasorda Jr., who was known as “Spunky” to friends and family, was born in Greenville, S.C. in 1958 while his father was still playing for the Montreal Royals in the Triple-A minors. A few years later, Lasorda Sr. ended his pitching career and took a job as a scout for the Dodgers organization, which by then had moved its major league team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. The Lasorda family moved from Greenville, where family matriarch Jo was born and raised, to the Los Angeles-area city of Fullerton.
As a teenager, Lasorda Jr. attended Fullerton’s public high school, Sunny Hills, where friends remembered him as having “a style and a self-assurance uncommon in a man so young.” His friends were all girls and his interests were fashion and beauty.
After graduating, he enrolled in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and took a lackadaisical approach to his studies, according to his classmate Cindy Stevens. He moved to West Hollywood, described by writer Peter Richmond in GQ magazine as “a pocket of gay America unlike any other, a community bound by the shared knowledge that those within it had been drawn by its double distinction: to be among gays, and to be in Hollywood.”
Lasorda Jr. immersed himself in the unparalleled nightlife of WeHo, becoming known in the community as someone to be seen, adorned in a royal blue waistcoat or a tailored Edwardian gabardine jacket, his face meticulously enhanced with make up, and his bleached hair styled according to his whims.
Described by Richmond as “a man of striking looks, with long blond hair, startlingly and wincingly thin,” Lasorda Jr. would visit Rage, the Duck Club, Club Zero and especially Rose Tattoo, a club with male strippers.
He also spent considerable time at his father’s ballclub and on the road with the team, sharing Lasorda Sr.’s love of the game. There, Lasorda Jr. befriended Glenn Burke, who played for the Dodgers. Burke’s teammates knew Burke was gay and were seemingly accepting of it.
But Lasorda Sr. “didn’t like him because of his sexuality,” according to John Casey of The Advocate. “So Burke started the friendship with the junior Lasorda, and it raised eyebrows and ire at that time, as it most certainly would have in the mid-1970s in professional sports.”
In the mid-1980s, Lasorda Jr. decided to adopt a markedly different routine, one “of health clubs and abstinence and sobriety and religion,” Richmond wrote for GQ. “But by then, of course, the excesses of the earlier years had taken their inexorable toll.”
He moved to Santa Monica, just far enough away from the temptations of West Hollywood. As his illness progressed, his celebrated beauty began to fade. Still, he continued to dress with elegance and distinction, and he would occasionally visit some of his old haunts.
When Lasorda Jr. died in early June of 1991, he was surrounded at his bedside by his parents and his sisters, the LA Times reported. By all accounts, he was well-loved by his family. His memorial service was attended by Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles, and Pia Zadora sang one of Lasorda Jr.’s favorite songs, “The Way We Were.”
June 4, 1991
Thomas Hannan — Opera Singer & AIDS Activist — Dies
Thomas Hannan, co-founder of the first PWA buyers’ club, dies at his Manhattan home of AIDS-related illness. He was 40 years old.
Learn More.
In the early 1980s, Hannan was in Europe pursuing a career as an opera singer, but returned to New York City when the AIDS crisis hit. In 1986, he founded the Public Works Administration Health Group with Joseph Sonnabend and Michael Callen.
As the first and largest formally recognized buyers’ club, the PWA Health Group widened access to people with AIDS seeking AIDS therapies not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration, according to Prabook.com.
Hannan also helped to establish the nonprofit Community Research Initiative (CRI, later renamed CRIA, then ACRIA) in New York in 1987, becoming the organization’s administrative director. Frustrated and outraged by the slow pace of government-sponsored and academic HIV/AIDS research, members of CRI created the first-ever activist-led, community-based approach to the study of new treatments for the disease.
One of CRI’s early achievements was a trial that contributed to the approval of inhaled pentamidine for preventing Pneumocystis pneumonia, a common AIDS-related infection. Since then, the organization has contributed to the development of a remarkable 20 medicines that have gone on to receive FDA approval.
Poll: Fear of AIDS Causes Singles to Change Sexual Behavior
More than half of single adults under 45 years old say fear of getting AIDS has caused them to change their sexual behavior, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll.
Of the respondents who were single and under 45 years of age, 52% said they had changed their sexual behavior as a precaution against HIV and AIDS. Of the behavioral adjustments they had made, respondents most frequently cited using condoms and limiting the number of sexual partners.
Of all the people surveyed (including those married and older than 45), 20% reported that they had changed their sexual behavior due to the fear of getting AIDS. The subgroups reporting the highest rates of behavior change are single adults (43%), those aged 18-29 (40%), Blacks (38%), residents of large cities (35%), and Hispanics (32%).
In addition, the survey showed that 21% of respondents either knew “someone who has AIDS” (12%) or knew “someone who has died from AIDS” (17%). In comparison, only 2% said they knew someone with AIDS in the NYT/CBS News’ poll conducted six years before, in 1985.
Many respondents to the 1991 poll — 40% — said they “know a lot” about AIDS, compared with 11% in the 1985 poll. Both polls had an overall margin of sampling error of +/- 3%.
ADVERTISEME
June 22, 1991
Drag Performer Doris Fish / Philip Mills Dies
Performer-writer Philip Mills, who performed in drag in San Francisco under the name Doris Fish, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 38.
Learn More.
Co-founder with Miss X and Tippi of the long-lived Sluts-a-Go-Go drag trio, Doris would perform songs and skits based on such cult favorites as The Valley of the Dolls.
Mills would co-write and (as Doris Fish) star in the cult film classic Vegas in Space (1991).
June 23, 1991
Steven Grossman — Singer-Songwriter of ‘Caravan Tonight’ — Dies
Steven Grossman, the first openly gay music artist to address the concerns and sensibilities of gay life in his work, dies of AIDS-related illness at his San Francisco home at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Grossman’s only album, Caravan Tonight (1974), was hailed by Stephen Holden in Rolling Stone as “one of the most auspicious singer/songwriter debuts of the ’70s.”
According to Joseph Dalton of Queer Music Heritage, Caravan Tonight is regarded as a landmark, because it was the first recording for a major label by an openly gay artist whose work addressed gay life. Caravan Tonight was recorded in late 1973 and early 1974, at a time when Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and Lou Reed were using androgyny and gender-bending as flamboyant symbols to subvert popular culture.
“Grossman wasn’t interested in pandering to clichés. Instead he offered a painfully honest portrait of a sensitive gay man’s real life,” writes biographer and New York Times writer James Gavin. “Wild promiscuity was the accepted defiant lifestyle, but Grossman’s songs ached with sadness and some disapproval over the frivolity of the new so-called ‘liberation,’ which had made commitment unfashionable.”
“His voice is great and his songs personal and beautiful,” wrote Vito Russo in Gay Magazine. “He is going to be the one to bridge the gap between straight and gay audiences.”
“Grossman’s simple and heartfelt message and persona stood out in sharp contrast to the hypersexual posturings of bigger rock stars of the era,” William Lang said of Caravan Tonight. “Steve isn’t cute about his sexuality like David Bowie; nor does he see sexuality as a spice for an innocent’s view of decadence, as does Alice Cooper; nor does he invent a never-never land to exploit as do the New York Dolls. Steve sings of a gay world that is familiar to most of us.”
Caravan Tonight sold around 15,000 copies — not enough, apparently, for Mercury Records to renew Grossman’s contract.
“If this record appeared today, it would still be relevant, but probably no more successful,” wrote Robert Cochrane in Culture Catch. “Consider this a parable of the poverty attached to the sin of innovation.”
July 4, 1991
Gay Man Murdered in Montrose Area of Houston
Paul Broussard is beaten and stabbed to death in a gay-bashing attack outside a Houston nightclub. He was 26 years old.
Learn More.
In actions indicative of the homophobia-fueled violence in many parts of the country, ten youths drove from the northern Houston suburb of The Woodlands to the heavily gay area of Montrose to “beat up some queers,” in the words of one of the convicted teens.
Paul Broussard, Clay Anderson, and Richard Delaunay were walking home just after 2:00 a.m. when they were approached by Jaime Aguirre, Javier Aguirre, Derrick Attard, Jon Buice, Paul Dillon, Raphael Gonzalez, Gayland Randall, Leandro Ramirez, Brian Spake, and Jeffrey Valentine.
The large group of youths had already spent hours on an alcohol-fueled drive through Montrose, harassing men they presumed to be gay. They identified their targets by asking directions to Heaven, an area gay bar, and threw rocks at men who answered with directions. All but three of them were under 17 years old, and the oldest of them – Brian Spake – was 22.
Upon seeing Broussard, Anderson, and Delaunay, the carloads of men stopped and asked how to get to Heaven. Upon receiving directions, they jumped out of their cars and attacked the three men with a variety of weapons, including steel-toed boots, nail-studded two-by-fours, and a Buck knife wielded by Jon Buice. They also pummelled them with their fists. Anderson and Delaunay managed to flee their attackers, but Broussard became trapped, and immediately he was surrounded and fatally beaten.
Broussard, a young banker and graduate of Texas A&M, suffered abrasions, puncture wounds, a broken rib, bruised testicles, and three stab woulds. As he lay dying, blood poured onto the pavement from a chest wound 17-year-old Buice had inflicted with his knife. That didn’t stop two of his attackers from rifling through his pockets and taking a comb as a souvenir. The attackers returned to their cars and drove off.
Broussard was treated by EMS and then airlifted to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where he died shortly after. His mother, Nancy Rodriguez, flew into Houston from Atlanta, Georgia, and met with city police as well as with Anderson and Delaunay.
Initially, Houston newspapers did not report Broussard’s murder as a hate crime. As a result, gay activists like Ray Hill organized large public protests, some with Broussard’s mother Nancy participating. The resulting media attention led to a girlfriend of one of the assailants calling the police. All ten were soon arrested.
Hill, who coined the phrase “The Woodlands Ten,” lobbied the prosecutor and District attorney for “meaningful sentences.”
Derrick Attard received probation for agreeing to identify the other nine. Four more also received probation, and Broussard’s mother Nancy – aided by the Houston Crime Victim’s Office – worked with the D.A. to set the terms (which included the order for them to pay for Anderson’s hospital bill and Broussard’s funeral).
Buice confessed to inflicting the stab wound that the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office said caused Broussard’s death, and received a 45-year sentence. Dillon received a 20-year sentence for attempted murder and aggravated attempted murder. The three remaining assailants received sentences of 15-years-and-one-day, for their admitted participation in the beatings. Their sentences were criticized by Broussard’s mother Nancy as being too light.
Over the years, Nancy Rodriguez travelled from her home near Macon, Georgia to Texas to attend more than 20 parole hearings in her efforts to keep her son’s assailants in prison.
July 1991
ACT UP Contingent Launches Treatment Action Group
Members of the Treatment and Data Committee of ACT UP New York split off to launch a new organization focused on accelerating treatment research.
Learn More.
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.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends restrictions on the practice of HIV-positive healthcare workers, prompting Congress to enact a law requiring states to adopt the CDC restrictions.
Learn More.
The CDC’s report ecommends that healthcare workers who are HIV-positive “should not perform exposure-prone procedures unless they have sought counsel from an expert review panel and been advised under what circumstances, if any, they may continue to perform these procedures.”
The CDC goes on to say that HIV-positive healthcare workers should notify prospective patients of the worker’s HIV status before they undertaking exposure-prone invasive procedures.
The report cites the case of Dr. David Acer, a dentist with AIDS who likely transmitted HIV to five of his 850 patients.
Although this was the only cluster of health care worker-to-patient transmissions of HIV in the U.S., the report concerning Dr. Acer immediately set off public debate on the effectiveness of existing safeguards of the public’s health, whether it was appropriate for HIV-positive health care workers to practice, and the public’s right to know the HIV status of their physicians.
July 30, 1991
San Francisco AIDS Activist Zach Long Dies
Zachary Long, a Bay Area activist celebrated for his ability to raise thousands of dollars for the HIV/AIDS cause, dies of AIDS-related illness at Davies Hospital at the age of 48.
Learn More.
“In the galaxy of activists in the San Francisco community, the name of Zach Long consistently glowed brilliantly and with a strong sense of caring, loving and perseverance,” wrote the Bay Area Reporter. “And while that glow is no longer visible, it will remain in the minds and hearts of all of us who were priviledged to know that handsomest of gentlemen.”
Long served on the board of directors for the Larkin Street Youth Center and the AIDS Emergency Fund. He was also a ruling elder at the Old First Presbyterian Church and a volunteer for the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera. He was voted “Man of the Year” at the 1991 Cable Car Awards in San Francisco.
In the leather community, Long was known as Zach Daddy Leather V, and was a semi-finalist in the 1988 International Mr. Leather competition. Just a month before his death, he led the San Francisco Freedom Day Parade as the Grand Marshall. In April, at the Mr. San Francisco Leather competition, San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos honored Long’s many accomplishments by proclaiming April 20 to be “Zach Long Day.”
Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Long graduated from Davidson College with a Bachelor’s in Economics and then the University of North Carolina with a Master’s in Business Administration. He served in the U.S. Army as a first lieutenant in the Signal Corps, and was posted in Seoul, Korea.
Minority Groups Launch HIV Treatment Education Program
The National Minority AIDS Council, in cooperation with the National Association of People With AIDS and the National AIDS Interfaith Network, holds the National Skills Building Conference, which will later become the United States Conference on AIDS.
Learn More.
As the largest AIDS-related gathering in the country, the United States Conference on AIDS would draw thousands of attendees annually to share information, create new networks, and learn about the latest tools being used to address the challenges of HIV/AIDS.
Paul Kawata, Executive Director of NMAC, planned and implemented the first three conferences, considered to be the first national HIV treatment education programs in the U.S. Annual conference participants include healthcare and service providers, advocates, people living with HIV/AIDS, and policymakers.
August 8, 1991
Thomas Duane,
August 8, 1991
Candidate for NY City Council Discloses HIV+ Status
Tom Duane, one of two candidates running for the lower Manhattan district of the New York City Council, announces that he tested positive for HIV. Three months later, he would win the election.
Learn More.
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”
August 14, 1991
U.S. Creates Network of Clinical Trials, Expanding Treatment Options
Congress passes legislation to create a network of community-based clinical trials for HIV treatment.
Learn More.
The Terry Beirn Community-Based Clinical Trials Program Act establishes a network of community clinical trials to complement the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ university-based research in order to provide increased access to experimental therapies.
The legislation is named for Terry Beirn, a program officer for amfAR who worked on the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources on AIDS legislation.
Known as a fierce AIDS activist, Beirn compiled quarterly directories of AIDS treatment for doctors and patients, fundraised for AmFAR and other research organizations, and pushed legislation to fund clinical trials of experimental treatments and drugs.
Following his diagnosis with AIDS in 1984, Beirn began his advocacy work on AIDS policy with Sen. Ted Kennedy, and in 1986, Beirn joined the staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. During his time there, Beirn garnered support for the first comprehensive piece of AIDS legislation, the HIV Organ Policy Equity Act of 1988, which modified rules regarding organ donation between HIV-positive individuals. In 1990, Beirn would be instrumental in the passage of the Ryan White Care Act, for which he advocates directly with President George H.W. Bush.
Beirn dies of AIDS-related illness in 1991 at the age of 39.
August 16, 1991
U.S. Travel Ban Causes Int’l AIDS Conference to Move to Amsterdam
The 8th International AIDS Conference is originally scheduled to be held in Boston in 1992, but conference planners decide to move it to Amsterdam due to U.S. immigration restrictions on people living with HIV/AIDS.
The Boston site of the meeting is canceled, because of Bush Administration requirements that short-term visitors to the U.S. declare whether they are infected with the AIDS virus. The policy bans travel to the U.S. by foreigners infected with the virus, unless they get a waiver.
Two months earlier, the 1991 International AIDS Conference in Florence closes with officials and participants marching to the U.S. Consultate to protest the American travel ban.
Almost 20 years later, the ban on HIV-positive immigrants and travelers to the U.S. would be lifted by an executive order by President Barack Obama.
August 25, 1991
San Francisco Drag Performer Tippi / Erik Mead Dies
Erik Mead, who performed in San Francisco venues under the drag name Tippi, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 39.
Learn More.
With drag queens Miss X and Doris Fish, Tippi created the performance group Sluts-a-Go-Go in San Francisco. They would create and perform drag shows for 10 years in Bay Area venues like Club 181.
Tippi would also perform in a featured role in the camp cult film Vegas in Space (1991), written by Philip Mills (who performed in drag as Doris Fish). Favorites of the Castro district drag scene, Doris and Tippi produced a weekly cable news show in 1986 about the gay community.
Mead and Mills were roommates, and Mills would precede Mead in death by two months.
September 5, 1991
Activists Put Giant Condom on House of Homophobic Senator
Activists from the Treatment Action Group (TAG) gathered at the Arlington, Virginia home of U.S. Senator Jesse Helms and placed over his house a giant condom with the message, “A CONDOM TO STOP UNSAFE POLITICS. HELMS IS DEADLIER THAN A VIRUS.”
Learn More.
Led by the new activist group’s founding director Peter Staley, TAG executed a meticulous plan to create a condom large enough to engulf the senator’s two-story brick colonial house, transport it from New York to Virginia, and quickly place it over the senator’s house using two ladders, rubber mallets, plastic stakes, a portable generator, air blowers, and a extra-long extension cord.
Senator Helms was TAG’s target for this “zap,” because — as Staley put it — he was one of the chief architects of AIDS-related stigma in the U.S. He proposed and passed federal laws that limited the rights of HIV-positive people, including restricting their travel to the U.S. and forbidding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to spend money on HIV prevention in the LGBT community.
“Helms gave a veil of legitimacy to every parent who threw their HIV-positive kid out of the house,” Staley wrote in 2008 in POZ magazine. “ACT UP New York was filled with angry young men who experienced this kind of Helms-related hatred.”
The members of TAG came largely from the Treatment & Data Committee of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power). They were well-versed in creating spectacle — often with humor — to draw attention to the problems surrounding HIV/AIDS treatment, research and policy. And they decided that Senator Helms’s destructive rhetoric and policy actions deserved a special response that only they could provide.
“If you can get folks laughing at your target’s expense, you diminish his power,” Staley said. “I wanted the country to have a good laugh at Helms’ expense. I wanted his fellow senators to have a little chuckle behind his back. And I wanted Senator Helms to realize that his free ride was up — if he hit us again, we’d hit back.”
The activists involved in the condom action — the “TAG Helms Seven” — were Staley, Sean Strub (who would found POZ), Garance Franke-Ruta, Mark Allen (who blogged about it here), Derek Link, Jim Serafini, and Jason Childers. An eighth activist, Dan Baker, agreed to be TAG’s “ready for Prime Time” media spokesperson.
Once the condom was in place, police arrived and debated how to proceed, Staley said. One of them laughed at the sight, and after much consulting over the radio with law enforcement leaders, the officers took down the names and addresses of the activists and issued a ticket for parking their truck in the wrong direction.
After the media recorded and photographed the spectacle, the activists removed the condom and all their equipment. The condom still exists — it is currently stored at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California.
The action was well-covered in the media. After television stations around the country played clips of the action with humorous comments by newscasters, Sen. Helms was moved to complain on the Senate floor about “radical homosexuals” — but he never proposed or passed another life-threatening AIDS amendment.
In the years that followed, Helms’s health would begin to deteriorate due to bone disorders, prostate cancer and heart disease. He would retire from the Senate in 2003 and die in 2008.
Meanwhile, Staley, who was HIV-positive, would be appointed in 1994 to President Clinton’s National Task Force on AIDS Drug Development, and would serve on the Board of Directors of amfAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research) from 1991 to 2004. In 2000, he would found AIDSmeds.com to provide treatment information for people living with HIV, and in 2004, he would launch an impactful awareness campaign to address the epidemic of crystal meth use among gay men.
In 2013, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo would appoint Staley to serve on the state’s Ending the Epidemic Task Force. In 2014, Staley would help to form a coalition of advocates for Truvada PrEP that successfully pressured Gilead Sciences to liberalize its patient assistance programs.
Staley would also be a leading subject in the Oscar-nominated documentary How To Survive A Plague (2012).
September 8, 1991
Actor Brad Davis of ‘Midnight Express’ Dies
Brad Davis, a film actor known for his powerful performances in Midnight Express (1978) and Chariots of Fire (1981), dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 41.
Learn More.
Davis also played lead roles in the film Querelle (1982) and in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985).
In early December 1985, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center notified Davis that he was HIV-positive, probably the result of intravenous drug use, according to Davis’ wife of 15 years, Susan Bluestein Davis. In an interview with South Coast Today, Bluestein said that her husband’s diagnosis needed to be kept secret in order for him to continue working in the film industry.
“I make my money in an industry that professes to care very much about the fight against AIDS,” Davis wrote in a book proposal developed in the final weeks of his life. “But in actual fact, if an actor is even rumored to have HIV, he gets no support on an individual basis. He does not work.”
Davis’ book, which his wife would complete, would be titled After Midnight: The Life and Death of Brad Davis (1997). According to Bluestein, Davis wanted the world to know that he had been HIV-positive, had developed full-blown AIDS, and had worked in the industry without ever holding up the production of his projects.
In 1978, after landing the lead in Alan Parker’s hit movie Midnight Express, Davis had become an overnight sensation. His quick exposure to wealth and fame led to a series of bad lifestyle choices, and he became addicted to alcohol and drugs.
With his career destroyed and his marriage badly damaged, Davis joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1981 and became sober. However, the bills from his old lifestyle kept coming due in the form of health problems and then a diagnosis of HIV in late 1985.
Davis kept his condition a secret until shortly before his death in early September 1991. Later, his wife revealed that he committed assisted suicide by a drug overdose.
‘Well, bye-bye y’all’: Activist Belinda Mason Dies
Belinda Mason, the only AIDS-infected member of the National Commission on AIDS and a critic of President George H.W. Bush, dies of AIDS-related illness at age 33.
Learn More.
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.
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.”
Robert L. Douty, a Navy veteran who specialized in electronics, dies of AIDS-related illness at Laguna Honda Hospice at the age of 37.
Learn More.
Douty served in the U.S. Navy in 1972-1978 as an electronic standards specialist on the USS Dixie and the USS Oriskany. After his military service, he continued to work in electronics at Ford Aerospace until his illness forced him to retire in 1987.
California AB101 Veto Ignites Protests in LA and SF
Infuriated by Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto of a major gay rights bill, California activists launch a wave of demonstrations that brand the governor “a liar” who betrayed a cause he had pledged to support.
Learn More.
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.
October 1, 1991
U.S. Locks Up HIV+ Haitians Fleeing Overthrown Country
After thousands of Haitians try to reach the U.S. by boat, the Coast Guard redirects asylum-seekers to a refugee camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they are administered HIV tests. Those testing positive for the virus are retained in separate quarters called Camp Bulkeley.
Learn More.
Following the September 30, 1991 military overthrow of democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Coast Guard rescued more than 40,000 Haitians traveling to the U.S. by boat during 1991 and 1992. On the orders of President George H.W. Bush, none of the asylum-seekers would be allowed to enter the U.S. and most would be immediately returned to Haiti.
While refugees were detained in Guantánamo Bay in a crowded refugee camp surrounded by barbed wire, they were tested for HIV and their asylum claims were reviewed, according to the Guantánamo Public Memory Project. Those testing positive for HIV were required to meet a higher standard to establish that they had a “well-founded fear” of persecution by the Haitian government.
According to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine by George J. Annas, Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to allow the refugees’ attorneys to be present at the screening interviews.
The HIV-positive refugees who successfully completed the interview were housed at Camp Bulkeley, a separate facility at Guantánamo Bay that had inadequate medical facilities and rustic accommodations. During storms, plastic bags would be hung along the structure to help keep the rain out of the refugees’ living quarters.
That is how Camp Bulkeley became the world’s first detention center for people with HIV/AIDS, incarcerating hundreds of Haitian refugees, many of them women and children. Most of the HIV-positive refugees would endure years of detention under brutal conditions and no medical care, and many of them would die while under detention at Camp Bulkeley.
Responding to orders from President Bush, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) classified most of the Haitians as “economic migrants” rather than “political refugees,” allowing INS officials to swiftly deport them, despite the political dangers in Haiti. During 1991-1992, the U.S. deported about 25,000 asylum-seekers from Haiti.
John Dorr Debuts ‘AIDS Poems’ at EZTV Fundraising Event
About six months after testing positive for HIV, EZTV Founder John Dorr reads some of his AIDS-related poems during “The Age of AIDS: Sorrow and Hope,” a fundraiser in West Hollywood for Project Angel Food.
Learn More.
Co-sponsored by the City of West Hollywood, the poetry event featured readings by Dorr, Robert Crosson, Gill Cuadros, Carol Muske Dukes, Lewis MacAdams, and Harry Northrup, and was hosted by actor Bruce Davidson (who had won the 1990 Golden Globe Award for Longtime Companion). The event was held in memory of Tim Dlugos (1950-1990), Leland Hickman (1934-1991), and Cookie Meuller (1949-1989), poets and writers who died of AIDS-related illness.
Door told the audience about how he received the news on April 5, 1991, that his HIV test came back positive and days later, he was hospitalized with HIV-related pneumonia. With raw vulnerability, he shared what his life has been like since then.
Dorr was well-known in West Hollywood as a purveyor of media arts, favoring feature-length movies using home analog video equipment. In 1982, he rented the city’s community center (now the site of STORIES: The AIDS Monument in West Hollywood Park) and presented several evenings of his own work, as well as the work of other video-filmmakers including Ken Camp (As the World Burns) and Richard Moyer (Rimbaud in L.A. starring Michael Kearns, Hollywood’s first openly gay actor). This was Dorr’s first use of the term EZTV, according to the EZTV Online Museum.
In 1983, Dorr opened EZTV Video Gallery at 8543 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood. The space housed a 40-seat screening area and two editing systems. By the mid-1980s, EZTV became a place where members of the West Hollywood community could gather to grieve the loss of those who died of AIDS. Dorr provided his space free of charge for memorial services. In addition, a number of groups focusing on the AIDS crisis (including Queer Nation, ACT Up/LA, AIDS Project Los Angeles, Louise Hays Foundation, and Being Alive) met at EZTV for events, activities and meetings.
Many of EZTV earliest participants died of AIDS-related illnesses, including Mark Addy, James “Dillinger” Baker, Victor Davis, Benedict Falvo, Earl Miller, and Wallace Potts. John Dorr would die of AIDS-related illness about 14 months after this poetry event, on January 1, 1993.
– – – – –
Photo from video taken by Michael J. Masucci.
November 7, 1991
Magic Johnson Announces HIV-Positive Status
Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson announces that he is HIV-positive.
November 14, 1991
Tony Richardson, Oscar-Winning Director, Dies
Tony Richardson, an English theater and film director whose career spanned five decades, dies of AIDS-related illness at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 63 years old.
Learn More.
Richardson won the Academy Award for Best Director in 1964 for the film Tom Jones. Richardson’s early films, such as A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, were an important part of England’s kitchen sink realism movement.
Born in Shipley, West Riding of Yorkshire in 1928, he attended Wadham College, Oxford, where his contemporaries included Rupert Murdoch, Margaret Thatcher, Kenneth Tynan, Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert.
Richardson’s career began in 1953, when he directed productions of Othello and Dostoyevsky’s Gambler for the BBC. He left television in 1955 to become associate artistic director of the new English Stage Company, eventually becoming joint artistic director.
He directed John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre, while also directing Shakespearean productions in Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1957, he directed Laurence Olivier in Osborne’s next play The Entertainer, again for the Royal Court Theatre. By then, he was well on his way to establishing himself as part of the British “New Wave” of directors.
In 1959, Richardson moved onto film projects, co-founding Woodfall Film Productions with John Osborne and producer Harry Saltzman. Their first production was the film version of Look Back in Anger, which Richardson directed.
At the time, Richardson was critical of big Hollywood studios for being afraid to take risks.
“It’s impossible to make films that appeal to everyone, and the only solution is to make them at a non-prohibitive cost, and to try to adhere to a strong, independent point of view that will appeal to at least one body of customers: the ones who want to be stimulated by provocative ideas,” he said in 1960.
In 1962, Richardson and actress Vanessa Redgrave were secretly married, but Redgrave sought and received a divorce five years later. He would father two daughters with Redgrave, and another daughter with Grizelda Grimond.
Richardson was bisexual, but never acknowledged it publicly until after he contracted HIV.
In 1974, Richardson moved to Los Angeles to work with Sam Shepard on a script, which was never realized. His next notable film was the 1984 comedy-drama The Hotel New Hampshire with Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster, which he wrote and directed. Four more major films followed, his last being Blue Sky starring Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones. In all, he directed 23 films, according to the Los Angeles Times.
November 15, 1991
Jacques Morali, Creator of Village People, Dies
Jacques Morali, French music producer and creator of the Village People, dies of AIDS-related illness in Paris at the age of 44.
Learn More.
The musical group The Village People was originally formed in 1977 by Morali with his business partner Henri Belolo and lead singer Victor Willis.
Morali hired Willis as a background singer for an album he was producing for the Ritchie Family, and saw in him the potential to be the star of his new project.
“I had a dream that you sang lead vocals on an album I produced, and it went very, very big,” Morali reportedly told Willis, according to The Village People website. “I have four tracks. I can’t pay you much right now but if you agree, I’ll make you a star.” Willis agreed and the rest is history.
Those initial four tracks were San Francisco (You’ve Got Me), In Hollywood (Everyone’s a Star), Fire Island, and Village People. Willis performed the songs with professional background singers and they were released as the album Village People. When the album became a fast hit, Morali and Belolo moved fast to find more members for the group.
The Village People’s iconic characters were developed to appeal to disco’s large gay audience. With its members portraying various gay-fantasy personas from American culture, the group became so popular, their music broke through the confines of the club scene to enjoy mainstream success worldwide.
With Willis, Morali wrote their biggest hit, “Y.M.C.A.,” which was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in March 2020. Morali (with Belolo and Willis) wrote another big hit with “Go West.”
During the late ’70s and early ’80s, Morali produced nearly 70 disco albums. But when the disco craze faded in the early ’80s, Morali and Belolo would follow up Village People’s success by developing the pop-rap act Break Machine and bringing breakdancing to Europe.
After Morali’s death, Belolo turned to licensing European pop dance acts, such as 2 Unlimited, Eiffel 65, Gala and Haddaway, for the French market.
Three Men Convicted of Hate-Crime Killing of Julio Rivera in NYC
Two men were convicted of murder and one of manslaughter in the killing of Julio Rivera, a man who became their target in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens because he was gay.
Learn More.
On July 2 at about 3:00 a.m., Rivera, a 29-year-old bartender, was lured to his death in a remote part of a local schoolyard by three white men who wanted to “reclaim” their neighborhood from gays.
Two of the defendants were convicted of taking part in what the prosecutors described as a savage “gay bashing” spree. A third defendant, 21-year-old Daniel Doyle, had previously pled guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter in return for providing the only eyewitness account of the crime.
According to testimony by Doyle, his two friends Erik Brown and Esat Bici assaulted Rivera with a claw hammer and broken beer bottle, and then Doyle himself finished him off with a knife. The New York City Police Department initially and erroneously classified the murder as a drug-related crime, and it would have remained so if it were not for members of Rivera’s family and local gay activist friends who spoke out to the media about the mishandling of the case by the NYPD.
Brown and Bici received convictions of second-degree murder and faced sentences of life in prison, with parole possible no sooner than 15 or 25 years. The plea deal that Doyle received (the prosecution dropped the murder charge against him and allowed him to plead guilty to manslaughter) was protested by Brown’s and Bici’s lawyers. Doyle, who admitted to instigating the attack and stabbing Rivera, faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison for his manslaughter plea, with parole possible as early as 8 years.
Leaders of gay-rights groups told the NY Times that the verdicts sent important message in the effort to counter violence against gay people, who have been increasingly targeted in violent attacks since the emergence of the AIDS virus.
“It sends a message to everybody in the city that we have a right to live and that this kind of violence will not be tolerated,” Rafael Ruiz-Ayala, a member of Latino Gay Men of New York, told the NYC Times after the verdict was announced.
“I’m sorry that hate led them to this sorry fate, but I’m pleased justice was done,” said Matt Foreman, executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project.
The three defendants were lifelong residents of Queens. Doyle, who testified against the other two, was the son of a retired New York City police detective and was home from college when he participated in Rivera’s murder. Brown was a student at the Art Students League in Manhattan. By contrast, Bici was a high school dropout whose family background included the killing of his mother by his father when he was 7 years old.
Prosecutors told the jury that Doyle and Bici were members of a local racist organization, the Doc Martens Skinheads, and the three had shaved their heads the night of the murder.
November 24, 1991
Performer Freddie Mercury Dies
Freddie Mercury, the lead singer-songwriter for the rock band Queen, dies at the age of 45 of AIDS-related illness at his home in west London one day after he publicly announces he is HIV positive.
Learn More.
Regarded by fans and critics alike as a consummate showman, Mercury was openly bisexual and enjoyed a colourful rock-star lifestyle.
Born Frederick Bulsara on the East African island of Zanzibar on September 5, 1946, Mercury studied piano in boarding school in India, then befriended numerous musicians at London’s Ealing College of Art.
Mercury would become famous for being one of the rock world’s most versatile and engaging performers and for his mock operatic masterpiece, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ Released in 1975, the six-minute song was nearly never released due to its length and unusual style.
But Mercury insisted to his bandmates and music executives that it be included in their album “A Night at the Opera” and the song would go on to be a worldwide hit and timeless rock anthem.
When members of the music community began to become sick and die from AIDS, Mercury would express fear about becoming infected with HIV, recalls friend Peter Freestone, who believes the singer first suspected he was ill as early as 1987.
For the final two years of his life, Mercury would keep his illness secret from everyone, except those he was closest to, according to his bandmates, and he would live in almost total seclusion.
Only Freddie’s close family and friends were invited to his funeral.
Ten years later, Mercury and Queen would be recognized for their contributions to American music history when they are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
Paul Martin Heltsley — San Francisco Writer-Editor — Dies
Paul Martin Heltsley, a writer for Drummer and other leather-related magazines, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in San Francisco. He was 29 years old.
Learn More.
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.
December 2, 1991
Sacramento Activist Stan Hadden Dies
Stan Hadden, a senior administrative aide to California Senate President Pro Tempore David A. Roberti and one of the most influential voices on AIDS policy in Sacramento, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 35.
Learn More.
As fierce fighter for HIV/AIDS policy for 10 years, Haddon is credited with shepharding the creation of the California AIDS Advisory Committee in 1983 and writing legislation supporting a coordinated approach to local HIV/AIDS programs and services in 1985.
According to Stephen Colbrook’s paper “Clandestine Networks and Closeted Bureaucrats: AIDS and the Forming of a Gay Policy Network in California,” Haddon was a key player among policymakers who jumped into action when the AIDS crisis unfolded. When Hadden learned that a new deadly disease was spreading through San Francisco’s gay community, he brought the epidemic to the attention of his boss, David Roberti, who was the president of the California senate.
Colbrook wrote:
“Hadden quickly emerged as a pivotal figure in California’s response to the AIDS crisis. He was affable, forthright, and pragmatic, burnishing a well-deserved reputation as the AIDS Tsar of California. By 1987, his monthly AIDS newsletter had 25,000 subscribers, and his correspondence reached beyond California to activists in Texas, Illinois, and New York.”
Sen. Roberti provided Hadden with a significant degree of autonomy, with which Hadden used to craft a large portion of California’s early AIDS legislation, including Senate Bill 1215, which expanded the state budget for prevention education by $11 million. Passed in 1985 by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both the Assembly and Senate at a time when budget funds were thin, SB 1215 cemented California’s leading role in addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis. In 1985, nearly half of the total state spending on the AIDS epidemic was attributed to California, according to Colbrook.
Hadden’s leadership also throughout the 1980s also helped steer California’s action on the epidemic toward a focus on patient confidentiality and individual rights. This focus was not always adopted by other states in their approach to the AIDS crisis. On the other end of the spectrum was Texas, whose political leaders created policy centered on the disease’s perceived threat to the heterosexual population.
Hadden was one of only a few in the 1980s Sacramento political scene who were open about their LGBT identity, journalist Karen Ocamb would later write in The Pride. Scores of administrative and political aides to California legislators remained in the closet, fearful that open knowledge of their sexual identity would end their professional careers. Elected officials and potential candidates who identified as LGBT also remained silenced by the very real fear of ruination.
In the final two weeks of his life, Hadden received round-the-clock nursing care as part of a hospice program. Sacramento AIDS Foundation spokeswoman Patty Blomberg noted that the AIDS care Hadden received might not have existed if it were not for his influence and persistence.
Blomberg told the Sacramento Bee that Hadden had slipped into a coma early that morning and then died at about noon at his farmhouse along the Sacramento River, surrounded by friends and family who had flown in from as far away as Michigan.
Hadden’s funeral would bring in friends and colleagues from around the state, including Ocamb and John Duran, then President of the Board of LIFE AIDS Lobby who would become Mayor of the City of West Hollywood.
“In a gesture unheard of for the suits of Sacramento, a huge rainbow flag was unfurled and solemnly marched down the street to the Capitol,” Ocamb recalled.
“Stan’s memory will go on, because he made a contribution to this state that many of us can only dream of making,” Senate President Pro Tem Roberti said during Hadden’s memorial service at St. Francis Church in midtown Sacramento.
Kimberly Bergalis — Focus of Testing Debate — Dies
Kimberly Bergalis, who stirred a national debate over AIDS testing when she became known as the first case of contracting the virus from a health care worker, dies of AIDS-related illness at her home in Fort Pierce, Florida at the age of 23.
Bergalis’ infection with the AIDS virus was traced to her dentist, Dr. David J. Acer of Stuart, Florida. Acer, who continued practicing dentistry several years after learning he was infected with HIV, told health investigators that he did not believe he had infected anyone.
However, testing of hundreds of his patients found four more who were infected with the same strain of HIV as his and who reportedly had no other risks for the disease. Experts still question how those infections occurred, with the most common theory beging that Acer bled from a cut in his hands or used instruments that had punctured his skin or were not sterilized after use on another infected patient.
What finally convinced health officials that Acer was responsible for Bergalis’ infection with HIV was a laboratory analysis of the virus, whose mutations produce varied strains, showing that the samples from Acer and Bergalis were virtually identical. Bergalis sued Acer’s estate for $1 million and also received an undisclosed sum from his insurance company. But her crusade continued.
“Someone who has AIDS and continues to practice is nothing better than a murderer,” said George Bergalis, Kimberly’s father. The Bergalis family also urged testing of patients to protect doctors.
A few months before her death, Kimberly Bergalis was wheeled into a Capitol hearing room so she could state her support for a bill to test both medical professionals and patients.
“I did not do anything wrong, yet I am being made to suffer like this,” she whispered. “My life has been taken away. Please enact legislation so that no other patient or health care provider will have to go through the hell that I have.”
Some said that Bergalis stirred unwarranted panic and that her case diverted attention from the far more common spread of the disease by unprotected sex and the sharing of tainted needles by IV drug users.
Spurred by the public uproar, the Federal Centers for Disease Control proposed barring infected health workers from procedures in which HIV might be transmitted. But the legislation stalled, and the centers backed off under opposition from state and local health officials, medical societies and advocates for AIDS patients.
Opponents of the proposed regulation argued that the Florida case remained an anomaly, that thousands of patients of other doctors with HIV were tested and found uninfected, and that new rules were not needed. They said the proposals would unfairly destroy the careers of infected health workers and waste millions of dollars that would be better spent on other AIDS preventives.
Robert Wiley Kirk — known as “Cirby” in the Bay Area leather community — dies of AIDS-related illness at a hospice in San Francisco. He was 48.
Learn More.
Cirby had a notable talent for erotic and leather-themed art, and his work was featured in gay publications and displayed in bars coast-to-coast. His artwork was also included in the leather-bound publication The Hun Coloring Book. He was also a proud Leatherman who competed in various competitions.
Cirby was born in Texas in 1943, and after working in Denver as a model and club dancer, he moved in the late 1960s to San Francisco, where he took on a number of jobs, including acting, modeling and bartending. He moved to Los Angeles around 1973 and became a bartender at Griff’s. It was in LA where a friend took notice of his artistic talent and helped him set up his first art show.
Cirby became sober in 1984, and worked as the accountant for the St. James Club. In 1990, he returned to San Francisco, where he made a positive and prolific impact on many in the recovery community.
Richard Hunt, a puppeteer known for his work on The Muppet Show, dies of AIDS-related illness at Cabrini Hospice in Manhattan at the age of 40.
Learn More.
Hunt, a native of the Bronx, was a member of Jim Henson Productions for more than 20 years, as the performer behind Scooter, Janice, Junior Gorg and many other characters from the popular television programs The Muppet Show, Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock.
He directed several episodes of these shows, and was a puppeteer in the Henson films The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Muppets Take Manhattan and Jim Henson’s Muppet Vision 3-D, a Disney/MGM Studios Theme Park attraction.
Hunt was known by his co-workers on Sesame Street and other projects for his accomplished singing voice and his warm backstage personality. He served as a mentor to newer puppeteers, taking new hires to lunch. He was often observed reading a newspaper as he was performing a character and doing that character’s lines.
“When he is not working on camera, he is apt to have Scooter or Beaker or Janice — anyone — on his arm for the purpose of entertaining visitors to the studio. If there are no visitors around, he will attempt to entertain his co-workers,” wrote Christopher Finch in his book Of Muppets and Men.
In the period immediately following his death, few of Hunt’s characters (with the notable exceptions of Beaker, Statler, and Sweetums) were recast with new performers. Scooter was retired and absent as a character in all Muppet productions until 1999 with Muppets from Space. On Sesame Street, characters originated by Hunt usually appear only in background cameos.
The Richard Hunt Spirit Award is presented annually at the Sesame Street wrap party to the cast member who best honors the generosity in spirit and dedicated work of Richard Hunt in their actions on set.
Jerry Nolan, drummer for the band The New York Dolls and a punk rock pioneer, dies of AIDS-related illnesses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. He was 45.
Learn More.
The New York Dolls was an early 1970s glam-rock band that had a profound influence on bands as diverse as the Sex Pistols to Motley Crue. Nolan joined the band in 1972 after the original drummer, Billy Murcia, died of a drug overdose while on tour in the U.K. he played on the Dolls’ first two albums (New York Dolls and Too Much Too Soon).
Nolan and bandmate Johnny Thunders left the Dolls of 1975 to form a new band, The Heartbreakers, with Richard Hell. By this time, both were addicted to heroin.
Malcolm McLaren, the manager of The Sex Pistols, booked The Heartbreakers in 1976 for the doomed Anarchy in the UK tour, where they only played seven of the 19 booked gigs. As chaotic as the tour was, The Heartbreakers managed to get a record deal from the exposure and released their first and only album, L.A.M.F.” in 1977.
L.A.M.F. initially received poor reviews, largely due to its poor production quality, but appreciation for the work has grown over time. New Musical Express magazine named L.A.M.F. one of the greatest albums of all time.
What also accompanied The Heartbreakers’ reputation as a punk rock super-band was the band members’ problem with heroin addiction. In fact, their drug habit was immortalized in the song “Chinese Rocks,” co-written by Johnny Thunders and Dee Dee Ramone of The Ramones.
Unable to produce a second album, the band broke up and Nolan began a series of music projects and his creative output began to dwindle. In late 1991, after years of intravenous drug use, Nolan was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s Hospital for bacterial meningitis and bacterial pneumonia. During treatment, he suffered a stroke and went into a coma, from which he never recovered. He spent his final weeks on a life support system.
A.J. Antoon, a Tony Award-winning director, dies of AIDS-related illness New York University Medical Center. He was 47.
Learn More.
Antoon directed both classics and new plays for Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival for a 20-year period.
He began working for Papp at the Public Theater in 1971 with Subject to Fits. The next year, at the age of 27, he rose to fame with the production of That Championship Season (which won him a Tony Award).
The same year, he directed the Shakespeare Festival’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, which was so successful, it moved from Central Park’s Delacorte Theater to Broadway. His Much Ado was acclaimed for his fanciful, imaginative touch to the production, according to the New York Times.
His last New York Shakespeare Festival production was a Wild West version of The Taming of Shrew, starring Morgan Freeman and Tracey Ullman, in 1990. At the time of his death, Antoon’s Off-Broadway musical Song of Singapore was being performed and would go on to win a 1992 Drama Desk Award.
Jewelry designer and activist Tina Chow dies of AIDS-related illness in Pacific Palisades, California at the age of 41.
Learn More.
Born Bettina Louise Lutz, the supermodel, jewellery designer and fashion collector, was married to restaurateur Michael Chow in 1972 and became known professionally as Tina Chow. In the 1970s, she was featured prominently in advertising campaigns for the Japanese cosmetic line Shiseido.
“Chow broke the mold of being a model with an androgynous look and a distinctly chic fashion sensibility that gave her notoriety,” writes artist Maxwell N. Burnstein in his tribute to her on the Council of Fashion Designers of America website.
Karl Lagerfeld credits Chow as the inventor of minimal chic, and Kate Moss considers her to be her style icon. Recognized as having a profound influence on the styles of her era, Chow was initiated into the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1985.
The same year, Helmut Newton took a portrait photograph of Chow and her husband in which their power dynamics are made evident.
“In the photograph, the two are separated, physically, by the counter of a bar,” writes Cynthia Cruz in The Critical Flame. “He standing in dark glasses, holding a glass in his hand, staring at her while she is on the other side, in a long white dress, her eyes made dark with make-up, tied to the bar with rope.”
In the mid-1980s, Chow began to find the non-stop party lifestyle tiresome, and was encouraged by artist Andy Warhol to turn her attention to jewellery design. She incorporated stones and crystals associated with healing properties into bamboo and used traditional Japanese basket weaving techniques to follow the shapes of uncut stones.
“Chow’s pieces of jewelry are unusual, neither delicate or what one might usually consider ‘beautiful,'” writes Cynthia Cruz in her tribute to Chow. “Instead, the pieces are solid, anchored.”
The piece for which Chow is best known is her Kyoto Bracelet, constructed of black bamboo with seven rose quartz pebbles inside.
Around this time, Chow also deepened her commitment to AIDS charity work. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, she explained, “I lost several friends to AIDS, and I felt my life slipping away while I continued to party.”
She also separated from her husband and embarked on a series of affairs, first with a film star who introduced her to Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama, and later with the French aristocrat Kim D’Estainvillle.
In 1989, Chow and her husband divorced. Five months later, she learned that she was HIV positive. Chow refused to take any of the medicine her Western doctors recommended. Instead, she opted for a holistic approach, attempting to heal herself with crystals, macrobiotics, teas, and similar somatic modes of healing.
After Chow had made her illness public, she continued to work with AIDS organizations, including Project Angel Food. She ultimately lost her life from complications from AIDS at her home in Pacific Palisades on January 24, 1992.
Clark Tippet, a choreographer and principal dancer with American Ballet Theater, dies of AIDS-related illness at the Labette County Medical Center in Parsons, Kansas. He was 37 years old.
“Tippet stood out onstage for his strong dramatic presence and a witty sense of style and theatricality that made him believable in a wide range of ballets, from the demanding pyrotechnics of Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake to the second male lead’s slippery fast-moving part in Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove to the brooding High Brahman in La Bayadere to Carabosse, the evil fairy, in The Sleeping Beauty,” wrote Dunning. “He was also a performer who could unobtrusively bring nuance and color to insignificant roles.”
Tippet began studying ballet when he was 5 years old, and by the time he was 11, he had moved from his birthplace of Parsons, Kansas to New York City. At age 18, he became a soloist for American Ballet Theater and was promoted to Principal Dancer three years later.
Tippet began choreographing in 1986, with Enough Said for ABT and followed by four more works. His work Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1, was “thunderously received at its world premiere,” according to The New York Times.
Tippet’s works for ABT also included S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A (The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America),Rigaudon, Some Assembly Required, and Enough Said.
In 1988, he received an American Choreographer Award and an Excellence of Achievement award from the General Electric Foundation. He also received an award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990-91.
Illustrator Daniel “Danny” Sotomayor, who helped found Chicago’s ACT UP chapter, dies of AIDS-related illness at Illinois Masonic Medical Center. He was 33.
Learn More.
When Sotomayor was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, he turned his illustration pen into a sword honed for raising awareness about the AIDS crisis.
He established himself as the first nationally syndicated, openly gay political cartoonist, according to The Legacy Project. During his brief but brilliant career, he created more than two hundred scathing and often humorous cartoons depicting inaction and indifference by the federal government, insurance industry, health care system, and pharmaceutical companies. His weekly cartoons appeared in Chicago’s Windy City Times and in gay newspapers and magazines in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis
Sotomayor attended the 1988 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, and was energized by the ACT UP demonstrations that generated nationwide media attention, according to activist Jeanne Kracher in the Chicago Reader. Sotomayor returned to Chicago and immediately proposed reorganizing their activist group, Chicago for AIDS Rights, and changing its name to ACT UP/Chicago.
Sotomayor took initiative early on with the rebranded organization, and his energy and enthusiasm for activism drew others to ACT UP.
McMillan recalled going down to the gay clubs on Halsted late at night with Sotomayor to pass out fliers.
“We were young and fresh, wearing new t-shirts, because we had a new logo for ACT UP Chicago, which Danny designed,” he said. “We were overwhelmed by how many people showed up. At Clark and Diversey, we shut down the intersection.”
In 1990, Sotomayor was “at the center of ACT UP/Chicago,” according to a profile of him in the Chicago Reader. With a T-cell count of 65, Sotomayor was still able to generate the energy to lead hundreds of activists in various demonstrations.
“Sometimes I wonder if ACT UP is what’s keeping me alive,” he told the Chicago Reader. “Sure, I have AIDS, but I think we all make the decision to die. I just haven’t made that decision yet.”
Sotomayor became known for his escalating public confrontations with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Around this time, other ACT UP members begin to say that he had gotten shriller, angrier, and more impatient. His manner was considered by some to be alienating to those working alongside him.
“I really don’t care whether people like me, or whether they approve of my style or my methods,” he told the Chicago Reader. “The question is whether I’m right and whether we’re making progress. Because if we are, then fuck ’em.”
Three months after organizing one of ACT UP/Chicago’s largest demonstrations — which included Sotomayor and four other activists slipping unnoticed into the Cook County Building and hanging a protest banner from the window of an upper floor — he resigned from the organization.
He explained his seemingly abrupt resignation to the Reader: “I quit, because I can no longer do the kind of AIDS work I want to do with the hostility that I feel within the group. People with AIDS are not setting the agenda of ACT UP. The group is being manipulated to suit the politics of a small group of people who don’t even have AIDS.”
In 1991, at a fundraising event for Impact – an Illinois-based LGBTQ political action group – Daniel challenged invited guest Mayor Daley with a banner that read “Daley, Tell The Truth About AIDS.” Impact’s organizers promptly threw him out of the venue.
A year later, Impact would have a change of heart and honor Sotomayor with an award for his activism.
Martin “Marty” Robinson, a long-time organizer for gay-rights causes who was known for his provocative protests, died of AIDS-related illness at his Brooklyn home at the age of 49.
Such raids were common, but for the first time, the customers resisted and fought back. Shortly afterward, 2,000 attended a rally in Sheridan Square, where Robinson was a keynote speaker.
One of his mantras was, if it’s not medicine, it’s murder,” activist Bill Bahlman would tell the Act Up Oral History Project in 2010. “He taught me things like it doesn’t matter whether you’re Rock Hudson or a person living on the street, homeless. If you don’t have effective treatments for HIV, you’re going to die.”
In the early 1980s, Robinson headed GLAAD’s Swift and Terrible Retribution Committee, planning demonstrations and developing political “zaps,” chaotic and theatrical interventions intended to attract the attention of the press.
When the Centers for Disease Control planned its 1987 conference in Atlanta with a focus on mandatory testing for HIV, Robinson led activists from his group, the Lavender Hill Mob, into the ballroom of the Marriott Marquis, where a pre-conference cocktail party was being held for attendees.
Activists passed out fliers to the startled participants with the message, “What does CDC stand for? Center for Detention Camps!”
During the three days of the conference, Robinson and the Lavender Hill Mob appeared in various meeting locations with leaflets and noisy chants: “Test drugs, not people!” and “Drugs into bodies now!”
Robinson was also a founder of ACT UP, which was started in New York in the wake of the Lavender Hill Mob’s success. Modeled on the tactics of the Lavender Hill Mob, ACT UP’s approach was bold and headline-grabbing — and effective.
Perhaps one of Robinson’s most important “zaps” was the one at the National Institutes of Health in May 1990, around the time that North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms was trying to block a $600 million AIDS relief bill.
ACT UP members from all over the country descended on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, setting off smoke bombs and yelling that NIH policies were killing them. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the NIH’s drive to end AIDS, invited several ACT UP leaders inside and listened to them. What he learned brought about the Accelerated Approval process that helped get “drugs into bodies now,” as the ACT UP slogan demanded.
The Marty Robinson Collection of papers and records are currently stored at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York.
March 24, 1992
AIDS Legal Activist Clint Hockenberry Dies
Clinton C. Hockenberry, an activist for gay and lesbian rights and on behalf of AIDS patients, died of AIDS-related illness at his home in San Francisco at the age of 41.
Learn More.
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.
Considered one of the “Big Three” science fiction writers in America, Isaac Asimov died in Manhattan of AIDS-related illness at the age of 72.
Learn More.
The cause of death was initially reported as heart and kidney failure. In 2002, the Asimov family would correct the record to reflect that Asimov died from AIDS-related illness.
A prolific writer, Asinov was best known for writing science fiction attentive to scientific accuracy and logic. He also wrote mysteries, fantasy, and nonfiction.
His most famous work is the Foundationseries, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966. His other major works include the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. In addition, he also wrote over 380 short stories, including the social science fiction novelette “Nightfall,” which in 1964 was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
Asimov’s wife, Janet, would make public the details around Asimov’s HIV-positive status in the last 10 years of his life with the posthumous release of his autobiography It’s Been a Good Life.
Asimov suffered a heart attack in 1977, and six years later, he underwent triple bypass surgery at NYU Medical Center, during which he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. His HIV status was kept secret out of concern that the anti-AIDS prejudice prevelant in the 1980s might extend to his family members.
April 1992
West Hollywood Activist Edward Riney Dies
Edward Riney, member of the East End Community Action group in West Hollywood, dies of AIDS-related illness.
Learn More.
Riney was well-known in the West Hollywood community as a civically engaged resident who worked tirelessly to improve public safety in the early days of West Hollywood’s cityhood.
He served on the neighborhood watch group on the city’s east side and established himself as a commentator for the Los Angeles Times for local public safety initiatives, such as the passage of a “no camping” law for city parks and removing from Plummer Park a meal program for people experiencing homelessness.
At the April meeting of the City Council, then-Mayor Paul Koretz announced that he would adjourn the meeting in memory of Riney. A moment of silence was also held in Riney’s honor.
At the meeting, longtime resident Jeanne Dobrin spoke of Riney’s dedication to crime prevention and said she appreciated his sense of humor. In addition, resident Gloria Vassy talked about how Riney organized an annual food basket drive during the holidays.
On April 25, the West Hollywood community held a memorial service for Riney in Plummer Park. The following December, the holiday food basket drive was organized in memory of Riney; 150 food baskets were assembled and given out to those in need.
The sold-out Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness is broadcast in 76 countries, with an estimated that one billion people tuning in worldwide.
Learn More.
Considered one of the biggest benefit concerts of all time, the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert featured “warm-up acts” by Metallica, Def Leppard, and Guns N’ Roses.
Between bands, several video clips honoring Freddie Mercury were shown. Film star and AIDS activist Elizabeth Taylor then spoke about AIDS prevention, which was followed by a compilation of Mercury’s performances.
Then came the main event: a greatest-hits set from Queen featuring stand-in vocals from superstars that included David Bowie, Robert Plant, Elton John, Annie Lennox, Axl Rose and George Michael.
After Queen front man Freddie Mercury died on November 24, 1991 after a long battle with AIDS, his bandmates decided to honor him with a concert to raise money for AIDS research. This form of tribute was fitting, given that, seven years earlier, Mercury had delivered the performance of his life at the Live Aid benefit concert.
The concert was held in London’s Wembley Stadium and all 72,000 tickets sold out in three hours, despite that the only confirmed act was Queen and the band still did not have a new front man.
All proceeds from the concert were used to launch the Mercury Phoenix Trust (MPT), a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding programs for HIV/AIDS awareness and treatment.
Since then, MPT has released tapes of the concert at various times to raise money for HIV/AIDS programs and, in 2020, for the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
April 28, 1992
Canadian Figure-Skating Champion Brian Pockar Dies
Three-time Canadian men’s champion Brian Pockar dies of AIDS-related illness in Calgary at the age of 32.
Learn More.
Pockar was the 1982 World bronze medalist, a Canadian national champion from 1978 to 1980, and competed at the 1980 Winter Olympics. After turning pro, Pockar toured with “Stars on Ice” and worked as a choreographer.
Pockar was the first figure skater to successfully complete a triple one-foot
salchow/double flip combination jump at the World Championships. He was recognized as one of Canada’s best athletes when he was presented with five
Alberta Achievement Awards, and in 1982, was presented with the Government of Canada Sport Excellence Award.
“Even after his death, Pockar’s family members have tried to avoid sensational revelations,” Bondy wrote in a November 1992 column about AIDS deaths among figure skaters. “Through a spokesman, the family released a simple statement: ‘Brian wanted to be remembered for his accomplishments in life, and not for the cause of his death.'”
Pockar was posthumously inducted into the Skate Canada Hall of Fame. Annually, Skate Canada’s Alberta-Northwest Territories/Nunavut Section hosts the Brian Pockar Male Seminar, which provides training to male figure skaters. The Pockar Foundation helps fund this seminar every year.
May 2, 1992
Sharon Redd — Disco Queen, R&B Singer and ‘Harlette’ — Dies
Sharon Redd, a singer and actress whose voice energized nightclubs in the 1970s and 1980s, dies of AIDS-related illness. She was 46.
Learn More.
Redd signed with United Artists in 1968 and immediately recorded four singles, which included the Hank Williams song “Half as Much.” She also landed a lead role in the Australian production of the rock musical Hair, and recorded the song “Easy to be Hard” (1969) for the Australian soundtrack of the musical.
“All these records helped her to establish a reputation as a very fine R&B singer with an expressive voice,” writes music critic Stian M. Eriksen. “They reveal a much more soulful Sharon than what you find on most of her club hits of the ’80s.”
After Redd returned from Australia, she won the first “Schaefer Beer Talent Hunt” and became known nationwide as the “Schaefer Beer Girl. This exposure helped her secure a spot as one of Bette Midler’s backup singers (called “The Harlettes”) from 1973 to 1978.
Redd, Charlotte Crossley and Ula Hedwig were thought of as the consummate Harlettes trio, according to the Bette Midler fan site Bootleg Betty.
“Sharon Redd and Charlotte Crossley are two beautiful brown ladies with some of the best pipes in the music business. Add the sleek willowy frame of Ula Hedwig and a voice that ranges from the purest high tones to the gutsiest blue notes, and what you get is some of the freshest and most dynamic music being created in the New York nightclub circuit,” wrote Don Bradshaw (also known as “Mister D”), editor of Bootleg Betty.
To perform with “Miss M,” the Harlettes had to master a wide range of musical styles, ranging from ’30s and ’40s ballads to modern rock, country, blues, and gospel. Their act grew so strong, club owners sought to book The Harlettes as a separate act during the months Midler retreated to write new shows, and they even recorded an album under the name Formerly of The Harlettes.
“With Bette, we learned the importance of theatre, that is, creating a character that enhances the music we were singing,” Redd told an interviewer in 1978. “In addition, this helped to sustain a high-performance level under widely varying conditions and locations. Bette emphasized the importance of the group to her show and we learned to work together.”
Redd also performed vocals with Bonnie Raitt, Gwen McCrae (“Love Insurance”), and Norman Connors (“You Are My Starship”), and by the end of the decade, she had a solo deal with Prelude Records, which was known for disco hits.
During the heyday of disco, Redd released three albums for Prelude. After releasing her first LP, she was steered toward Prelude’s production powerhouses Eric Matthew and Darryl Payne, according to music site Ransom Note.
Matthew and Payne employed the recent technology of drum machines and synthesizers to create an “electronic undercurrent” to Redd’s dynamic vocals, and created a fresh sound that influenced the future of music.
“For me, with Sharon, Eric and Darryl forming their post-disco Prelude triptych, they recorded the definitive proto-House rhythm – building the foundations for what we know as House,” writes the author of House Hunting.
While Redd’s singles didn’t register on radio playlists, they were in constant circulation in the dance clubs. Her “boogie bomb” recordings of “Can You Handle It,” “Never Give You Up,” “Beat the Street,” and “Love How You Feel” became nightclub standards. Many DJs, recognizing the malleability of the work, issued creative re-mixes to extend their popularity.
After her third and final Prelude album, Redd slowed down and occasionally did more session work. She released a new single in 1991, but that would prove to be her final work.
She was diagnosed with HIV and, after stepping on broken glass during a 1992 performance, Redd’s immune system became overwhelmed. Her health steadily declined and she died in May 1992 in upstate New York.
“I made a decision,” Redd told an interviewer in 1978. “This is my life, and I thank God there’s been enough success to make it all seem worthwhile.”
May 5, 1992
Robert Gladstein, Choreographer for San Francisco Ballet, Dies
Robert Gladstein, choreographer, dancer and former assistant director of the San Francisco Ballet, dies at his home of AIDS-related illness at age 49. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times report the cause of death as “cancer.”
Learn More.
Gladstein was a principal dancer of the San Francisco Ballet in 1970, the company’s ballet master in 1975, and, in 1980, its assistant director and artistic coordinator. In his time with the company, he choreographed more than 30 ballets, including Symphony in Three Movements and Psalms. Some of these works were televised on San Francisco’s PBS station, KQED.
Born in Berkeley in 1943, Gladstein made his debut at age 10 when he danced in a production of The Nutcracker by the San Francisco Ballet School, according to The New York Times. He graduated from the school in 1960.
In 1967, he joined the company of New York’s American Ballet Theatre. After three years, he returned to the San Francisco Ballet as a principal dancer. After assisting in multiple efforts to rescue San Francisco Ballet from near bankruptcy in 1974, Gladstein served as the company’s Ballet Master from 1975 until 1980, when he became the Ballet’s Assistant Director and Artistic Coordinator.
He left California again in 1986 to become ballet master for the Dallas Ballet, a position he held until 1988.
Gladstein also was a member of the dance advisory panel of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1981 to 1986, a time when then-President Ronald Reagan attempted to abolish the federal arts grant program. When Reagan’s efforts to kill the NEA failed, he then began a campaign to defund the program and initially cut its budget in 1981 from $158.8 million to $143.5 million.
Robert Reed, who played quintessential family man Mike Brady in the popular sitcom The Brady Bunch from 1969 to 1974, dies of AIDS-related illness in Pasadena, California at the age of 59.
Learn More.
In 1969, Reed was cast as quintessential family man Mike Brady on the enduring sitcom The Brady Bunch. With a superficial and somewhat charming view of suburban family life, the TV show became a cultural icon of the 1970s, against all Reed’s expectations.
Reed kept it a secret that he was gay until he died in 1992. Co-star Florence Henderson said she knew about Reed’s sexual identity, as did others on the set, but it was never discussed.
“He was an unhappy person,” Henderson said. “Had Bob not been forced to live this double life, I think it would have dissipated a lot of that anger and frustration.”
Behind the scenes of the TV show, Reed battled with its creator, Sherwood Schwartz, over its content. In a 1983 interview with The Associated Press, Reed said that he and Schwartz “fought over the scripts,” and that he thought Schwartz filled the show with “just gag lines. That would have been what The Brady Bunch would have been if I hadn’t protested.”
Despite his frustration with the sitcom, Reed developed close connections with his fellow cast members: He established a lifelong friendship with Henderson, and served as a surrogate father figure to his TV children, Barry Williams, Maureen McCormick, Christopher Knight, Eve Plumb, Mike Lookinland and Susan Olsen.
Reed first gained a TV following in The Defenders, a 1960s dramatic series on which he played a progressive-minded young lawyer whose father was portrayed by E.G. Marshall. He also had roles in the television series The Lawman and Mannix. Earlier in 1992, he filmed an episode of Jake and the Fatman.
Born John Robert Rietz Jr. in Highland Park, Illinois, Reed spent his childhood in Muskogee, Oklahoma and then studied drama at Northwestern University, playing the leading man in eight campus productions. He married fellow student Marilyn Rosenberger in 1954, and they had a daughter named Karen; the marriage ended in divorce in 1959.
After more acting study in England, where he studied Shakespearean drama, Reed returned to the U.S. in the late 1950s and joined a young group of Shakespearian players, with whom he performed in Off-Broadway productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. He made his Broadway debut in 1964, succeeding Robert Redford as the star of the Neil Simon hit play Barefoot in the Park.
After The Brady Bunch and Mannix, Reed continued to find success with TV projects, most notably the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), Roots (1977) and Scruples (1980). He received Emmy Award nominations for his work on Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Dr. Pat Caddison, a transgender person, in a 1975 two-part episode of Medical Center, a groundbreaking role for the time.
He also appeared in Brady Buch reunion specials and the popular Brady Bunch Variety Hour, even though he truly loathed the show’s often inane scripts. He did it, because he knew that the other performers would suffer financially if he declined to participate.
At the end of his career, Reed taught Shakespearean-style acting at the University of California, Los Angeles, work which brought Reed great joy. It was short lived however, because of his battle with cancer that was complicated by HIV.
In the last year of his life, Reed called Florence Henderson and asked her to “tell the kids.” She agreed, and said making those phone calls was “the hardest thing I ever had to do.”
His death told America something important: If AIDS could take America’s favorite Dad from The Brady Bunch, the disease was everywhere — and could take anyone.
As the only rapid enzyme immunoassay (EIA) approved for diagnostic use in the U.S., the test is manually performed by mixing a small amount of the patient’s blood with an antibody agent to which only HIV-1 antibodies will attach.
This test is considered by researchers to be part of the third wave of HIV tests, following the ELISA and Western Blot tests of the mid-1980s. A 1993 clinical trial analyzing almost 2,000 test samples would show the SUDS HIV-1 test to give false-positive results at a relatively high rate.
May 24, 1992
Bush Orders Coast Guard to Turn Back Haitian Refugees Fleeing by Boat
With the country’s refugee camps in Guantanamo Bay exceeding capacity, President George H.W. Bush closes the U.S. to any additional asylum-seekers from Haiti, ordering the Coast Guard to return directly to Haiti any refugees they encounter in the sea.
Learn More.
The decision left in limbo a group of more than 300 Haitians who had tested positive for HIV and were quarantined with their families in Camp Bulkeley, a separate detention center in Guantanamo Bay. The Haitians in Camp Bulkeley qualified for refugee status in the U.S., but a Bush Administration policy forbid HIV-positive people from entering the country.
Issued from President Bush’s vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, the new order officially ended a policy that allowed refugees from Haitians to plead their case for asylum with Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials, and triggered responses of concern and outrageous from human rights leaders.
“This is a violation of international law,” Ira Kurzban, a human rights lawyer in Miami who was unsuccessful in getting the Supreme Court to rule on the Haitian refugee issue, told the Los Angeles Times.
“The U.N. convention on the status of refugees prohibits the return of refugees when they would face persecution,” said Kurzban. “Apparently the President’s version of the new world order is to ignore existing international treaty obligations.”
Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, told the Los Angeles Times that the U.S. policy shift would cost Haitian lives.
“It’s also an admission in our opinion that U.S. (immigration and asylum) policy is not working — if there ever was a policy,” said McCalla. “The Administration would rather accept the status quo than do something to restore democracy and achieve stability that would be beneficial for Haiti and all countries in the region.”
Henceforth, the U.S. Coast Guard would return all asylum-seekers from Haiti to their country, which was reeling from the emergence of a violent junta intent on persecuting anyone seen as problematic to the military-led leadership. Many Haitians were in the crosshairs of the new leaders, including officials from the previous democratically elected administration, as well as members of community associations, trade unions, and groups that promoted literacy, democracy, and women’s rights, according to the Human Rights Watch World Report 1993 – Haiti.
Following President Bush’s order of May 24, 1993, White House advised Haitians fearful of persecution to file a claim with the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Starting on May 25, 2993, the U.S. Coast Guard positioned 10 vessels off the shores of Haiti to intercept and escort back any seaworthy boats filled with refugees. For any craft that could not complete the return journey, Coast Guard officials would bring aboard the refugees and transport them directly to Haitian ports.
The decision to turn back fleeing Haitians did not affect the more than 12,000 Haitian asylum-seekers detained in Guantanamo Bay. Since the military coup ousted Haiti’s democratically elected president in September 1991, Coast Guard vessels had plucked refugees from the seas and transported them to the Guantanamo Bay camp, where claims for political asylum were reviewed by INS officials. More than 20,000 migrants determined to be fleeing economic hardship rather than political persecution already had been returned to Haiti.
Earlier this month, the number of refugees being intercepted by the Coast Guard had dramatically increased, according to the Los Angeles Times. Bush Administration officials said that they had worked in recent weeks to open a second refugee camp in the Dominican Republic or in another Caribbean nation, but they could not secure the cooperation of another country.
“At this point we have no choice but to require all Haitians to be picked up and sent back to Haiti,” said White House deputy press secretary Judy Smith. She said the United States will take new steps to urge Haitians not to attempt the crossing.
In imposing the new restrictions, the White House also said that Bush had called for an “intensification” of humanitarian assistance efforts in Haiti as requested last week by the Organization of American States.
NYC Launches AIDS Education Program for Convicted Sex Workers & Drug Offenders
A new criminal justice program in New York City offers people convicted of prostitution and minor drug offenses the opportunity to avoid jail time by participating in a two-day course on AIDS and substance abuse education.
Learn More.
As part of a new movement in the criminal justice system toward “problem-solving courts,” the Manhattan Criminal Court Project sought to curb the spread of the AIDS virus by sex workers and intravenous drug users by providing them with information about HIV and ways to avoid infection and transmission.
Low-level misdemeanor offenders sentenced to the program would meet in Room 1600-A of the Manhattan Criminal Court to learn about HIV transmission and addiction recovery.
Of the initial the 200 participants in the pilot project, 92% completed the classes, called the Treatment Readiness Program, according to The New York Times. In addition to sessions informally titled “AIDS 101” and “Drugs 101,” the program included field trips to longer-term substance-abuse programs.
As part of the study, some people convicted of prostitution and minor drug violations still received the traditional sentence of community service along with the opportunity to participate in the Treatment Readiness Program — but only 70% of them attended the first day of classes and less than 50% appeared for the second.
The project was, in part, the brainchild of Justice Gustin L. Reichbach, a radical night court judge who was elected to the bench in 1990. After three months of presiding over a court that saw an endless stream of prostitution cases and minor drug offenses, Reichbach became concerned that every night he returned to the streets sex workers who appeared to be sick from AIDS, drug use, or both, according to The Times.
He reached out to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and arranged for the organization to set up a table outside the courtroom to distribute condoms, conduct HIV testing and provide counseling. More importantly, the GMHC connected Reichbach to someone who was far more focused than GMHC on the spread of HIV among sex workers: Dr. Joyce Wallace. The infectious disease specialist operated a “care van” that travelled the sex work districts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and provided an array of services for sex workers, from HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STI) testing and clean needles to basic primary care and food coupons.
Dr. Wallace became an enthusiastic participant in Reichbach’s plan to get sex workers to HIV and drug recovery resources. In early March, Reichbach began ordering women convicted of prostitution to “36 hours off the street to think about what we’re doing here,” according to The New Yorker. He also offered the offenders the opportunity to have an on-the-spot meeting with Dr. Wallace, receive free condoms, and learn about AIDS prevention and addiction recovery. Many of the sex workers would agree to sit down with Dr. Wallace, and then proceed to her van, which was parked outside the courtroom, to receive a free HIV test.
Soon after, on March 28, 1991, The Daily News published a front-page story about it under the headline “The Condom Court.” Displeased with the media attention, Reichbach’s supervisors transferred him to the civil courts. (There, he continued to generate headlines by sentencing a slumlord to be confined to one of her properties until she successfully addressed a list of dangerous violations.)
Meanwhile, Dr. Wallace continued what she and Judge Reichbach started and, with a $115,000 grant from the Medical and Health Research Association of New York, she created an alternative sentencing program for offenders at-risk for HIV. Fourteen months later, on May 28, 1992, the Manhattan Criminal Court Project was launched.
May 30, 1992
Robert Pruzan — Bay Area Photographer — Dies
Robert Pruzan, longtime photographer for the Bay Area Reporter who also created photographic art, dies of AIDS-related illness at Davies Medical Center in San Francisco. He was 45 years old.
Learn More.
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.
June 18, 1992
Broadway Showman & Songwriter Peter Allen Dies
Concert entertainer and songwriter Peter Allen dies of AIDS-related illness in San Diego at the age of 48.
Learn More.
Allen drew audiences in the thousands to his shows at Radio City Music Hall, Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall and Central Park. Energetic, charismatic and often flamboyant, he once rode onstage on a camel, another time on an elephant.
Starting his career in show business as a child, Allen sang in school shows and neighborhood pubs in his native Tenterfield, Australia, with the encouragement of his mother. After his father committed suicide, he dropped out of school at the age of 14 to help to support his family. To increase his pay as a teenage entertainer, he learned to dance and play piano, and wrote original songs.
He got his break in 1964 when Garland saw him perform in Hong Kong and hired him to be her opening act. He met and then married Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli in 1967. Over the next few years, Minnelli’s movie career took off like a rocket while Allen remained a relatively unknown performer, except on the New York cabaret circuit. After Garland died in 1970, Allen’s marriage to Minnelli deteriorated and they divorced in 1974.
It seems to have been Peter Allen’s fate to be overshadowed by other stars. His songs were hits for mostly other performers, like Melissa Manchester with “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” Olivia Newton-John with “I Honestly Love You,” and Frank Sinatra with “You and Me (We Wanted It All).”
However, New Yorkers loved Allen’s live performances, and he sold out Radio City Music Hall so often in the early 1980s that he was named the concert hall’s official personality. His shows were distinguished by visual extravagance and Allen’s unflagging energy and wide range of talents. In a typical concert, he danced a bit, bantered, then leaped atop a grand piano and finally sat down to play and sing songs he had written, all at an engaging pace.
Over the years, he recorded 11 albums and performed live in venues ranging from cabarets and bath houses to Broadway theaters and concert halls. He once gave a special performance for Queen Elizabeth II, and he won an Oscar for writing the theme music to the 1981 film Arthur.
This song, which included a line about being “caught between the moon and New York City,” became a No. 1 hit. He also wrote for other films, including All That Jazz.
Allen never made a public announcement that he had HIV, fearing audiences wouldn’t want to see a performer who was sick. He may also have feared alienating conservative, heterosexual fans: Allen didn’t pretend to be straight after divorcing Minnelli, but he never publicly came out as gay either.
Even many of his friends didn’t know he was sick until January 1992, when he began chemotherapy and radiation treatment for AIDS-related throat cancer.
Allen’s last performance was on January 26, 1992 in Sydney, Australia, where he performed to packed houses. He died less than five month later.
In 1995, music journalist and film writer Stephen MacLean directed The Boy from Oz, an Australian TV documentary on Peter Allen. MacLean’s similarly titled book was published the following year and became the inspiration for a stage musical written by Nick Enright.
With Enright’s book adapted by Martin Sherman, and a revision of the musical content, The Boy from Oz premiered at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway with Hugh Jackman giving a Tony-winning performance as Allen. The show opened in October 2003 and played for a year. A Japanese version followed in June 2005. The Boy from Oz was revamped yet again for an enormously successful Australian arena production with Hugh Jackman in 2006.
Roger James Thompson, who was among the first in San Francisco to be diagnosed with AIDS, dies of AIDS-related illness at Kaiser French Hospital. He was 44 years old.
Learn More.
Thompson was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma in 1982, and battled AIDS for 10 years. He owned a carpentry business which was known for “exquisite craftmanship,” according to the Bay Area Reporter.
Born in 1948 in Santa Monica, Thompson grew up in Los Angeles’ West Side and attended college at the University of Southern California. He continued his education at Cambridge University as a Fulbright Scholar.
After returning to the U.S., the City of Los Angeles hired him to work in the Department of City Planning. He relocated to New York City and then again to San Francisco, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Thompson became active in civic affairs, bringing to the public forum his background in architecture and city planning. He also worked as a dresser for the San Francisco Opera House, which helped satisfy his appetite for opera. He also was a proud member of the City Bears Club.
Kris Anthony, Composer for Turtle Creek Chorale, Dies
Kristopher “Kris” Anthony, composer-in-residence for the Turtle Creek Chorale, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Dallas home. He was 38.
Learn More.
Anthony first composed for the Turtle Creek Chorale in July 1982 and he continued to compose for and sing with the Chorale until the end of his life. His work for the Chorale culminated in his composition for When We No Longer Touch: A Cycle of Songs for Survival, a choral rendition of the stages of grief that was composed by composer-in-residence Kristopher Anthony.
During that time with the Turtle Creek Chorale, he composed and created arrangements and revoicing for the following productions:
The Music of America (1982) – composed “A Short Set” from text of an Arabian Proverb, and arranged “Auction Cries” by John Biggs
Wintersong (1982) – arranged “Nun wandre, Maria” by Hugo Wolf
Rhapsody (1983) – composed “Visions” with Mark Miles
Sing Gloria! (1983) – arranged “Turn Ye to Me”
Of Thee We Sing (1984) – arranged “A Nightingale Sang In Berkley Square”
Tux Delux (1984) – arranged “I Sing the Body Electric” by Pitchford & Gore and revoiced “Celestial Spring ‘Glorification’ & ‘Exultation’” by F. M. Christiansan
Pops! (1985) – arranged “Jazz Parade” by Ken Kraintz; “London by Night” by Gene Puerling; “Makin’ Whoopee” by Gus Kahn; “Longest Time” by Billy Joel; “Michelle” by the Beatles; “Sounds of Silence” by Paul Simon; “Love Me Like a Rock” by Paul Simon; “Always on My Mind” by Thompson; and “My Romance” by Rodgers & Hart
Bravo (1985)– revoiced “My Funny Valentine” by Rodgers & Hart, and “Holy” by Felix Mendelssohn
Jubilate! (1985) – revoiced “Estampie Natalis” by Vaclay Nehybel
Intermezzo (1986)– revoiced “Choose Something Like A Star” by Randall Thompson
Pops! (1986) – arranged “The Closer You Get” by Alabama; “Sondheim!”, “I Need to Be in Love”, and “Goodbye to Love” by Richard Carpenter; and “Please Mr. Postman”; revoiced “Alleluia” by Larry Gatlin
In Concert (1986) – revoiced “The Heavens Are Telling” and “Abendtied (Evensong)” by Franz Joseph Haydn
Greatest Hits (1987) – arranged “Schmaltz” and “I Sing the Body Electric”
Hello Dallas! (1987) – arranged “Alleluia” by Larry Gatlin
A Perfect 10 (1989) – revoiced “Alleluia” by Larry Gatlin; “The Heavens Are Telling” from The Creation by Franz Joseph Haydn
When We No Longer Touch: A Cycle of Songs for Survival (1991) – composed music for lyrics by Peter McWilliams for “Prologue: What Will I Do If It Happens”; “Denial: Why Do I Torture Myself”; “Isolation: The Layers I Have Put Around The Pain”; “Anger: I’m Past The Point”; “Bargaining: But Today?”; “Depression: I Am Missing You”; “Acceptance: I Shall Miss Loving You”; and “Hope: I Have Loved”
Anthony was also director of music for the Central Christian Church and a member of the Dallas Handbell Ensemble. Originally from Onalaska, Wisconsin, Anthony received his Bachelor degree from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and his Masters in Music Theory and Composition from the University of Miami, according to the Dallas Voice. He moved to Texas to pursue his doctorate degree at the University of North Texas.
Anthony found a home for his talents at the Turtle Creek Chorale, which was founded in early 1980, according to Michael Sullivan in The Dallas Way. The group was named after the small stream that passed through the queer-friendly Dallas neighborhood of Oak Lawn.
“In some cities, the newly-formed choruses boldly chose to use the word ‘gay’ in their name, but in the buckle of the Bible Belt, the founders of just such a chorus in Dallas decided against it for what seemed obvious reasons,” Sullivan wrote in 2017.
Chief among those reasons was the fact that many of the singers were public school teachers, and the local superintendent was a a notoriously homophobic man who threatened to fire openly gay teachers.
The group first rehearsed in February 1980 with 39 singers. On June 24, 1980, 70 members of the Chorale gave its first formal concert at the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By the end of its first season, the group had grown to 83 members.
In 1985, HIV/AIDS began to impact the Chorale. As members began to get sick and die, the group transformed to become a space for its members to grieve and heal through performance and community, according to the University of North Texas’ 2017 exhibit Threads of Remembrance.
In its 1987 holiday performance, the Turtle Creek Chorale placed a poinsettia on the piano to honor the memory of those who had died of HIV/AIDS. When the number of fatalities reached 20, the tradition evolved into having a poinsettia placed at the front of the stage for each individual.
In April 1994, PBS would televise the documentary After Goodbye: An AIDS Story, which looked at the impact of epidemic on the Turtle Creek Chorale. The film follows the Chorale through rehearsals and performances of When We No Longer Touch: A Cycle of Songs for Survival, a choral rendition of the stages of grief that was composed by Kristopher Anthony.
At the time the documentary was filmed in 1993, the Chorale had already lost more than 90 members to AIDS, including Anthony.
By 2013, the AIDS death toll at the Chorale would reach 197. Still to this day, during its holiday performances, the group places on the stage a field of poinsettia plants, one for each Chorale member who has passed.
Consisting of a small group of activists within ACT UP Los Angeles, the Clean Needles Now (CNN) program launches its first exchange in the predominantly Latinx immigrant neighborhood of MacArthur Park.
Learn More.
The controversial program — intended to help stop the spread of HIV infection and give people the tools they needed to make informed decisions about their own health — started after a year of careful research and planning. Founding members educated fellow activists, organized resources, and stockpiled clean needles and other supplies; member Renée Edgington secured a decommissioned postal truck, out of which they would run the program.
ACT UP LA adopted the needle exchange committee as an official project in January 1992, and the group created CNN as a service provider with a distinctly activist spirit. Unlike the community-based AIDS services that defined the first wave of AIDS organizing in the early 1980s, needle exchange was itself an act of civil disobedience.
Drug paraphernalia laws made the possession and distribution of syringes a crime, and rarely distinguished between distributing rigs and selling drugs. Emboldened by the use of health emergency declarations in San Francisco and other cities and bolstered by support from West Hollywood civil rights attorney John Duran, the CNN activists believed they had the law on their side.
Eventually, CNN split off from ACT UP, so it could obtain funding as an independent service provider. And then, in early 1995, under Renée Edgington’s leadership, CNN boldly opened a storefront on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. Los Angeles City Councilmember Jackie Goldberg helped CNN obtain the space, fending off detractors with the explanation that a storefront would get the needle exchange program off the streets.
Christened “Harm Reduction Central” (HRC), the storefront extended its program, offering a range of health services and cultural activities for Hollywood’s homeless and runaway youth in addition to providing syringe exchange. HRC offered an appealing space where street youth and users could hang out casually.
“One of the main purposes I saw in the storefront, in contrast with what the street exchange had been doing, was that Harm Reduction Central wanted to pull in all those Hollywood kids. Teen homelessness was so prevalent at the time,” said Kim Abeles, a close friend of Edgington.
In spite of its split from the mother ship, CNN retained much of ACT UP’s activist DNA with its storefront programs.
“CNN adhered to a similar AIDS cultural analysis around the politics of representation regarding drug users,” recalled Dont Rhine. “CNN’s primary demands to city and county governments were that they provide the legal protections for needle exchange to exist, and that they offer funding and interconnection of services so that CNN could do the job itself. Beyond this, the fundamental political demand of CNN was the end of drug prohibition (i.e. legalization).”
In the early 2000s, gentrification pressures in Hollywood forced CNN out of its lease on the Cahuenga Boulevard space. Over the years, the needle-exchange program was housed out of various non-profit organizations and eventually morphed into the Los Angeles Community Health Project’s Syringe Service Program.
Today, CHPLA’s Syringe Service Program reaches nearly 10,000 people and distributes more than 1.1 million sterile syringes a year. In 2020, the program provided participants and community members across LA County with 10,778 Naloxone kits and, of those kits, 3,701 were used to successfully respond to an overdose.
July 6, 1992
Civil Rights Icon Marsha P. Johnson Found Dead in Hudson River
Marsha P. Johnson — an HIV-positive gender-fluid activist, performer and advocate for gender-nonconforming youth — dies under suspicious circumstances in New York City. She was 46.
Learn More.
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.
July 13, 1992
Ronnie Mutimusekwa, First AIDS activist in Zimbabwe, Dies
Ronnie Mutimusekwa, the first AIDS activist in Zimbabwe, Africa, dies of HIV-related illness in Njube, a township of Bulawayo. He was 33.
Learn More.
Mutimusekwa made international headlines in 1989 when he publicly revealed that he, a 23-year-old heterosexual man who worked as a street vendor, was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.
His story, which appeared on the front pages of the major newspapers, was the first personal account of an AIDS patient in Zimbabwe and it included details about how his wife and child were also infected, according to The New York Times.
Mutimusekwa sought to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS by warning the public about the deadly risks associated with promiscuous behavior. At the time, government officials in Zimbabwe were downplaying the threat of HIV and were severely underreporting the number of AIDS cases.
Because of under-recognition, under-reporting and delays in reporting, the World Health Organizaton estimated that only a fraction of the world’s cases of AIDS and HIV had been recorded, according to the Associated Press.
By the mid-1990, only 65,000 AIDS cases had been reported from African countries. But WHO estimated that number to be closer to 500,000. The spread of the disease peaked in 1997 when more than a quarter of the African population was estimated to be infected.
Other notable AIDS activists in Zimbabwe include:
Auxillia Chimusoro (1956-1998): The first woman to publicly announce being HIV-positive, also in 1989.
Eliot Magunje (1965-2003): Zimbabwean actor whose HIV-positive status was accidentally revealed by CNN. Magunje decided to make the best of the situation and became a leader at The centre, one of Zimbabwe’s largest AIDS service organizations.
Frenk Guni: A former coordinator of the ZNNP+ and a former executive board member for the National AIDS Council of Zimbabwe, living under political asylum in the U.S. since 2003.
Sunanda Ray: British doctor who founded the Women Aids Support Network in November 1989.
July 14, 1992
Activist Elizabeth Glaser Addresses 1992 Democratic National Convention
Elizabeth Glaser gives a landmark speech on the AIDS epidemic at the Democratic National Convention in New York City, telling the story of how she and her children were infected with HIV.
Learn More.
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.
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.
July 25, 1992
Robert Nemchik, Los Angeles Activist, Dies
Robert Nemchik, who was known to channel his rage about the AIDS crisis in ACT UP demonstrations, dies of AIDS-related illness at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in West Hollywood. He was 28 years old.
Learn More.
Nemchik was an active member of the Los Angeles chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and also volunteered for AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), an organization providing care and services to people with HIV/AIDS, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
Less than a year ago, in October 1991, Nemchik joined 4,000 activists in Sacramento to protest California Governor Pete Wilson’s veto of a bill supporting gay and lesbian rights. He arrived at the state capital in a bus from Los Angeles bearing the banner “Gay and Lesbian Freedom Ride.”
“This is what keeps me alive now. This is what it’s all about,” Nemchik told the Los Angeles Times. “I would like to think before I die, that everyone gets the rights they deserve. I want to go thinking I made a difference.”
August 5, 1992
Activist & Fundraiser Randall Klose Dies
Randall Klose, longtime gay-rights activist and fund-raiser, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in Washington, DC. He was 37.
Learn More.
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.
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.
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.
August 8, 1992
AIDS Awareness Advocate Alison Gertz Dies
Alison Gertz, who said she contracted the AIDS virus during her first sexual encounter at age 16 – and who publicized her misfortune to show that anyone can be at risk – dies at her parents’ home on Long Island at the age of 26.
Learn More.
Gertz drew international attention by telling her story as a warning to heterosexuals and women. A television movie based on her diaries and starring Molly Ringwald, Something To Live For, raised awareness about HIV/AIDS with millions of TV viewers. An HIV/AIDS information hotline that ran after the film generated a record 189,251 calls within 24 hours, mostly from women
When Gertz first publicly told her story, in an interview with The New York Timesin 1989, the AIDS epidemic was widely perceived as confined to homosexual men, intravenous drug abusers and blood-transfusion recipients.
She fit none of those categories. Her story was all the more dramatic because of the privilege she was born into, with artistic talent, affluence, private schools and social prominence.
Following her diagnosis, Gertz became a crusader, speaking at schools, colleges and public events. Esquire named her Woman of the Year, and she appeared on the cover of People magazine.
The People article describes Gertz as “pretty, poised and privileged,” but with a forever-changed future due to her AIDS diagnosis. Gertz shares with the reporter her goal of warning young people about the risk of unprotected sex and stopping what happened to her from happing to others.
“They might not listen to their parents or pay attention to the news,” she told People, “but they might understand it coming from me because I’m one of them.”
When she was well enough, Gertz lectured at high schools and colleges.
An only child, Gertz was born in Manhattan and grew up on Park Avenue. Her father, the grandson of a founder of Gertz department stores, is a real-estate investor. Her mother cofounded a national chain of fashion stores, Tennis Lady.
Educated at Horace Mann School, Ms. Gertz studied art at Parsons School of Design. At 22, she was beginning a career as an illustrator.
“I was just, as they say, starting out in life,” she said, with hopes of marriage and children.
Gertz’s mother Carol also became an advocate for HIV treatment and research. In 1989, two close friends helped Carol Gertz start the nonprofit organization Concerned Parents for AIDS Research (CPFA), with the hope of developing a cure.
Initially supported by a circle of longtime friends, the network of fund-raisers soon expanded to include others whose lives had been upended by the virus — and those who realized that their children were also at risk.
Following the death of her daughter, Carol Gertz would go onto launch Love Heals in 1992 as a way to empower youth in the fight against HIV/AIDS through prevention education and leadership development training. The project is meant to address stigma and help young adults have conversations about sexuality.
Alexis Sorel — Radical Faerie from Columbia — Dies
Alexis Sorel, a respected leatherman who migrated to the U.S. from Columbia in the early 1970s, dies of AIDS-related illness in the mountain city of Manizales, Columbia. He was 55.
Learn More.
Sorel identified with the radical faerie movement, particularly with faeries with “black leather wings,” according to the Bay Area Reporter. His spiritual beliefs were rooted in the sense of sacredness and ritual that he brought to his leather play.
Born in 1937 in Manizales, Columbia, Sorel migrated to New York City in the mid ’50s. A job with Bank of America brought him to San Francisco in the early 1970s and he remained in the city for almost 20 years.
In 1980, he helped to found The 15 Association in San Francisco, and two years later, he became a U.S. citizen, an achievement he was particularly proud of. He returned to his family home in Manizales, Columbia when his health began to deteriorate, saying he would die where he was born, “within the shadow of a volcano.”
Not long after her own HIV diagnosis, Mary Fisher addresses the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston’s Astrodome.
Learn More.
Seen by many as a sharp rebuke of her party’s negligence in the face of the growing AIDS epidemic, Fisher’s speech — titled “A Whisper of AIDS” — moved many in the convention hall and those watching her televised speech from home to tears.
“Adolescents don’t give each other cancer or heart disease because they believe they are in love, but HIV is different; and we have helped it along,” she told party members. “We have killed each other with our ignorance, our prejudice, and our silence.”
Her message was embraced by many, regardless of their political affiliation.
Many years later, broadcaster Rachel Maddow would call Fisher’s speech “incredibly eloquent and poignant,” and “one of the top speeches in the 20th century.”
And Fisher would write in her blog about ending each day with watching The Rachel Maddow Show , enjoying Maddow’s “casual intimacy in her conversational style,” and appreciating her “genuine insight based on knowledge.”
Recently, Fisher claimed she shares a “political legacy” with Maddow.
“Asked once what it meant to be a ‘liberal,’ [Maddow] said it was simple: ‘It means I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform,'” Fisher wrote in February 2022. ”Me, too.”
August 24, 1992
Spanish Illustrator Juan Suárez Botas Dies
Juan Suárez Botas, illustrator, graphic designer and film maker, dies of AIDS-related illness at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City at the age of 34.
Learn More.
Botas’ illustrations appeared on the covers of Time, Fortune, U.S. News & World Report and other magazines. His drawings appeared in The New York Times, Vogue and other publications.
Glynis Johnson, Bass Player for Chicago Punk Bands, Dies
Glynis Johnson, who played bass in the Chicago punk bands Friends of Betty and Red Red Meat, dies of AIDS-related illness in her hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana. She was 32.
Learn More.
Glynis Johnson formed the band Friends of Betty in 1984 with Tim Rutili and Ben Massarella. Rutili, who was six years younger than Johnson, was a film school student when they became a couple.
“She was an amazing, funny, smart, beautiful person,” Rutili told reporter Jeff Johnson of The Awl in 2013. “And I loved her. I can’t even tell you how much I loved her. And I still really miss her. Even last night, we played in Athens and I was talking to a girl and she did this gesture that reminded me of Glynis and it sort of killed me for a second. I do miss her.”
As a noisy punk band, Friends of Betty attracted a following at local bars and released a 1988 album Blind Faith II. When the album failed to sell, the band changed its name to Red Red Meat and changed their sound to a “hazed-but-focused blues-touched rock,” Chicago Reader music. critic Peter Margasak wrote in 1994.
Johnson grew up in Valparaiso, Indiana, and worked for a while in Portland, Oregon as a painter and carpenter, according to a 1992 article in the Chicago Reader. She moved to Chicago to become part of the music scene.
“She was a Rolling Stones freak,” wrote Bill Wyman of The Reader. “Every summer, she and some friends would hold a Steaks and Stones barbecue.”
Bandmate, flatmate and boyfriend Tim Rutili said he and Johnson had been going out for five or six years when he noticed that she was spending more and more time with drug addicts at a local bar. Shortly after, he broke up with her and moved out of their apartment.
In the years that followed, Johnson’s began to experience chronic infections, and doctors told her she had bronchitis, according to Wyman.
“She started getting thin, and her hair began to fall out,” Wyman wrote. “In August [1992], she went to visit her mom back in Valparaiso …. There she learned what some of her friends suspected she already knew, that she’d been suffering the effects of AIDS for at least two years.”
When Rutili learned that Johnson was living with AIDS, he sought out an HIV test for himself and he was relieved when the test came back negative, he told The Awl. .
“I don’t know if she got it from using needles,” he said. “A bunch of people who were hanging out [with her] at this bar died, and Glynis was the first to go.”
Rutili said he struggled with feelings of guilt for a long time.
“I had this thing where I wished I could have done something to stop it. Now I know that I couldn’t do anything to stop it, but for years I thought there was something I could have done to make her choose between me and death,” he said. “It’s tough when the first person you fall in love with dies, when the person who teaches you how to fall in love dies. I know that’s set into everything I’ve ever done.”
September 5, 1992
Irving Allen Lee, Television Soap Star, Dies
Daytime television actor Irving Allen Lee dies of AIDS-related illness at his Manhattan home. He was 43.
Learn More.
Lee was a Broadway and television actor most known for his roles on daytime soap operas. From 1977 to 1984, he played Detective Calvin Stoner on The Edge of Night, notable for writing and performances on an artistic level more elevated than any other soap of its time. From 1986 to 1988, Lee played Dr. Evan Cooper on Ryan’s Hope.
Lee appeared in several musicals, including Ride the Winds (1974), Rock-a-Bye Hamlet (1976) and A Broadway Musical (1978), all of which had short runs on Broadway. In 1974, he replaced Ben Vereen in Pippin at the Minskoff Theatre, was the original understudy for the two male roles in Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978) and recreated the role of Big Daddy in the revival of Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity (1986).
According to The New York Times, Lee was a theater director as well, staging productions at the Manhattan Theater Club, the Henry Street Settlement and the Boston Summer Arts Theater Festival. He was also an adjunct professor in the theater arts division of Marymount Manhattan College.
He was born in New York City the son of a minister, Allan Ezekiel Lee, and his wife, Ruth, according to Film Reference. He received a theater degree from Boston University, and then joined the Olatunji African Dance Company as the associate artistic director of its theater company.
Coulter “Colt” Thomas, winner of numerous leather comptetions, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in San Francisco at the age of 33.
Learn More.
After winning the title of Mr. International Leather at the age of 23, Thomas spent the following year travelling extensively to cities across the U.S., Canada and Europe for promotional appearances, and managed to still maintain above-average grades at the University of Texas, where he was attending medical school.
Upon graduation, Thomas and his partner, Charley Smith, moved to Detroit for his residency in radiology, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
In 1986, Smith was diagnosed with AIDS and broke off his relationship with Thomas, which devastated him. He remained in his residency for another year and then, upon being diagnosed as HIV+, relocated from Detroit to the Bay Area.
In San Francisco, Thomas worked for a video producer for gay events as a contractor’s assistant and occasionally made appearances as Mr. Leather at fundraising events.
Anthony Perkins — an Oscar-nominated stage and film actor best known for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho — dies at his Hollywood Hills home of AIDS-related illness with his wife and two sons at his side. He was 60.
Learn More.
Alongside Rock Hudson, Perkins is considered one of the most significant actors to have died from the disease. There were countless tributes to him around the world, pouring in from news stations and fans, according to Biography..In 1960, Perkins starred in what would become one of the most talked about horror films in cinematic history — Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and co-starring Janet Leigh and Vera Miles. He reported that he had a good experience working with Hitchcock on the film.
“Hitchcock and I got along very well and he let me make several changes and suggestions,” Perkins said. “He used to find me at the end of the working day and thank me, even though it sometimes meant he had to take a car journey to do so. I haven’t had that sort of treatment from many people.”
“When [Psycho] debuted in 1960, mainstream horror consisted mostly of immortal figures like Dracula and scientific freaks of nature in films like Godzilla, King of the Monsters! and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Psycho, on the other hand, emerged with a grounded villain,” wrote Peyton Robinson for Film School Rejects.
Perkins portrayed Norman Bates as a courteous young man with a timid smile — and a capacity for violence just lurking under the surface of his boyish demeanor. This character struck such a nerve with film audiences in 1960 (and still to this day), that the Bates role would follow Perkins for years in American film circles.
After Psycho, film fans forgot that Perkins had been a notable Broadway actor and a bit of a teen idol throughout the 1950s. In 1957, he starred in Fear Strikes Out, a biopic about Red Sox player Jimmy Piersall, and film critics raved about Perkins’ performance. A review in Variety stated, “Every recent young star has been compared to James Dean. From now on the standard is Tony Perkins.”
But his time with Paramount Pictures was fraught with pressure from studio executives who thought Perkins should hide his homosexuality and take pains to appear more masculine. In his biography of Perkins, author Charles Winecoff wrote about how a studio executive told Perkins to end his relationship with actor Tab Hunter and to “get a girl.” Perkins response was “But I love him!”
Hunter told Attitude that while Paramount felt entitled to tell Perkins how to live his life, Hunter had a better experience with his studio, Warner Brothers.
“Warner Brothers never said a word about my sexuality, and that’s just the way I wanted it,” said Hunter. “However, Paramount did have something to say about my relationship with Tony… Despite the opposition, we did continue seeing each other.”
In 1961, after receiving recognition at Cannes for his part in the Ingrid Bergman film Goodbye Again, Perkins relocated to Europe and starred in several films there throughout the 1960s, including Orson Welles’s The Trial (1963).
He returned to the U.S. and worked on Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Mahogany (1975) and the Disney sci-fi adventure The Black Hole (1979). He also co-wrote the 1973 film The Last of Sheila with Stephen Sondheim.
Perkins was living with Sondheim as they worked on The Last of Sheila, and it was around this time that Perkins began subjecting himself to a series of psychiatric attempts to “cure” his homosexuality, coordinated by psychologist Mildred Newman, who had written the pop-psychology best-seller How to be Your Own Best Friend. In 1972, he submitted to “electroshock aversion therapy” under Newman’s direction.
“The electroshock treatments took a terrible toll on Perkins,” said Doug Ireland in Gay City News. “The talent that made him sought after by such distinguished film directors as Claude Chabrol, Jules Dassin, and Orson Welles faded away, as did his looks.”
In 1973, Perkins married Berry Berenson, with whom he would co-star in the films Remember My Name (1978) and Winter Kills (1979). Berenson was a granddaughter of the Paris fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli.Then, from 1983 to 1990, Perkins reprised his Bates role and starred in three Psycho follow-ups, one of which he directed — 1986’s Psycho III.
During the late 1980s, Perkins was diagnosed with HIV and he kept his diagnosis secret.”He simply never wanted anyone to know,” Berenson said in an interview with The New York Times. “He figured if anyone knew, they’d never give him work again.”
He and his wife volunteered with Project Angel Food, an organization that provides meals for individuals who are homebound due to HIV. Shortly before he died, he told his sons that he learned “more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life.”
Ron Woodroof, who founded the Dallas Buyers Club in 1988 after testing positive for AIDS, dies in Dallas of AIDS-related illness. He was 42.
Learn More.
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.”
September 15, 1992
Infant Detained at Haitian Refugee Camp Dies
Morant Ricardo Bethony dies of AIDS-related illness at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The 3-month-old boy was a detainee, along with his parents, at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
Learn More.
The infant’s mother, 22-year-old Silieses Success, was a Haitian asylum-seeker being held by the U.S. military at Camp Bulkeley, a detention facility that housed HIV-positive refugees and their families. She gave birth to her son in June at the facility. The infant’s father, Morant Bethony, was housed with them.
When the infant contracted AIDS-related pneumonia, Naval personnel arranged for the mother and infant to be flown to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. This is how Silieses Success and her son became the first Haitian refugees to reach the U.S. It would be months before others could follow, because a federal travel policy adopted by the Bush Administration banned HIV-positive people from entering the U.S.
Efforts at Walter Reed to save the baby were unsuccessful, and he died. The infant’s mother later told her husband that hospital personnel did not permit her to view the body of her dead son.
“They said they buried it. They don’t tell us where,” the infant’s father told The New York Times.
Following the death of her infant child, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials would transfer the mother to a prison on Varick Street in New York City. INS officials told The New York Times that they did not want HIV-infected immigrants released into the general U.S. population.
Meanwhile, the infant’s father, Morant Bethony, continued to be held at Camp Bulkeley in Cuba, along with 276 other refugees.
“We have nothing to do but sit like animals,” Bethony said. “Why can’t I be with my wife? Why?”
Bethony told The New York Times that he and his wife fled Haiti, because the new regime sought to persecute them for their work as human rights activists. His wife’s parents, who were supporters of the overthrown President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, were murdered by Haitian soldiers in 1991.
“My wife asks why she is held in a jail with criminals and users of drugs,” he said “She is no criminal.”
Silieses Success would eventually be freed from prison in 1993, with the help of law students from American University and Yale and lawyers from the university law clinics and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
September 27, 1992
Keith Prentice — Larry in ‘Boys in the Band’ — Dies
Keith Prentice, an actor who played the part of Larry in both the original stage and film versions of The Boys in the Band, dies of AIDS-related illness in Kettering, Ohio. He was 52.
Learn More.
Prentice worked on TV, film and the New York stage. He appeared on the TV soap Dark Shadows during the series’ final months in 1971, and for a number of years, his picture was displayed on the label of Tasters Choice coffee.
Prentice studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. His stage musical credits include Sail Away, The Sound of Music, Paint Your Wagon, and The King and I, according to the Internet Broadway Database.
In 1968, he appeared off-Broadway in the production of The Boys in the Band, which was groundbreaking for its portrayal of gay life. The play is set at a birthday party the summer before the Stonewall riots. He also appeared in the film version of the play, which was directed by William Friedkin. As the first major film studio production to deal frankly with homosexuality, every member of the show’s original Off-Broadway cast appears in the iconic film.
Prentice had the striking good looks to be cast — twice — in the part of Larry, described in the play notes as an “extremely handsome” commercial artist who prefers multiple sex partners.
Prentice’s final film role was in Cruising (1980), which was also directed by Friedkin.
In 1982, Prentice moved to Kettering, Ohio and co-founded Kettering Theatre Under the Stars. He directed summer shows there until 1992, the year of his death.
September 29, 1992
Paul Jabara – ‘Last Dance’ Songwriter — Dies
Paul Jabara, songwriter of some of the top dance hits of the 1970s, dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 44.
Learn More.
Jabara was the songwriter who wrote Donna Summer’s Oscar-winning “Last Dance” from Thank God It’s Friday (1978) as well as “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” Summer’s international hit duet with Barbra Streisand. He also cowrote (with Paul Shaffer) The Weather Girls’ iconic hit “It’s Raining Men.”
Jabara was also an actor, having been in original cast of the stage musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. He took over the role of Frank-N-Furter in the Los Angeles Production of The Rocky Horror Show when Tim Curry returned to England to film the movie version.
He made a very small part memorable in John Schlesinger’s 1969 film Midnight Cowboy, as a hippie handing out pills (“Up or Down?”). In Schlesinger’s 1975 film The Day of the Locust, Jabara sang a cover of the Marlene Dietrich song “Hot Voo-Doo” in drag.
He was known for spontaneously entertaining friends and strangers alike with highlights from his latest production, according to his memorial website. He was a one-man show who delighted in performing for an audience.
Jabara was credited with conceiving and distributing the first AIDS red ribbons, and he co-founded the Red Ribbon Project in 1991.
At Jabara’s memorial service, his friends and collaborators paid tribute to him by performing a song he wrote entitled “We’re Gonna Win.” The song was performed just once; it has been locked in a vault and has never been performed again.
Veteran British Character Actor Denholm Elliott Dies
Denholm Elliott, a British actor known to steal scenes in Hollywood movies, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home on Ibiza, Spain. He was 70.
Learn More.
With more than 125 film and television credits, Elliott was honored with the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his contribution to the arts, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Among his most notable film roles were the abortionist in Alfie (1966), Marcus Brody in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Coleman the sarcastic butler in Trading Places (1983). For his performance in A Room with a View (1985), Elliott was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in three consecutive years in the 1980s, becoming the only actor to have achieved this distinction.
Active to the end of his life, Elliott performed in early 1992 as the burglar in a film based on the raucous British play Noises Off. He also portrayed George Smiley, author John le Carre’s British super-spy, for the 1991 PBS season opener of Masterpiece Theater, titled “Murder of Quality.”
The American film critic Roger Ebert described him as “the most dependable of all British character actors.”
The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is displayed for two days on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. with more than 24,000 panels.
Learn More.
The first display of 1,920 Quilt panels was held in the National Mall on October 11, 1987 during the March on Washington for Gay & Lesbian Rights. In 1988 and 1989, the quilt was displayed on the Ellipse’s 52-acre green space across from the White House. By 1988, the quilt had grown to 8,000 panels; a year later it was 12,000 panels.
Despite the quilt being in their backyards, then-presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush refused to visit.
Bush was still in office in October 1992 when the quilt returned to Washington, this time to be displayed at the Washington Monument’s 72-acre grounds. The quilt, which had grown to more than 24,000 panels, put the issue of AIDS in the national spotlight during a hotly contested presidential election. In fact, Bush would lose that election to Bill Clinton, the Democratic candidate from Arkansas.
By 1996, the quilt would grow to more than 40,000 panels and it would fill the National Mall from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. The display would be visited in 1996 by 1.1 million people, among them the new president, Bill Clinton, his wife Hillary, Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper. Today, the quilt is too large to display in one piece.
[Photo courtesy of Sue Scheibler, West Hollywood activist]
October 23, 1992
Terry Clark, Houston Community Leader, Dies
Terry E. Clark, who co-founded the Texas Gay Rodeo Association with his partner Walter “Papa” Strickland, dies of AIDS-related illness in Houston at the age of 47.
Learn More.
Clark was an original member of the Mustangs Leather/Levi Club and an associate member of the Texas Riders, Knights D’Orleans, and Triangle Club of Denver , according to the Texas Obituary Project. He was named Grand Marshal of the 1991 Gay Pride Parade in Houston.
His partner, Walter Stickler, preceded him in death in 1990.
October 27, 1992
CDC Proposes Expansion of AIDS Definition, Conceding to Activist Pressure
In a move that will have a significant impact on HIV/AIDS policy in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announces that it will expand the list of symptoms and conditions falling under the diagnosis of AIDS.
Learn More.
Activists, medical professionals and health officials had been urging the CDC to recognize that many people living with AIDS — primarily women — had symptoms that were not included in the federal government’s definition of the disease. As a result of the definition’s limitations, many people living with AIDS could not access public programs designed to treat and care for them.
The three new conditions proposed for the expanded definition were: pulmonary tuberculosis, invasive cancer of the cervix, and recurrent bacterial pneumonia. The new definition also would include any HIV-positive adult with a CD-4 cell count of 200 or less per microliter of blood (about one-fifth a normal count). No such measurement was part of the original definition, which was devised in 1987.
After missing a July 1 deadline for updating the AIDS definition, the CDC announced that a broader definition would be “indefinitely delayed,” according to Lawrence K. Altman, the HIV/AIDS beat reporter for The New York Times.
The activist community responded with outrage and demanded immediate action, prompting the CDC to hold a public meeting in early September and return to the work.
“I am, and have been, a woman with AIDS — despite the CDC not wishing to count me,” AIDS activist Katrina Haslip told The New York Times after the CDC announced it planned to expand the definition. “We have compelled them to.”
The proposed AIDS definition did not go far enough, according to Haslip. Since 1989, Haslip and other HIV/AIDS services advocates had been urging the federal government to broaden the CDC definition of AIDS to include gynecological and other conditions that occur more frequently, or are less responsive to treatment, in women.
Haslip, who tested positive for HIV in 1987, said she would have been able to access treatment two years earlier if she had known that chronic yeast infections were an early sign of HIV in women. She spoke to the Times reporter from her bed at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, where she was being treated for bacterial pneumonia and renal problems.
Terry McGovern of the HIV Law Project told The New York Times that because AIDS case classifications had been based on the opportunistic infections found primarily in gay men, “women, injection drug users, and other populations have been systematically excluded, and unable to be officially diagnosed as having AIDS.”
Dr. John Ward, an AIDS epidemiologist at the CDC, anticipated that the broadened definition would result in the doubling of the number of reported AIDS cases in the U.S. He said the CDC’s old projection of 50,000 AIDS cases in 1993 would be revised to about 80,000-90,000 cases.
In October 1992, the number of HIV-positive Americans was estimated to be at least one million, with 230,000 developing AIDS (under the original definition) and about 150,000 dying from AIDS-related illnesses.
The CDC said officials would accept public comment on the new proposal until Nov. 16, 1992. An executive committee of the State and Territorial Epidemiologists approved the proposal at a meeting the previous week and if its membership votes to accept the new definition, it would take effect on Jan. 1, 1993.
October 27, 1992
Gay U.S. Sailor Killed in Homophobic Attack in Japan
Allen R. Schindler, a gay man awaiting discharge from the Navy, is followed to a park near his base in Sasebo, Japan and brutally killed. He was 22 years old.
Learn More.
One night in September 1992, a little more than a month before, Schindler was serving as radioman aboard the USS Belleau Wood while en route from San Diego to Japan. As a prank, Schindler broadcast an unauthorized message, “2-Q-T-2-B-S-T-R-8” (“too cute to be straight”), which led to a disciplinary hearing.
When he appeared at captain’s mast for the unauthorized radio message, Schindler requested that the hearing be closed. But the captain held an open hearing, with 200-300 people in attendance. Schindler was put on restrictive leave and was unable to leave the ship.
In the month that ensued, Schindler was subjected to anti-gay harassment, according to several of his friends. He was often shoved as he walked the ship’s halls and threatened with comments like “there’s a faggot on this ship and he should die.” Deciding he could no longer survive the homophobic climate aboard the ship, he told his commanding officer that he was gay, knowing that his disclosure would lead to a discharge. Schindler immediately felt a sense of relief: “If you can’t be yourself, then who are you?” he wrote in his diary.
By late October, the Belleau Wood was docked in Japan and Schindler’s confinement had ended. To escape the hostility of his shipmates, he went off-base, where he met a group of gay American entertainers, including dancer Eric Underwood, whom he told about the harassment.
The night of Oct. 27, Schindler was followed into a park bathroom shortly before midnight by two drunken shipmates. Airman Charles Vins watched and occasionally joined in while the other, Airman Apprentice Terry M. Helvey, kneed Schindler in the groin, struck him in the face and then, cradling his head in the crook of his arm, punched him repeatedly.
Once Schindler was on the floor, Helvey began stomping on him with the heel of his boot, causing, according to the pathologist who performed the autopsy, abrasions, contusions and lacerations of the forehead, eyes, nose, lips, chin, neck, Adam’s apple, trachea, lungs, liver, and penis. As the assailants fled, witnesses arriving on the scene summoned the Shore Patrol, and medics tried to revive Schindler without success.
Helvey and Vins were identified by witnesses and arrested the next morning. As Helvey was being led away, he told a shipmate, “The bastard deserved it.” Vins received a quick court-martial and was sentenced to just four months in exchange for testimony against Helvey.
The incident received little press coverage until Underwood organized a letter-writing campaign to several media outlets, exposing the anti-gay harassment Schindler had faced, according to the Bay Area Reporter. The military newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes printed Underwood’s letter, and a reporter from the paper investigated the story.
In April 1993, just six months after her son’s death, Dorothy Hajdys would be invited by the Human Rights Campaign to speak at a candlelight vigil in honor of her son in Washington, DC. She would tell Wisconsin’s In Step magazine that she hoped President Bill Clinton would follow through on his proposal to end the ban on gays in the mllltary.
“It’s too late for Allen. But maybe this will save someone else’s life,” she said.
Hajdys, a fundamentalist Christian who initially had trouble accepting that her son was gay, became an unlikely activist for LGBT civil rights.
“If you would have told me I would have been at the March on Washington standing before a million people and being seen all over the world, I would have told you you were nuts,” she later told Esquire magazine.
On May 27, 1993, Helvey’s trial would end with a conviction of murder and a sentence of life imprisonment. At his sentencing, Helvey would cry and apologize to Schindler’s mother, and insist he did not kill her son because he was homosexual. This apology reduced his punishment from death to life, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The apology contrasted sharply with earlier testimony by Navy investigator Kennon F. Privette. He told the jury how Helvey admitted to brutally beating Schindler during interrogation the day after the murder.
“He said he hated homosexuals. He was disgusted by them,” said Privette. He quoted Helvey as saying: “I don’t regret it. I’d do it again.”
During his trial, Helvey offered no explanation for why he killed Schindler, nor did he disclose any details of what led up to the killing except to say that he and two other sailors from the Belleau Wood had purchased two large bottles of whiskey, a bottle of schnapps, a bottle of vodka, orange juice and a six-pack of beer and went drinking in a park.
Helvey said he had met Schindler before but did not explain how he knew his shipmate was a homosexual.
In August 1997, Lifetime would broadcast Any Mother’s Son, a movie based on the story of Allen Schindler’s murder. The movie would win the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Made for TV Movie, and Bonnie Bedelia would be nominated for a CableACE Award for her portrayal of Dorothy Hajdys.
November 3, 1992
Homophobic Texas Judge Loses Election
Texas gay rights advocates celebrate the defeat of a judge who gave a convicted murderer a light sentence and later said his views on the sexual identity of the victims influenced his decision.
Learn More.
The judge, Jack Hampton of the Texas Criminal District Court, narrowly lost the election to Barbara Rosenberg, a 42-year-old Democrat and a judge on the Texas Court of Appeals.
Rosenberg won by 15,994 votes (51%) over Hampton, a 60-year-old Republican. Judge Rosenberg campaigned on a theme of fairness, referring to Hampton’s homophobic comments in her television advertisements.
Following the 1988 sentencing of the killer of two gay men, Hampton had been under sharp criticism from gay rights groups. In that criminal case, a group of men, including Richard Lee Bednarski, picked up two men, Tommy Lee Trimble, 34, and John Lloyd Griffin, 27, and drove them to a Dallas park, where Bednarski shot them to death.
Kenneth Molberg, the chairman of the Dallas County Democratic Party. told The New York Times that Judge Rosenberg was able to raise three times as much money for her campaign due to a tremendous outpouring of support from the LGBT community. The support of women also factored greatly in Judge Rosenberg’s success in a heavily Republican area.
“The gay community was a more powerful factor this time,” Molberg told the NY Times. “They did a lot of direct mail on their own, slate cards, advertising in gay newspapers and ran their own phone bank.”
Mobilized in the last few years by homophobic attacks likely related to the AIDS crisis, LGBT groups in Texas have been diligently working to advance the rights of their community. Among recent campaigns were the support of a woman who hoped to become the first openly gay police officer in Dallas and a challenge to the state’s sodomy law.
November 3, 1992
Colorado Voters Pass Hate Amendment 2, Removing Legal Protections for LGBTQ Community
As discrimination against people living with HIV and AIDS rises and begins to take more subtle forms, voters in Colorado pass a ballot measure designed to remove discrimination protections for the LGBTQ community.
Learn More.
The amendment overturned municipal ordinances adopted in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Denver, Boulder, and Aspen that
protected gays and lesbians from discrimination.
“The conservative Christians who drafted and campaigned for Amendment 2 used a powerful slogan, No Special Rights, which suggested gay men and lesbians sought not equal but ‘special’ rights,” Princeton historian William Schultz wrote in his 2018 op-ed for The Washington Post. “This slogan, combined with an ad campaign that used lurid images from San Francisco’s gay pride parade, enabled Amendment 2 to defy pollsters and secure victory by a 53-46% margin, even as Bill Clinton and Democratic Senate candidate Ben Nighthorse Campbell carried the state.”
Initiated by a Colorado Springs-based religious organization named Colorado for Family Values, the ballot measure caused far-reaching implications regarding legal protections for the LGBTQ community. The vote shocked local HIV/AIDS advocates and put others in the nation on alert.
She continued: “Throughout the 1980s, the religious right focused on realizing its anti-abortion goals …. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic was ravaging urban gay communities, forcing the LGB community to face inwards and reassess priorities.”
A group of Denver activists responded by forming a new advocacy organization, Equality Colorado. The group’s mission was to inform Colorado voters about Amendment 2 — after the fact — and coordinate political work within the LGBTQ community, including lobbying and preparing for the next campaign.
In the months that followed, convention organizers and business owners were persuaded to boycott the State of Colorado, causing the economy to lose nearly $120 million by the end of 1993, according to Princeton historian William Schultz. The American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) was among the first to cancel an event — a large fundraiser in Aspen — in protest.
“AmFAR could not continue business as usual in Colorado,” AmFAR President Mervyn F. Silverman, MD., said in a letter published in the Los Angeles Times. “Amendment 2 represents the kind of officially sanctioned homophobia which has fueled this plague we know as AIDS. HIV may be the cause of AIDS, but the virus is aided and abetted by denial, hatred and extremists who seek to pit Americans one against the other.”
Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell declared that he would not attend the U.S. Conference of Mayors, because it was being held in Colorado, saying, “As a statement of denouncing bigotry and affirming civil rights, I will personally request that the conference be moved to Philadelphia, the birthplace of civil rights.”
Meanwhile, Christian conservatives put forward No Special Rights initiatives in eight additional states: Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, and Washington. Six failed to make the ballot, and the two that did (Idaho and Oregon) were voted down.
Two years later Amendment 2 itself was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans.
November 7, 1992
Chicago Playwright Scott McPherson Dies
Scott McPherson, creator of the Drama Desk Award-winning Marvin’s Room, dies of AIDS-related illness in Chicago at the age of 33.
Learn More.
McPherson, who also wrote the stage plays ‘Til the Fat Lady Sings and Scraped, was one of the first openly gay, HIV-positive American artists. His play Marvin’s Room was first produced in 1990 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, telling the story of two sisters who reunite after many years when one is diagnosed with leukemia.
“Amidst the homophobia and AIDS hysteria that gripped the nation, [McPherson] has spoken eloquently, both in his writing and in interviews, of the personal and familial ravages of chronic illness and the need for loving support and connection with lovers, family and friends,” reads the tribute to McPherson by the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame.
Known as one of Chicago’s most vital creative forces, McPherson moved to the city from Ohio in 1981 and began performing in theatrical productions, commercials and industrial films. His first full-length play, ‘Til the Fat Lady Sings, was directed by Eric Simonson at Lifeline Theatre in Chicago in 1987 and received a Joseph Jefferson Citation for Best New Work, according to Broadway World. His one-act play, Scraped, premiered in a Chicago New Plays production at the Organic Theatre.
Marvin’s Room, McPherson’s second and last full-length play, has been performed throughout the U.S. and around the world. Following its 1990 premiere at the Goodman Theatre Studio, the production went on to the Hartford Stage, Playwrights Horizons and Minetta Lane in New York, London’s West End and the Tiffany Theatre in Los Angeles.
In spite of variable and increasingly failing health, and the illness and recent death of
On February 5, 1992, McPherson’s lover, ACT UP activist and cartoonist Daniel Sotomayor, died of AIDS-related illness. As his own health deteriorated, McPherson continued to write for the stage.
He even managed to attend Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s annual Commission on Human Relations luncheon at the Palmer House hotel in late February. McPherson attended the event in a wheelchair to protest the award that Mayor Daley was giving posthumously to Sotomayor, a political action thought by activists to be highly hypocritical in light of the mayor’s refusal to spend city funds on HIV/AIDS care.
“If you want to honor Danny,” he yelled at the mayor during the event, according to the Chicago Reader, “increase the AIDS budget! Pass Helen Shiller’s resolution!”
Witnesses to the incident said that McPherson and the activist pushing his wheelchair, Mark Schoofs, were surrounded by guards as they continued to interrupt the mayor’s speech, chanting “Fewer awards! More money!”
Afterward, McPherson told the Reader, “You know, I went to a lot of demonstrations with Danny but I always felt a little hesitant. These things are really not my style; I’m too polite. But I think this is the closest I’ve ever felt to Danny. This was really in his spirit.”
McPherson was working on a new play when he succumbed to his illness about eight months later, in early November.
In 1996, four years after McPherson died, Marvin’s Room was adapted into a major motion picture starring Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gwen Verdon and Hume Cronyn.
David Lourea, an activist who appeared on local and national TV advocating for bisexual rights, dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 37.
Learn More.
As an early co-director of the Bisexual Center in San Francisco, Lourea helped to raise awareness nationwide of bisexuality as an identity. This increased awareness among the public led many media outlets to promote the idea that bisexuality was a “trend.”
Lourea’s response to this was: “Well, you know, it’s real nice that my sexual orientation is in fashion right now, but when it’s not in fashion, it’s still going to be my sexual orientation.”
Lourea was raised in Philadelphia as Orthodox Jewish, and he continued to explore religion and faith throughout this life. He earned a BFA from Temple University in 1967, and later earned a PhD from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
After moving to the Bay Area in 1973, he became involved in San Francisco Sex Information, an organization founded that year by bisexual activist Maggi Rubenstein, along with Margo Rila and Tony Ayers. Lourea was also one of the early members of the Bisexual Center, which was also founded by Rubenstein to “serve as a positive support base to facilitate communication, to teach each other by sharing … learning, and to explore the essence and potential of loving” for bisexuals.
At the Bisexual Center’s first meeting, 22 attendees established a steering committee and within six months, the Bi Center’s membership grew to about 140. In early 1977, the organization sponsored about 15 events each month, including discussion groups, gender workshops and social outings.
According to trans bisexual activist Verity Ritchie, “The Bi Center team was made up of quite politically radical bisexuals and had a policy of inclusion. All human rights were important to them. They were feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist.”
In June 1977, Lourea and Rubenstein held a press conference at the Bi Center to speak out against Anita Bryant and Proposition 6 (aka the Briggs Initiative, a ballot initiative that sought to ban gays and lesbians from working in California’s public schools). As a result of the media exposure, the center’s membership rose to 435 and at its peak, the center would have almost 700 members.
In the early 1980s, the AIDS crisis began to sap resources and attention from the Bi Center and its mission, and membership began to decrease. The center closed in 1985, but in its eight years of operation, the Bi Center had a profound impact.
“It created a sense of a bisexual community, educated the general public and professionals about bisexuality, confronted the gay and lesbian communities about the tendency to render the bisexual invisible, spawned several organizations (including political action groups), and changed the lives of many women and men who had felt marginalized by both the heterosexual and homosexual communities,” according to the Bisexual+ & Pansexual Network.
As activity at the Bi Center slowed, Lourea began focusing his attention on the new disease sweeping the Bay Area population. As early as 1981, he would visit local bathhouses and BDSM clubs to give presentations on safer-sex education in an effort to reduce sexually transmitted disease.
In 1983, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein appointed Lourea to her AIDS Education Advisory Committee. He lobbied officials at the San Francisco Department of Public Health to get them to recognize bisexual men in their official AIDS statistics, and after two years of campaigning, he succeeded in 1984.
This seemingly small change in data collection resulted in health departments throughout the U.S. updating their processes to recognize bisexual men in AIDS statistics (whereas before they had mostly only recognized gay men).
When Lourea began to lose friends to the AIDS epidemic and he was diagnosed himself in the late 1980s, he often turned to his faith to try to make sense of the devastation and loss. His idealogical struggle is evident in his entry to the bookBi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out (1991).
“For a long time now I’ve been in a great deal of spiritual trouble,” he wrote in his essay “Just Another Lingering Flu.” “You know how it goes: How can G_d allow this to be happening? Why? Why now? Why this one or that one? Why so much pain and so little compassion? Why the false hopes? Why so many lingering flus? Why no relief in sight? What kind of G_d does not intervene? Why can’t I have what I want? Do I have more compassion than G_d? Does G_d even exist?”
In the essay, Lourea voices his anger and also ultimately acknowledges that he can still find joy:
“Even if my friends or I do not survive, even if bisexuals are never recognized, even if the whole human race fails, the universe is a pretty amazing place.”
“His absence was incomprehensible. The eclectic crowd of those who had come to mourn his death — teachers, young children, AIDS activists, bi activists, leather daddies, sex radicals, therapists, rabbis, and family members — was testimony to how instrumental David was in bringing communities together.”
Lourea was a writer, AIDS activist, bisexual rights activist, pre-school teacher, therapist, leather daddy, AIDS educator, and board member of Congregation Ahavat Shalom.* * * * * * * *
David Oliver, star of the Emmy Award-winning television series A Year in the Life, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Los Angeles home. He was 30.
Learn More.
Oliver also appeared for two years on the NBC soap Another World, according to Variety. Additional TV credits include the TNT television movie Miracle in the Wilderness, and the NBC movie of the week If It’s Tuesday, It Still Must Be Belgium.
In A Year in the Life, Oliver played Sam Gardner, a business-school student who falls into an unexpected romance. The show, which premiered on NBC in 1986, followed the lives of Sam and other members of his family for a year.
He also played the lead in the 1988 action movie Defense Play.
On stage, he appeared in several San Diego Civic Light Opera productions, including L’il Abner and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. He also performed regularly at the Edinburgh Theater Festival, according to The New York Times.
He also appeared Elegies, a play about AIDS, at the Canon Theater in Beverly Hills and Club 20-20 in Century City.
November 18, 1992
Barbra Streisand Calls for Boycott of Colorado, Protesting Amendment 2
While being honored at AIDS Project Los Angeles’ Commitment to Life benefit, superstar Barbra Streisand calls for a boycott of the state of Colorado, in the wake of that state’s passage of Amendment 2.
Learn More.
“There are plenty of us who love the mountains and rivers of that truly beautiful state,” said Barbra Streisand. “But we must now say clearly that the moral climate there is no longer acceptable. And if we are asked to, we must refuse to play where they discriminate.”
Colorado was poised to become the first state in the nation with a constitution that prevents adoption of laws that specifically protect homosexuals from discrimination, due to the passage of a ballot measure introduced by Christian Conservatives. In the new year, gay men and lesbians could be dismissed from jobs and denied housing on the basis of their sexual orientation, and then prevented from challenging the discrimination.
Streisand made her call to action at APLA’s annual gala while being honored with the “Commitment to Life” award for her fundraising efforts through her foundation. In her speech, she also criticized former President Ronald Reagan for his inaction during the first eight years of the AIDS crisis.
“I will never forgive my fellow actor Ronald Reagan for the genocidal denial of the illness’ existence, for his refusal to even utter the word AIDS for seven years, and for blocking adequate funding for research and education which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” she said.
Streisand’s call for a Colorado boycott was widely covered by the media, and drew the support of other celebrities, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Liza Minelli, and Joan Rivers. Boycotts were soon implemented by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation – Los Angeles (GLAAD-LA) and Coloradans & Californians for Fairness in the Nation (COFFIN).
November 28, 1992
Radio Station KGAY Debuts in Wake of Colorado’s Hate Amendment
From a secret location in Denver, KGAY begins broadcasting as the nation’s first 24-hour radio station devoted to an LGBTQ audience,
Learn More.
“From the heartland of homophobia, this is KGAY,” said station manager Clay Henderson as he began the station’s first broadcast.
Broadcasting a format of alternative music, talk and “mainstream news from a gay perspective” via satellite hookup, KGAY could be listened to via home satellite or through AM stations transmitting the signal. Henderson told The Seattle Times.
With a potential audience of 7.5 million in North America, the new station quickly found its way to listeners. KGAY regularly fielded calls from across North America, many coming from listeners in small towns in the U.S. and Canada. Nearby Colorado Springs, a hub for the Christian conservatives who advocated for the passage of the anti-hate legislation Amendment 2, received the KGAY signal through the local AM station KXRE.
“It was an emotional setback when Colorado passed the anti-gay law,” Henderson said. “We took some time off to decide what we were going to do. We finally decided to stay here and fight. We’re behind enemy lines, and we’re keeping the communication open. We’re prepared for anything to happen.”
In the weeks since the passage of Amendment 2, anti-gay factions in Colorado had become more activated, according to the Denver Post. HIV/AIDS service organizations and LGBTQ establishments in Denver reported an uptick in bomb threats and harassing phone calls, and anti-gay graffiti appeared overnight in many Colorado towns. This is why Henderson was keeping the location of the radio station a secret.
Henderson’s interest in radio began when members of the Ku Klux Klan used explosives to destroy a Pacifica Radio transmitter, which was located in his grandparents’ cotton field in Texas. Henderson said he and his friend Will Gunthrie were able to launch KGAY through the acquisition of $1 million from private investors and the use of a signal subcarrier on Turner Broadcasting’s WTBS signal.
KGAY stopped broadcasting in late 1993, but not before Amendment 2 was hit with an injunction upheld by the Colorado Supreme Court. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court would rule Amendment 2 unconstitutional, forcing it to be removed from Colorado’s constitution.
December 1, 1992
CDC Extends HIV Education Programming to Business Community
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiates a long-term, primary prevention program for HIV education directed at business owners and the labor community.
Learn More.
The Business Responds to AIDS program is designed to help large and small businesses meet the challenges of HIV/AIDS in the workplace and the community.
In an interactive teleconference originating at its Atlanta headquarters, the CDC introduces business leaders to the BRTA program and releases resources to assist them with initiating their own HIV-education programs in the workplace.
Participants in the teleconference include the American Red Cross, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the New England Corporate Consortium on AIDS, and the business and labor communities from several sites throughout the U.S.
The CDC encourages businesses to develop written HIV policies and provide employee education about preventing HIV transmission.
Katrina Haslip — an AIDS activist who fought for the CDC to expand its definition of HIV and AIDS to include symptoms found in women — dies of AIDS-related illness less than a month away from the date that the CDC’s new definition would go into effect. She was 33 years old.
Learn More.
Haslip became an advocate for HIV/AIDS treatment while she was an inmate at the Bedford Hills Correctional Center, serving a sentence in the late 1980s for pickpocketing. In 1987, she tested positive for HIV while in jail and befriended other HIV-positive inmates who were outraged at the ostracization and abuse directed at them.
“Women were dying in their cells and in the hospitals,” Haslip said in an interview with Mireya Navarro of The New York Times. “They were dying because they were giving up and because they felt there was no hope.”
She and other inmates created a network for services and began to take care of each other. After her release, she created a program to help formerly incarcerated, HIV-positive women.
“They have to deal with, ‘How do I get my kids back?’ ” Haslip told The Times. “‘Where do I move to? How do I stay drug free? How do I earn money without stealing?'”
She became an AIDS educator with Life Force, a program for women in Brooklyn, and at a health clinic associated with the Brooklyn Task Force on AIDS. Haslip went from sharing her story in one-on-one outreach work to making speeches at AIDS conferences and activist rallies.
From years of helping HIV-positive women connect to treatment and other programs, Haslip realized that many of her clients in the later stages of the disease were left out of important medical research trials, healthcare initiatives and more, because their symptoms did not meet the government’s case definition of AIDS. She personally knew that women and IV-drug users often had different HIV-related illnesses from men, and the government’s AIDS definition was based on the symptoms and auto-immune disorders of men who were infected through sexual relations with other men.
With the numbers of HIV infections rising among women nationwide, Haslip began meeting with government health officials to tell them that the case definition for HIV and AIDS was outdated and too limited. She urged them to broaden the definition to include the symptoms and conditions that were unique to HIV-positive women and IV-drug users.
In early 1992, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally began to acknowledge the need for updating the case definition of AIDS. When officials appeared to slow-walk the initiative to revise the classification system for HIV and AIDS, Haslip voiced her anger in the media and at protests.
In October, the CDC finally announced plans to update the AIDS case definition. The same month, Haslip was admitted to Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan with renal problems and was diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia. When the CDC released its new AIDS definition, with the news that it was scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 1993, Haslip spoke to reporters from her hospital bed.
“Ms. Haslip was so weak she spoke in a raspy whisper. Her eyes were often closed when she spoke,” Mireya Navarro of The New York Times reported on November 15, the day after the CDC announcement. Navarro noted that Haslip’s room was filled with flowers, food, stuffed animals, newspapers and romance novels.
Haslip’s health continued to decline and she succumbed to complications from AIDS on December 2, 1992. Thirty days later, the new AIDS case definition went into effect, giving access to services and programs to an additional tens of thousands of people living with AIDS, the majority of them women.
December 13, 1992
Florida Teenager Ricky Ray Dies
Ricky Ray, the eldest of three hemophiliac brothers barred from school in Florida because they carried the AIDS virus, dies at the age of 15 at his home in Orlando.
Learn More.
Ricky and and his two younger brothers, Robert and Randy, sparked a national conversation on AIDS in 1987, after their court battle to attend school led to boycotts by local residents and the torching of their home in Arcadia, Florida.
Last month, President-elect Clinton had telephoned the boy to offer his support. Bedridden with AIDS, Rick let it be known that he wanted to talk to then-President-elect Bill Clinton about the deadly disease.
When Ricky was handed the telephone in his room at All Children’s Hospital, Clinton was on the other end.
“Ricky told him, ‘I hope you do everything you said you would to make a difference,'” said Ricky’s mother, Louise. “He said that Clinton told him that he was going to do everything in his power to make things better.”
Haitian Refugees with HIV/AIDS Denied Medical Care
The U.S. Immigration Service refuses to allow four HIV-positive Haitian refugees to receive treatment at a state-side hospital.
Learn More.
The asylum-seekers from Haiti were picked up at sea from the U.S. Coast Guard and placed at Camp Bulkeley, a detention camp for HIV-positive people in Guantanamo Bay that did not have appropriate medical care for people infected with the virus.
Despite pleas from military officials at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, INS officials rejected the requests to allow four ailing Haitian refugees to leave Camp Bulkeley and come to the U.S. for HIV treatment, according to reporting by Philip J. Hilts of The New York Times.
In Camp Bulkeley were 222 men, women and children who tested positive for HIV; all had passed initial INS interviews in their applications for asylum. Among them, according to the NYT article, were 15 whose T-cell counts were low enough to designate them as having AIDS (which today is called “Late-stage HIV”).
Also in camp were 55 relatives, mostly children, who were not HIV-positive.
Navy Col. Stephen Kinder, the commander at Guantanamo, and camp doctors requested that the INS allow at least four detainees to be released to U.S. hospitals, because Camp Bulkeley could not provide adequate care. Camp doctors expected several patients to die within the next six months.
The U.S. continued to keep the 277 Haitians at the detention camp, because the U.S. Justice Department determined early in 1992 to enforce the Bush Administration’s ban on allowing anyone infected with HIV to enter the U.S.
December 18, 1992
CDC Publishes Expanded AIDS Definition for 1993
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announces its expanded case definition of AIDS, which will take effect in January 1993 and allow tens of thousands of additional people living with AIDS to access services and treatment.
Learn More.
In its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC releases the much-anticipated revised classification system for HIV/AIDS infection, broadening the definition of AIDS to include a focus on the white blood cell count, also known as CD4 cells or T cells.
The new definition, which came after years of urging from the HIV/AIDS activist community and healthcare advocates, specified that a CD4 cell count of 200 or less per microliter of blood (about one-fifth a normal count) would constitute Category 3 HIV, or AIDS. The new classification system also added three illnesses to the original 1987 list of 23 AIDS-related conditions: pulmonary tuberculosis, invasive cancer of the cervix, and recurrent bacterial pneumonia.
Activists, medical professionals and health officials had been urging the CDC to recognize that many people living with AIDS — primarily women — had symptoms that were not included in the federal government’s definition of the disease. The definition was expanded to capture a more complete population of people living with AIDS, so that they could access public programs designed to treat and care for them.
The CDC’s definition of AIDS had been — and still is — used as a surveillance definition to monitor trends in the incidence and prevalence of AIDS over time, to:
* characterize persons with end stage HIV disease,
* to identify risk factors and modes of transmission, and
* to predict the future course and impact of the AIDS epidemic.
In addition to being used for surveillance, the AIDS definition has been used as a clinical definition by physicians, a definition for research, and a measure of disability in benefits programs.
December 1992
#1 Cause of Death for Young Adult Men is AIDS
With the death rate from HIV infection steadily and dramatically increasing over the past 10 years, AIDS becomes the leading cause of death in the U.S. for men aged 25-44.
Learn More.
A report from the Centers for Disease Control announces that HIV infection emerged in the 1980s as a leading cause of death in the U.S., and now HIV infection is the number one cause of death among men aged 25-44 years.
The CDC bases this assessment on data obtained from death certificates filed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Statisticians suspect the magnitude is greater than indicated in the report.
The report also notes that HIV infection is more severely advancing to death for blacks and hispanics than other racial/ethnic groups.
“These differences probably reflect social, economic, behavioral, or other factors rather than race/ethnicity directly,” the report states. “The social and cultural context of HIV infection must be addressed through prevention efforts designed to meet the needs of specific communities.”
.
December 28, 1992
11-year-old Glendale Boy Dies
Alan Ward Ritchie, the 11-year-old son of Glendale community leader Judith Ritchie, dies of AIDS-related illness at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Learn More.
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.
December 29, 1992
ACT UP/LA Member Richard Iosty Dies
Richard Iosty, a veteran member of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power/Los Angeles (ACT UP/LA) dies at Los Angeles County Hospital of AIDS-related illness.
Learn More.
As his health declined, Iosty was hospitalized at National Medical Enterprises in Century City. After two weeks at NME, Iosty lost his health insurance and the hospital transferred him to Los Angeles County medical center.
At the time, the county medical center had established an AIDS ward, known as “6700,” but its beds were filled with many non-HIV/AIDS patients, according to ACT UP/LA member David Lacaillade. The ward stopped admitting new patients in June 1992.
So when Iosty was admitted to LAC medical center in mid-December 1992, he was placed instead in a bed outside the ward, where Lacaillade said Iosty was subjected to “homophobic interns and prayer meetings.”
Following Iosty’s death, ACT UP/LA members decided to memorialize him with a political protest against Los Angeles County’s healthcare providers. Amgen, a pharmaceutical company based in Thousand Oaks, California, became ACT UP’s target, due to the exorbitant price the company set for its HIV-treatment medications Epogen and Neupogen.
At ACT UP’s protest on March 3, 1993, activists carried signs with Iosty’s name, along with the name of Jerry Mills, another local ACT UP member who died shortly after Iosty.
January 1, 1993
EZTV Founder John Dorr Dies
John Dorr, video artist and founder of EZTV, one of the nation’s first centers devoted to the production and exhibition of video, dies in Los Angeles of AIDS-related illness at the age of 48.
Learn More.
From his two-story loft in West Hollywood, Dorr fashioned a self-contained studio with room for filming, editing and exhibiting. He was known to boast that feature films could be created with just enough money for videotape and groceries for their casts.
Dorr became a pioneer in the production of full-length dramatic videos, providing a new opportunity for independent filmmakers to produce inexpensive feature-length movies on video. He had a hand in the production of more than 100 video films, among them the Lannen Literary Series, hourlong programs on major poets and writers, and Dorothy and Alan at Norma Place, a film recounting the Hollywood career of the writer Dorothy Parker. In 1986, he produced funHouse, a documentary of Eric Bogosian’s 1983 solo show.
Dorr was a graduate of Yale University and president of the school’s film society. While at Yale, he provided exhibits of the films of Howard Hawks, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. After becoming a teaching assistant at UCLA, he hit upon the idea for EZTV when he found many young documentary makers using video to make inexpensive films but there was no place to show their work.
EZTV Founder John Dorr’s openly gay status in the late ’70s and early ’80s was rare, because such a disclosure could quickly end a Hollywood career. According to the EZTV Online Museum, Dorr’s gallery space served the West Hollywood community during the height of the AIDS pandemic as a place where the friends of those who had died of AIDS could hold memorial services and gatherings in their honor. For several years, it was common for a Saturday afternoon at EZTV to be dedicated to the remembrance of someone who could not afford a service any other way.
In addition to producing pictures, Dorr was a critic for Film Comment, the Los Angeles Times, and The Hollywood Reporter, among other publications.
“[John Dorr] was far more dedicated to the aesthetics and true independent spirit of the mediums of film, TV and video than anyone else I’ve ever heard or read about, encountered or met, worked for or against,” said editor/sound mixer John Hays. “In the nine years I knew Dorr, he never failed me, although some people failed him.”
At the time of Dorr’s death, he was working on a behind-the-scenes documentary about Robert Altman’s award-winning Short Cuts (1993). The resulting documentary, Luck, Trust and Ketchup: Robert Altman in Carver Country, featured missing scenes from the Altman film as well as interviews with the director, cast members and technicians.
After Dorr’s death, EZTV somehow persevered amid seemingly impossible odds. As actor Michael Kearns stated, EZTV became an “AIDS survivor.” Now housed at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, EZTV continues to be a pioneer in the media arts.
World-renowned ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 54.
Learn More.
Nureyev is born in 1938 aboard the Trans-Siberian express, near Lake Baikal. He spends his childhood and youth in Ufa, capital of the Soviet Republic of Bashkir. His parents are Tartar Muslims.
In 1961, Rudolf Nureyev dances with the Kirov Ballet, which is on tour in Paris. His first appearance on stage is at the Palais Garnier, in Act III from La Bayadère. Days later, he demands political asylum at Le Bourget airport and refuses to board an airplane to the USSR. He joins the Ballets du Marquis de Cuevas the next day.
He becomes internationally famous as a flamboyant performer and a charismatic celebrity who revived the prominence of male ballet roles and significantly widened the audience for ballet.
In 1973 he codirects (with Robert Helpmann) and stars in a filmed version of Don Quixote, and he has acting roles in the films Valentino (1977) and Exposed (1983).
From 1983 to 1989, Nureyev would be artistic director of the Paris Opéra Ballet, the oldest ballet company in the world. He would be diagnosed with HIV in 1984, his second year at the POB.
He continues to choreograph for the American Ballet Theatre and the Paris Opéra Ballet even as his health declines from AIDS-related complications.
Nureyev enters the hospital Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours in Levallois-Perret on November 20, 1992 and remained there until his death. His funeral was held in the marble foyer of the Paris Garnier Opera House.
Haitians Detained in GTMO Refugee Camp Go on Hunger Strike
To remind President Bill Clinton of his campaign promise to close the Haitian refugee camps at Guantánamo Bay, many Haitian detainees — including some from the “HIV camp” — begin a hunger strike. By Feb. 15, seven of the fasters had fallen unconscious.
Learn More.
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.
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.
January 20, 1993
The Mint’s Pianist Frank Banks Dies
Frank Banks, a beloved entertainer at the Mint piano bar in San Francisco, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 46.
Learn More.
Oklahoma-born Frank Banks held a long-standing gig at The Mint piano bar, located at 1942 Market Street, and drew fans that included Bay Area Reporter publisher Thomas Horn and then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein
“From 1975 to 1988 Frank Banks was both defined by and helped define The Mint in San Francisco,” wrote Michael Flanagan of the Bay Area Reporter in his 2018 tribute to Banks. “He would go on to play other bars before he left and his presence here was felt all the way to City Hall, but The Mint was the place where he came alive and entertained a broad swath of the city.”
According to Flanagan, Banks was born in Wagoner, Oklahoma on May 11, 1946, and grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As a teenager, he became the church pianist for his local Baptist church.
After graduating from college, he returned to Albuquerque to teach English and music and, during his summers off from school, he played piano at area venues such as the Alpine Theater, the Tiffany Saloon, and Melodrama. In 1972, a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune wrote that Banks “really knows how to make that old piano roll.”
After finishing the 1973-1974 school year, he moved to San Francisco, where he quickly established himself on the piano bar circuit, according to Flanagan.
In 1976, Banks started playing at The Mint, and by the next year, he had a weekly gig, playing Wednesdays through Sundays. In early 1982, Banks recorded his one and only album, Frank Banks Live at The Mint. On the album, Banks gives a nod to his birthplace with the songs “Oklahoma” and “I Cain’t Say No,” both of which were a part of his repertoire. Flanagan wrote that the album has the ability to transport listeners to a place that no longer exists — The Mint in the early ’80s.
“The Mint was a lively bar, and you hear people laughing, glasses tinkling and most of all the rapport between Banks and his audience during sing-alongs,” Flanagan wrote.
Banks was also involved in providing entertainment for The Great Tricycle Race, The Mint’s annual fundraising event for charitable organizations. Held every Memorial Day, the race consisted of flamboyantly costumed two-person teams, one contestant pushing the other on a tricycle. Afterward, a party with music was held at The Mint. In 1984, “The Incomparable Frank Banks” was featured in the ad for the event, which drew over 1,200 people.
Author Molly Martin wrote on her blog that in the ’80s, she and her then-partner, Pat, were regulars at Bay Area piano bars — including The Mint. Of all the piano players in town, Banks was their favorite. Martin appreciated the way he clearly enunciated the words to songs, so she could learn lyrics on the fly. Her partner appreciated how Banks knew every American standard, and performed them with passion and precision.
But they were also drawn to Banks’ nights at The Mint, because this is where Broadway stars would stop in to join the fun.
“When a star or a known accomplished singer would come in, those of us around the piano would make way for them,” she recalled. “The singer could choose any song — (Banks) knew them all — and we would transition from a chorus to an audience.”
Martin also remembered that many members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus also found their way to Banks’ piano.
“Every night was a surprise,” she wrote on her blog, which has been preserved by the San Francisco Oral History Project.
In the late 1980s, The Mint began to shift away from being a piano bar, and Banks started performing at other venues, including J.J.’s, Nine’s, Sutter’s Mill and Charpe’s, according to Flanagan. His final performance was on August 29, 1992, at the Square Bar, located at 405 Mason Street. Shortly afterward, he returned to Albuquerque to spend the last six months of his life.
President Clinton Establishes Office of National AIDS Policy
As one of his first acts in the White House, President Bill Clinton establishes the White House Office of National AIDS Policy.
Learn More.
The Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP) is designed to oversee U.S. efforts to implement the President’s National HIV/AIDS Strategy.
ONAP’s scope would grow over the next twenty years to include coordinating national and global efforts with the National Security Council and the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator. The group would work closely with international bodies to ensure that the U.S. response to the global pandemic is fully integrated with other prevention, care, and treatment efforts around the world.
ONAP would be featured in the press again in January 2017, when under the new Trump administration, the office’s website would become inaccessible. It is then reported that the office closed with the departure of the previous director, Obama-appointee Amy Lansky, with no clear plans if or when President Trump would reopen it.
When President Trump fails to appoint a new ONAP director by June 2017, six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS file letters of resignation, citing that above all things the Trump administration “simply does not care” about the HIV/AIDS situation in the U.S.
In June 2021, President Joe Biden would restore ONAP with the appointment of Harold Phillips, a Black man living with HIV, as Director. News of Phillips’s appointment would arrive June 5, the 40th anniversary of the first reports of AIDS.
January 28, 1993
Jerry Mills, Pioneer of Queer Comics, Dies
Jerry Mills, one of the most important queer underground comic artists of his time, dies of AIDS-related illness. He was 41 years old.
Learn More.
Mills was the creator of the gay comic strip Poppers, about Billy, a West Hollywood hottie, and his sidekick Yves, a nebbish who tries to steer his friend toward better choices. The comic first appeared in the adult magazine In Touch for Men in April 1982, and then was published in Advocate Men later on.
“Though the relationship between Billy and Yves is your typical odd-couple dynamic, you still learn a lot about the dangers of extremes through their interactions,” writes Sara Century for SYFY Media. “Billy could absolutely stand to be a little more prudent, while Yves would be better off adopting some of Billy’s go-with-the-flow attitude.”
Poppers was also published in France (Gai Pied Hebdo) and Japan (Barazoko), and in the comic book Gay Comix, according to reviewer Elisa Rolle. In addition to Poppers, Mills also made cartoons and contributed a story to the first Meatmen anthology.
As the AIDS crisis emerged, Mills’ work addressed the complexity of modern-day sexual relations, and he began to promote safer sex in his storylines, according to the editors of The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics’ Crucial Decade, Brannon Costello and Brian Cremins.
Mills was also a member of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power/Los Angeles (ACT UP LA), and was involved in many of the group’s protests and “zaps” in the late 1980s.
Shortly after Mills’ death, ACT UP/LA members decided to memorialize him with a political protest against Amgen, a pharmaceutical company based in Thousand Oaks, California. Amgen became ACT UP’s target due to the exorbitant price the company set for its HIV-treatment medications Epogen and Neupogen.
At ACT UP’s protest on March 3, 1993, activists carried signs with Mills’ name, along with the name of Richard Iosty, another local ACT UP member who died of AIDS shortly before Mills.
January 31, 1993
SOMA Event Producer Jerry Vallaire Dies
Gerald “Jerry” Vallaire, vice president of the South of Market Individuals Lifestyles Events, dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 41.
Learn More.
When Vallaire was diagnosed in 1989 with AIDS, he closed his successful florist business, and dedicated his time to raising funds for AIDS service programs, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
As part of Up Your Alley Productions, Vallaire helped to produce benefits such as the Ringold Alley Fair, Let’s Go Navy, The Charity Bowl, The Military Ball and Art for AIDS. His involvement in the benefits led to thousands of dollars for AIDS causes.
Born in 1951 in New Orleans, Vallaire was born to a family trade of operating wholesale and retail floral businesses. But he was interested in the performance arts, and moved to New York City to pursue dance and theater. There, he performed in productions with Richard Chamberlain, George Maharis, Margaret Hamilton, Ann Miller and George Chakaris.
But when his stage career failed to take off, he moved to San Francisco and opened a florist business, , Styles and Stamens. But when Vallaire began getting involved in fundraising events, his performance background came in handy and he acted as choreographer of many dance productions created for the events.
February 1, 1993
Rock Legend Elton John Starts AIDS Foundation
Musician Elton John, who since the late 1980s has been leveraging his celebrity to raise money for AIDS research, decides to launch the Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF).
Learn More.
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.
February 6, 1993
Tennis Star Arthur Ashe Dies
Tennis star Arthur Ashe dies of complications from AIDS at the age of 49. Ashe’s body is laid in state at the governor’s mansion in Richmond, Virginia, where thousands of people line up to pay their respects to the ground-breaking athlete and social activist.
Learn More.
Ashe is celebrated for being the first (and only) African American male tennis player to win the U.S. Open and Wimbledon singles titles.
Attending UCLA on a full scholarship in 1965, Ashe wins the individual NCAA tennis championship and helps UCLA win the team championship. He then serves in the U.S. Army for two years.
Ashe begins his career in earnest in 1968, winning the U.S. Open while still an amateur player. He becomes the first black man to win a Grand Slam event.
He becomes a trailblazer in the world of tennis, winning multiple Grand Slam titles in his career. He also becomes known for his commitment to charitable causes and humanitarian work. He establishes tennis programs for inner-city children and campaigns against apartheid in South Africa. He retires from tennis in 1980 after suffering a heart attack.
In 1988, Ashe begins experiencing paralysis in his right arm. After undergoing exploratory brain surgery and a battery of tests, doctors determine he has toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease that is commonly found in people infected with HIV. Another set of tests reveals he is HIV positive.
Doctors believe Arthur Ashe contracted HIV from blood transfusions during his second heart surgery. Despite that, Ashe and his wife try to keep his HIV diagnosis private. After a friend that worked at USA Today calls Ashe about his condition, he decides to go public.
Two months before his death, he founds the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, to help address issues of inadequate health care delivery to urban minority populations. He also dedicates time in his last few months to writing “Days of Grace,” his memoir that he finishes only days before his death.
Arthur Ashe dies of AIDS-related pneumonia in New York at the age of 49. His body was laid in state at the Governor’s Mansion in his hometown of Richmond, VA. More than 5,000 people line up to walk past the casket.
His funeral is attended by nearly 6,000 people including NYC Mayor David Dinkins, Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, and Rainbow Coalition chairman Jesse Jackson. Andrew Young, the former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor who had performed Arthur’s marriage ceremony, delivers the eulogy.
On what would have been Arthur’s 53rd birthday, July 10, 1996, a statue of him was dedicated on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. Before this, Monument Avenue had commemorated Confederate war heroes; in fact, as a child Arthur would not even have been able to visit Monument Avenue because of the color of his skin.
Arthur is depicted carrying books in one hand and a tennis racket in the other, symbolizing his love of knowledge and tennis.
In 1997, the USTA announced that the new center stadium at the USTA National Tennis Center would be named Arthur Ashe Stadium, commemorating the life of the first U.S. Open men’s champion in the place where all future U.S. Open champions will be determined.
Activists Protest Drug-maker Amgen at Thousands Oaks HQ
Members of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power/Los Angeles (ACT UP/LA) gathered at the headquarters of pharmaceutical company Amgen to protest the high cost of the company’s HIV/AIDS medications.
Learn More.
About 40 demonstrators marched through Amgen’s campus in Thousands Oaks, California, blowing whistles and chanting, “Amgen, Amgen, you can’t hide! We charge you with Amgen-ocide!” The protest was dedicated to the memory of two recently deceased ACT UP members, Richard Iosty and Jerry Mills.
Amgen was the target of ACT UP’s protest, because they were the sole manufacturer of Neupogen and Epogen, expensive medications commonly prescribed for people living with HIV who were at high risk for bacterial and fungal infections. According to ACT-UP, Amgen was over-charging patients for the drugs and taking advantage of people desperate to stay alive but who were unable to work or sustain health insurance coverage.
At the time, a ten-day treatment of Neupogen cost about $1,350, ACT-UP activist David Lacaillade told the Los Angeles Times. He called the price “appalling.”
“This is only an opening salvo,” Lacaillade said. “We will keep our attention on Amgen and, if they don’t respond to the community, which includes ACT-UP, we’ll be back. We want to put them on notice that people are dying for their drug. They’re making a killing — literally.”
While Amgen offered a patient assistance program that offered free or reduced-cost treatment, the program involved a complicated system of paperwork, Lacaillade said. He added that many doctors were not aware that Amgen had a program for low- or no-income patients.
ACT-UP demanded that Amgen create a community price advisory board and make a commitment to lower the cost of its HIV-treatment drugs.
Loyd Tittle, owner of Capitol Drugs in West Hollywood, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 42.
Learn More.
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.
March 19, 1993
Folk-Blues Musician Karen Dalton Dies
Karen Dalton — a folk guitarist, banjo player, and singer who released two albums on the cusp of 1970 — dies of AIDS-related illness at her home near Woodstock, New York. She was 55.
Learn More.
“Karen Dalton sang in a room-hushing confessional style, with a tone that earned her constant comparison with Billie Holiday,” wrote Tom Moon, author of 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die. “She was a singer of transfixing nuance and uncommon emotional control.”
Dalton accompanied herself with a 12-string guitar, just like Lead Belly (Huddie William Ledbetter), one of her favorite folk-blues performers.
Dalton was part of the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene, and she performed with folk luminary Bob Dylan, Moon wrote in a profile of Dalton for NPR. Her debut album, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best (1969(, was produced by Nik Venet, who also helped launch Linda Ronstadt’s career.
Born in Texas in 1937 and raised in Oklahoma by Southern Baptist parents, Dalton was twice married and divorced by the time she was 21. She arrived in New York City in the early 1960s with her guitar, banjo, “and at least one of her two children,” according to music writer Laura Barton in The Guardian.
“Although Dalton was in the right place at the right time, hanging with the right people and boasted a rare talent, she was also self-destructive.” Barton wrote. “She drank heavily, used drugs and had a tendency to disappear on a whim. She played only cover versions, and her decision to not play her own material in an era that belonged to singer-songwriters perhaps also hindered her success.”
Still, her covers of standards were distinctive enough to garner a dedicated following among music fans and musicians alike. Bob Dylan said she was his favorite singer in Cafe Wha? in the Village.
Throughout the ’60s, Dalton travelled from New York to perform in folk venues across the country, such as the Attic, a coffee house near the University of Colorado. She enjoyed the rural life that touring sometimes provided, and even set up house in Colorado for a few years.
In the late 1960s, Capitol Records signed Dalton to make an album. The process of recording was so daunting to her that singer-songwriter Fred Neil had to tell her that the tape wasn’t rolling (when it was) in order to get her to perform, according to Barton.
It’s So Hard to Tell You Who’s Going to Love You the Best was released in 1969 by Capitol Records, and is still appreciated by fans of authentic folk music. Pitchfork magazine lists the album at #52 on its 200 Best Albums of the 1960s.
Listening to “It Hurts Me Too,” a song on the album, is like opening a window to the 1930s. Barton’s singing gives the listener a direct link from the 1960s folk revival back to the original folk songs of Woody Guthrie.
Unfortunately, It’s So Hard didn’t sell well, and Capitol dropped Dalton. But then her friend Michael Lang was given a label to run at Paramount (Just Sunshine Records), and he signed her to produce her second album, In My Own Time (1971). To promote the album, Lang booked Dalton as the opening act for a tour headlined by Santana, and this experience proved to be disastrous for Dalton.
“It obviously didn’t work,” Robert Yapkowitz, co-director of the 2021 documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time, told The Guardian. “In part because of the audience, and in part because Karen wasn’t able to perform at that arena level.”
Following the tour, Dalton returned home depressed and increasingly drawn to drug use, according to Jim Farber of The Guardian.
She fell away from the music industry, and reportedly spent time unhoused in New York City. After a failed attempt at a Texas rehab, she returned to New York and settled in a friend’s cabin in Woodstock. Dalton was diagnosed as HIV positive some time in the late 1980s.
After her death, a book of her writings was released in 2012. Her music has been re-issued every so often, causing a surge of new fans, including artists Nick Cave and Devendra Banhart.
March 1993
AIDSWatch: Advocates Organize to Lobby for Congressional Action
The National Association of People With AIDS convenes the first “AIDSWatch,” a national advocacy effort to lobby Congress for increased funding.
Learn More.
AIDSWatch would become an annual event, serving as a vehicle by which people living with and affected by HIV could speak their truth in the halls of power in Washington, D.C., and demand that Congress protect their rights and honor their struggle.
Even after the National Association of People With AIDS ceases operations in 2013, AIDSWatch advocacy day would continue to be held annually under the auspices of AIDS United.
The small group of HIV advocates who met in 1993 would transform into the country’s largest annual constituent-based national HIV advocacy event. AIDSWatch 2020 becomes the largest to date, with more than 2,500 advocates joining over multiple platforms.
April 4, 1993
Rick Redewill — Owner of San Francisco’s Lone Star Saloon — Dies
Richard “Rick” Redewill, owner of the Lone Star Saloon, Cocktails Bar and the PIT, dies of AIDS-related illness at Kaiser French Campus in San Francisco. He was 40 years old.
Learn More.
In the summer of 1989, Redewill opened the Lone Star Saloon on the corner of Howard and 7th, serving just beer and wine at first because he didn’t have a liquor license. Redewill sought to foster an atmosphere in the bar that appealed to the neighborhood’s working class men who felt more at home in the city’s South of Market area, than in the Castro.
In October of that year, the bar was rendered structurally unsafe after the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. Only six months old, the Lone Star had to be demolished. Redewill relocated the bar to 1354 Harrison Street, where it remains today. The new space appealed to the biker crowd that previously made The Ambush — a leather bar across the street that closed in 1987 — their headquarters. And members of the Bear community also were attracted to the bar, making the Lone Star famous as a “Bear Bar.”
“Bar owners such as Rick Redewill were seen as community leaders,” wrote Ron Suresha in his post “Rainbow MC and the old Lone Star.” “During that time – following the closure of all gay SF baths – the Lone Star functioned as a kind of Bear community center that attracted a wealth of creative gay men’s culture: visual arts, writing, music, sex, even sports. The fact that it served as a nexus for such a plethora of culture at perhaps the height of the onslaught of AIDS deaths is a matter of wonder.”
“Bonsai Pete” Vafiades, who Redewill hired to bartend at the Lone Star, told Suresha:
“Bar life in the City (and elsewhere) was important in the way that gay men form community – which is not so much the case in gay life today – and the earthquake was the adversity out of which this first Bear community was forged.”
April 6, 1993
West Hollywood Activist Chris Fairchild Dies
Christopher “Chris” Fairchild, a lawyer and activist who spearheaded a campaign to create a new police department for the City of West Hollywood, dies of AIDS-related illness. He was 35.
Learn More.
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.
‘Soul Train Music Awards’ Producer Anthony Sabatino Dies
Anthony Sabatino, an Emmy-award-winning art director who regularly produced the Soul Train Music Awards, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Los Angeles home at the age of 48.
Born in Galveston and educated at the University of Houston and Brandeis University, Sabatino also worked on films (Richard Pryor’s Here and Now and Walk on the Wild Side), game shows (Truth or Consequences), television specials (for Bing Crosby, Liberace and George Burns), and talk shows (for Pat Sajak and Joan Rivers).
Nominated eight times for an Emmy, Sabatino won in 1988-89 for Fun House, a children’s game show that aired from 1988 to 1991.
May 7, 1993
FDA Approves Female Condom
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the female condom, giving women a new way to protect themselves from sexually-transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy..
Learn More.
The condom, which is ma nufactured by Chartex International, becomes available over the counter at most major drug stores in Southern California, under the name Reality Female Condom.
Although the female condom gives women more options for birth control, it is slow to catch on with the general public.
Donna Diaz, a representative of Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles, tells California State University’s campus newspaper that the female condom is not popular because it is “more awkward to use” than the male condom.
“It’s not as effective as the male condom and it’s very inconvenient to use,” she says.
However, Holly Sherman, spokeswoman for The Female Health Company — which markets and distributes the condom — disagrees, saying the female condom provides protection from disease on genital areas because there is “less skin touching skin” and the chance of transmitting a disease is less likely.
The female condom has a sheath material and a flexible inner ring, and is inserted similar to a diaphragm. A woman squeezes the ring and inserts it as far as possible into the vagina. The ring then covers the cervix. Its sheath material holds the condom in place. The outer ring lines the vaginal wall and helps cover the lips of the vagina. The sexual partner must stay within the confines of the female condom or it’s ineffective.
June 6, 1993
‘Angels in America’ Wins Four Tony Awards & Pulitzer
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, the first installment of Tony Kushner’s two-play epic that uses AIDS as a metaphor for a national spiritual decline in the 1980s, wins four Tony Awards, including best play, best director of a play, and best leading actor and featured actor in a play.
Judge Issues Order to Release 158 Haitian Refugees in ‘HIV Prison Camp’
A federal judge orders the U.S. Attorney General to immediately release 158 Haitian refugees — most of them HIV-positive — from Camp Bulkeley in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying they are being held in “the kind of indefinite detention usually reserved for spies and murderers.”
Learn More.
In a 53-page ruling that strongly rebuked the Bush and Clinton administrations, Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of the Eastern District of New York also ruled that Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials acted illegally when they tried to process the Haitians’ claims for asylum without allowing their legal counsel to participate in the process.
The trial followed a year of hunger strikes by the refugees at Camp Bulkeley and collaboration with human rights activists and lawyers, according to The Washington Post‘s coverage of the ruling.
During the trial, U.S. officials conceded that the medical facilities at Camp Bulkeley were not equipped to treat patients with HIV or AIDS “under the medical care standard applicable within the United States itself.”
Still, INS officials repeatedly refused requests to transfer HIV-positive refugees to U.S. hospitals, one official actually saying to members of the media, “They’re going to die anyway, aren’t they?”
Judge Johnson’s opinion claimed the HIV detention center at Guantanamo Bay violated federal law. He characterized the attitude held by INS officials — that there is “no value in providing adequate medical care when a patient’s illness is fatal” — as “outrageous, callous and reprehensible.”
The long-awaited victory for the Haitian refugees happened just one week before the start of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and by this time, the country had a new president, Bill Clinton. During his campaign for president, Clinton had promised to shut down the Haitian refugee camp and reform the asylum application process, but after taking office in January 1993, he decided to a continue the Bush Administration’s policy of forcibly returning Haitians who try to emigrate to the U.S.
Now he risked embarrassment before world leaders gathering at the human rights conference.
So days after Judge Johnson’s ruling, President Clinton announced that it would comply with the order. All 158 Haitians held at Camp Bulkeley were flown to states in the U.S., where they were allowed to take up residency.
June 10, 1993
U.S. Expands Scope for Women/Minorities as Research Subjects
Congress enacts the NIH Revitalization Act and directs the National Institutes of Health to expand involvement of women and minorities in all research.
Learn More.
The Act gives the Office of AIDS Research primary oversight of all NIH AIDS research and requires the NIH and other research agencies to increase the role of women and minorities as research subjects.
The statute calls for outreach to women and members of minority groups for recruitment as subjects in clinical research projects. For clinical trials in which women or members of minority groups are included as subjects, trials must be designed and executed in a manner that allows for researchers to determine whether the variables being studied in the trial affect women or members of minority groups differently than other subjects in the trial.
June 10, 1993
U.S. Immigration Ban Codified into Federal Law
Slipped into the NIH Revitalization Act is an amendment that codifies the U.S. HIV immigration ban into law, which President Bill Clinton signs.
June 13, 1993
LA Activist & Commissioner Rand Schrader Dies
Rand Schrader, a California municipal judge who was a noted gay activist, dies of AIDS-related illness at Century City Hospital. He was 48.
Learn More.
Judge Schrader helped establish the AIDS clinic at the Los Angeles County Medical Center, which would later be renamed in his honor.
He became one of California’s first openly gay judges when he was appointed to the Municipal Court in 1980 by Gov. Ed Brown. He also served on the Board of Regents for the University of California, and the board of the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), the first LGBT political action committee.
As a gay, liberal student at UCLA School of Law, Schrader volunteered countless hours giving legal guidance to members of the Los Angeles LGBT Center (then called the LA Gay Community Services Center). Many of his cases involved police discrimination against gay men.
After graduating from UCLA, Schrader began working for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, becoming the first openly gay staffer.
“He was a star performer,” said LA City Attorney Burt Pines. “In a relatively short period of time, he had the respect of everyone he worked with, including real conservative prosecutors who thought they could never work with a gay [man].”
In 1987, Los Angeles County established an AIDS commission, and Schrader was among its first cohort of commissioners. At the time, the county had surpassed San Francisco in the number of HIV/AIDS cases, and yet county officials had refused to act on the growing call for the creation of a ward dedicated exclusively to the care and treatment of AIDS patients. San Francisco had established an AIDS ward in 1983 (Ward 5B at San Francisco General Hospital).
As a commissioner, Schrader found himself siding with activists from the local chapter of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). With a steady stream of demonstrations at LA County Medical Center, the activists publicly called for persons living with HIV/AIDS to be provided with a specialized unit at the hospital that would protect them from discrimination and neglect.
When his friend Sheldon “Shelley” Andelson, died of AIDS-related illness in late 1987, Schrader issued a call of action: “There is only one memorial worthy of Sheldon and all the others lost to this disease, and that is to go forward with courage and spirit, to claim the ultimate victory of human freedom. Sheldon lived for no less, nor can I, nor can you.”
As the fight to create an AIDS ward in LA county continued, Schrader found himself at odds with the AIDS commission’s chairman, Rabbi Allen Freehling, who contended that patients put in a separate unit would feel “isolated.” The commission decided to form a task force to determine a course of action, and soon it became apparent to all the commissioners that people living with AIDS would benefit significantly from having access to their own clinic.
In 1988, a separate ward for AIDS patients was opened at the county hospital. The next year, Schrader was elected the new chair of the AIDS commission.
Schrader was diagnosed with HIV in 1991. He went public with the news and continued his judicial work. A month before Schrader’s death, the LA County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a motion to name the county’s AIDS ward after Schrader in tribute to “his courage, his vision and his tenacity.”
Schrader’s partner of 10 years was David Bohnett, who through his grief developed the groundbreaking e-commerce company GeoCities in the early days of the internet as a way to create a virtual place where people could connect.
“When [Randy] died, I honestly did not know how I could go on,” Bohnett said in 1999, the year when he sold GeoCities to Yahoo! for a reported $3.6 billion. It was also the year he was honored with the Rand Schrader Award by the Los Angeles LGBT Center. “But I had friends. I had a family — mine and Randy’s. And we all shared our grief and comforted one another during our time of loss.
“But what if I had been alone in that grief? What becomes of a man or woman when one loses a partner whom no one else knows was a partner? What happens to people who are afraid to tell the truth about who they are and whom they love?”
Bohnett said he created GeoCities with these thoughts in mind and, in the process, was able to introduce the internet to millions of people as a way to find connection and solace.
Rand Schrader’s legacy also endures in the HIV/AIDS clinic he helped to create. Today, the University of Southern California manages the Rand Schrader HIV Clinic. Dr. Joseph Cadden, an infectious disease specialist, serves as Medical Director and oversees more than 40 faculty members providing primary and specialty care to more than 3,000 patients in LA County.
June 14, 1993
LA Shanti Founder Daniel P. Warner Dies
Daniel P. Warner, co-founder and former executive director of the Los Angeles Shanti Foundation, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 38.
Learn More.
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.
HIV+ Haitian Refugees Released from GTMO, Arrive in Miami
The first contingent of HIV-positive asylum-seekers from Haiti are released from Camp Bulkeley in Cuba and flown to Miami.
Learn More.
Following a court order to close the Guantanamo Bay camp being used to detain HIV-positive refugees, the Navy arranged for a C-130 cargo plane to transport 27 Haitians, including 21 adults and six children, to Miami. In this group, 14 planned to settle in the New York City area, 12 were going to remain in Florida, and one was going onto Massachusetts.
The remaining 113 Haitian asylum-seekers were scheduled to travel from the naval compound in Cuba to the U.S. “in the next 10 days to two weeks,” Col. Raymond A. Barbeau told The New York Times.
The freeing of HIV-positive asylum-seekers followed on the heels of an order by Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn.
As he left the detention facility to board the cargo plane, asylum-seeker Jean Edouard said Judge Johnson’s decision restored his faith in democracy.
“Sometimes I got frustrated, and I thought that I’m never going anywhere,” said Edouard, who planned to join his wife and step-daughter in Brooklyn. “I thought I would probably die in Guantanamo, so the judge’s decision was a dream come true.”
At Camp Bulkeley, detainees lived in barracks-like structures made either of plywood or cinder block and capped with tin roofs. With as many as 27 people housed in a single room, many sought privacy by hanging sheets around their military-issue cots, but this impeded what little ventilation existed to alleviate the stifling tropical heat. During storms, residents placed plastic sheets over the screen windows to help keep the rain out.
The facility was not equipped to provide adequate medical care for people with HIV and AIDS.
“Being sick is not a crime,” asylum-seeker Bob Brutus told The New York Times before joining the contingent bound for Miami. “We have done nothing to deserve this treatment. They’ve kept us in prison for nothing.”
At its highest capacity, Camp Bulkeley housed about 300 asylum-seekers, most of them HIV-positive. After less than two years of operating as a detention facility, 140 remained.
June 29, 1993
Latin Jazz Giant Héctor Lavoe Dies
Héctor Lavoe, considered to be among the most important singers in the history of salsa music, dies of AIDS-related illness. He was 46.
Learn More.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, Lavoe helped to establish the popularity of salsa music in the U.S. and across the world. A charismatic soloist, Lavoe also performed with Tito Puente, the Fania All Stars and, early in his career, the Willie Colon Orchestra.
“Puerto Rican vocalist Héctor Lavoe was a real-life superhero of salsa, a diamond in the rough who could channel the full range of human emotions in a single fleeting note,” Suzy Exposito wrote in Rolling Stone for the magazine’s tribute to the top 50 Latin Pop Songs. Lavoe’s 1976 Hit “El Periódico de Ayer” was listed as #5.
Born Hector Perez in 1946 and raised in the Machuelo Abajo barrio of Ponce, Puerto Rico, Lavoe studied music in school and was inspired by the folk musician Jesús Sánchez Erazo (1900-1979). At the age of 16, he left home for New York City, moved into his sister’s Bronx apartment, and began performing with various Latin musical groups, including Kako All-Stars, Johnny Pacheco’s pachanga band, and ultimately Willie Colón’s salsa band.
Pacheco, co-owner of the salsa label Fania Records, suggested that Colón record Lavoe on a track of Colón’s first album El Malo (1967). Pleased with Lavoe’s performance, Colón kept him in the studio to record the rest of the album’s vocal tracks. Several of the songs became hits, including “El Malo” and “Canto a Borinquen.”
At Colón’s invitation, Lavoe joined the band and began performing Saturday nights at the Tropicoro Club. Soon after, he met Carmen Castro, who became pregnant but refused to marry Lavoe, according to Antonio Mejias, author of The Singer, Hector Lavoe. Lavoe’s first son, José Alberto Pérez was born in October 1968. Lavoe was also involved with Nilda “Puchi” Román, who in September 1969 gave birth to Lavoe’s second son, Héctor Jr. Lavoe married Román, and at his new wife’s request, agreed to keep to a minimum any contact with Castro and José Alberto.
Lavoe found his sudden success and his complicated personal life to be overwhelming, and soon he was addicted to heroin and prescription drugs, according to veteran salsa musician Pete Nader, who performed with Lavoe.
“[Lavoe’s] addiction resulted in him showing up late for gigs, and he eventually did not show up to some scheduled performances at all,” writes Nader on his website Pete Nader’s Salsa Legends and Masters Academy.
After trying in vain to get Lavoe to quit his drug habit, Colón fired him, according to Nader. But by then, Lavoe had developed his own fan following, and he was able to leverage this with Fania Records to launch a solo career with his own band.
In 1975, he released an album with an audacious title, La Voz (“The Voice), with the salsa hit “Mi Gente” (“My People”). Lavoe followed this up in 1976 with the album De Ti Depende and continued to build fans with the hit “Periódico de Ayer.”
The cover of his 1978 album Comedia featured Lavoe impersonating silent film star Charlie Chaplin. It was apparent that Lavoe’s playful personality and singing style was gaining force, and Comedia would feature several hits, including “El Cantante” and “Bandolera.”
During this period, he was frequently featured as a guest singer with the Fania All Stars, recording numerous tracks with the band.
In 1979, Lavoe sought help from a Santeria priest for his drug addiction and depression. At her advice, he managed to break his dependence on narcotics by isolating himself for two months and cutting all communication with family and friends, according to Nader.
But the years that followed would challenge Lavoe’s attempts to remain off drugs. In 1985, he was diagnosed with HIV. Then, two years later, his son Hector Jr. was killed in a shooting accident, according to The New York Times. Lavoe tried to commit suicide in 1988, the same year he was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1988 for his recording Lavoe Strikes Back.
“Of all the recordings of Hector Juan Pérez Martínez, Strikes Back is not the one that showcases his best vocal performance,” writes Jaime Torre Torres for Fania Records. “However, in each track, he surrendered his soul. And because of this, it is an album that we will never get tired of listening to over and over again.”
Two weeks prior to Lavoe’s death, Fania released a two-CD set of Lavoe’s best recordings.
Upon news of Lavoe’s passing, New York City musician Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times: “Mr. Lavoe was an incandescent singer, an improviser who used a boyish sound to impart passion. His voice, high and pure, turned the most banal lyrics into pleas, and when he improvised, he moved from clipped, abrupt rhythms to a graceful float that made his singing extraordinarily beautiful.”
Lavoe’s death would initially be reported in the media as a heart attack.
Lavoe’s life story would be featured in the film El Cantante” (2007), with salsa artist Marc Anthony starring in the role of Lavoe and Jennifer Lopez as Lavoe’s wife Puchi. Anthony told Lewis Beale of The New York Times that he grew up in New York listening to Lavoe’s music.
“He was our Bob Dylan,” Anthony said. “He spoke the language of the people. He wasn’t refined, was from the streets. He understood what it was like to be Puerto Rican in this country, to be lucky yet destructive at the same time.”
July 13, 1993
Patrick Lippert of ‘Rock the Vote’ Dies
Patrick Lippert, a well-known Los Angeles political activist, dies of AIDS-related illness at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Marina del Rey. He was 35.
Learn More.
Starting in 1991, Lippert headed the music industry organization Rock the Vote, helping to energize young voters for the 1992 presidential race. In that election, then-Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, a Democrat, defeated the incumbent President George H. W. Bush, a Republican.
Under Lippert, Rock the Vote also played a key role in the passage of the “Motor Voter” bill, a federal law that registers people to vote as they receive or renew their driver’s licenses.
Lippert entered politics in the early 1980s as a volunteer for Tom Hayden’s campaign for California Assembly, representing the Santa Monica district, according to the Los Angeles Times. Lippert then served as director of Network, a political action group created by Hayden and actress Jane Fonda (Hayden’s wife at the time) to organize the entertainment community around progressive causes.
In 1989, Lippert helped launch the Hollywood Policy Center, another politically based entertainment group, and in 1991, he became president of Rock the Vote.
The Rock the Vote campaign, which targeted young voters nationwide through celebrity-studded PSAs on MTV, claimed credit for an 18% increase in turnout in the 1992 election among voters aged 18 to 24.
The campaign was so successful that MTV decided to host an “unofficial” inaugural ball in Washington, D.C. — and the newly-sworn in president, Bill Clinton, surprised everyone by dropping by with his wife and daughter.
At the MTV Inaugural Ball, Lippert was introduced to President Clinton, who then assured him that the “motor voter” bill would be signed into law, according to People magazine.
Lippert was also known for his ability to organize major fundraising events. In 1991, he helped organize the an Academy Awards-viewing party for El Rescate, a Salvadoran refugee aid organization, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 1992, Lippert took his party to the Elton John AIDS Foundation, creating an Oscar night fundraiser so fabulous and successful that Elton John continues to host this party every year.
Jim Owles, Founder of Gay Activists Alliance, Dies
James “Jim” Owles, the founding president of the Gay Activists Alliance and the first openly gay candidate for political office in New York City, dies of AIDS-related illness at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 46.
Learn More.
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.
August 1993
U.S. Launches Two Research Studies Focused on Women
The Women’s Interagency HIV Study and HIV Epidemiology Study begin; both are major U.S. federally funded research studies on women and HIV/AIDS.
Learn More.
The Women’s Interagency HIV Study establishes a multi-center, prospective, observational cohort study of women living in the U.S. who are either HIV-infected or at risk for HIV acquisition.
The program would play an important role in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ effort to understand the current epidemiology of HIV infection, disease progression, treatment use and outcomes, and related co-morbidities among U.S. residents with HIV.
Understanding differences in HIV disease and treatment outcomes between women compared to men, and in different racial and ethnic groups, is a critical public health goal. The clinical research consortium is an integral part of the NIAID portfolio of research on HIV in women.
August 8, 1993
Roy London — Influencial Acting Teacher — Dies
Roy London, a Hollywood acting coach who guided many to stardom, dies of AIDs-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 50.
Learn More.
London was the premier acting teacher in Hollywood. With his profound influence over those who would become famous for their skill in the dramatic arts, he is credited with having a great impact on contemporary acting in films. Many who needed to prepare for demanding roles sought him out, and he was also known for helping develop and shape film projects.
London was an original member and a resident playwright of Circle Repertory Company in Greenwich Village, according to Variety. In the late 1980s, London debuted as a television director with episodes of Showtime’s It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. He also directed episodes of Shandling’s HBO series, The Larry Sanders Show, for which he received a Cable Ace Award nomination.
In 1992, London’s first feature film as a director, Diary of a Hitman, was released, starring Forest Whitaker, Sherilyn Fenn, Sharon Stone and Lois Chiles.
His knowledge of writing, combined with his experience of having acted in over 150 roles on Broadway, Off-Broadway, The Royal Shakespeare Company, feature films and television, led him to discover how to help actors reveal material in dynamic ways that led to exciting performances. London’s classes began in his living room, and spread by word of mouth.
In 1984 he moved to his own studio, but he never put a sign on the door, listed the phone number, advertised the classes nor publicized his teaching. His students have thanked him on the Academy Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, the MTV Movie Awards and more.
A documentary about his work, Special Thanks to Roy London, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. It features interviews with over 50 of his students and friends, including Sharon Stone, Sherilyn Fenn, Jeff Goldblum, Patrick Swayze, Patricia Arquette, Hank Azaria, Geena Davis, Famke Janssen, Garry Shandling, Lanford Wilson, Lois Chiles, Elizabeth Berkley, Drew Carey, and Janel Moloney.
Garry Shandling, Sharon Stone’s long-time friend and fellow student of Roy London’s, presented her with the inaugural Roy London Award in 2007 for her tireless efforts and steadfast commitment to the fight against AIDS.
Keeston Lowery, an aide to Portland Commissioner Michael Lindberg, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 43.
Learn More.
Lowery was a tireless and supremely effective advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights from inside the Portland government. He also worked as a physical therapist for Emanuel Hospital and served on the Board for the Right to Privacy PAC (predecessor to Basic Rights Oregon).
In 1967-68, Lowery worked on Sen. Robert Kennedy’s campaign for President, and shortly afterward, graduated from Mississippi State University’s five-year occupational therapy program. He continued his higher education and earned another degree from the University of Arkansas. He then worked in Pine Bluff and Little Rock, Arkansas, and in the mid-1970s, he took a job with then-Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton.
Lowery moved to Portand, Oregon in 1977 to take a job as a physical therapist for Emanuel Hospital, and quickly became a leader in the local queer community. He became an aide to Portland City Commissioner Mike Lindberg, and immediately used his role in inter-governmental relations and film policy to cultivate advocates for equal rights in all levels of local and state government.
Lowery crafted Portland’s first civil rights ordinance, which banned discrimination based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and several other categories.
“His beaming smile, southern drawl and good will were infectious,” writes the Gay & Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest in its tribute to Lowery. “He was an astute political observer who could intuitively plot winning strategies. His manifold contributions continue to this day, not only in the policies he crafted on behalf of marginalized people, but in memories of all the powerful and empowered people whose lives he touched.”
Lowery’s work on the city’s film production policies and the good will he established with film crews led to his receiving a “thank you” credit on the 1991 film My Own Private Idaho, written and directed by Gus Van Sant.
When Lowery in late August of 1993, Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts and Portland Mayor Vera attended his funeral, held on Sept. 2 in the Rose Gardens at Washington Park, along with numerous members and leaders in the LGBTQIA+ community. Lowery’s ashes were scattered on Mount Hood, a potentially active volcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc, located about 50 miles east-southeast of Portland.
The City of Portand’s archives store Lowery’s papers and artifacts.
Celebrity hairdresser Robin Weir, who visited the White House twice a week to style Nancy Reagan’s hair when she was First Lady, dies of AIDS-related illness at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. He was 45.
Learn More.
Weir was also the hairdresser for other women in the public eye, including Elizabeth Dole, Joan Rivers and Edie Gorme. During official state visits to Washington, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi and Queen Beatrix also received services from Weir, according to United Press International. His business surged because of his association with the First Lady.
Nancy Reagan said in a statement she was “very saddened to hear the news” of Mr. Weir’s death, according to The New York Times. “Robin was not only my hairdresser, but he was also my friend.”
During the Reagan presidency, Weir went to at least one summit conference with the president and helped the Smithsonian Institution stage an exhibit on hairstyles, according to the Los Angeles Times. People magazine called Weir “The Beauty Ambassador.”
In a 1984 interview with Iris Krasnow of UPI, Weir said that people would often pump him for personal information about his celebrity clients, but he was not willing to ruin his reputation by talking.
“People looooove to ask about the personal lives of some of my clients, you know, ‘What’s she reallllly like?'” he told Krasnow. “I say, ‘Well she has moles on her chin and lumps on her head.”
Weir also said he was aware of the jokes about Nancy Reagan’s hairstyle — “like if she falls down, she’ll break her hair.”
But Weir insisted that Mrs. Reagan’s hair was very soft.
“At any time, you can run your fingers through it,” he said. “It’s just that she has very thick, good hair.”
While serving the First Lady, Weir said he charged her $18 for a cut and $18 for a set. He would style her hair in the White House residence in a salon that Weir said was once a playroom for John John and Caroline Kennedy.
When Weir died, all the major media outlets in the U.S. reported on his death.
September 3, 1993
San Francisco Activist Joan Baker Dies
Joan Baker, San Francisco’s first out HIV+ lesbian, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 27. At the time of her passing, she is in her home surrounded by loved ones and her many pets.
Learn More.
In December of 1986, two days before Christmas, Joan Baker received news that she was HIV+. According to a tribute to Baker in Lady Science, she had gotten tested for HIV as an act of solidarity with a friend, not because she thought she was at risk, and her diagnosis was a shock.
The youngest of a large family, Baker was born in 1966 in Riverside, California. Her parents were originally from the U.K. and moved Baker and her siblings several times from southern California to Washington state and then to England in the late 1970s. In 1986, she left her family in England after coming out and returned to California.
She received her HIV+ diagnosis after settling in San Francisco, a city that was fast becoming a model for AIDS care to the world. Unfortunately, the city offered very few services and resources for HIV+ women at that time.
“In 1986, many HIV care providers and activists knew women could contract HIV/AIDS, but this knowledge did not translate to widespread services or research, or compassionate coverage from the media,” according to the article on Lady Science.
HIV+ women — particularly HIV+ lesbians like Baker — were virtually invisible, but Baker fought to change this during the last seven years of her life. Through a friend, she connected with several programs, including the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, where she attended the first ever Women with AIDS support group. Baker never intended to become known for being an HIV+ activist, but to gain access to services, she had to assert a level of visibility.
Baker appeared on local talk shows, promotional materials for pharmaceutical companies and care organizations, and spoke at public events. She attended protests organized by AIDS Action Pledge and ACT UP-San Francisco and carried the “Fighting for Our Lives” banner at the 1988 Candlelight Memorial March. And that same year, during the unfolding of the AIDS Memorial Quilt at the Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, she took part in the reading of the names of people who had died of AIDS emblazoned on the quilt.
Because she was a HIV+ lesbian, Baker was subjected to invasive questions. Some asked if she was an IV-drug user, while others wanted to know whether she had sex with men. Baker’s response to these questions was to challenge people to reimagine what an HIV+ person looks like.
“It doesn’t matter how I got it,” she said. “It’s the fact that I have been diagnosed and I am coming out as a woman with AIDS, because a lot of lesbians still think that they can’t get AIDS, and I’m here to say it can happen.”
By the last year of her life, Baker had built a strong support group and was known and admired by many in the community. After her death in early September 1993, Baker was memorialized with a political funeral and rally at Dolores Park, organized by Lesbian Avengers activist Judith Cohen.
Hundreds of people gathered for the event, including members of ACT UP-Golden Gate and ACT UP-San Francisco, and WORLD, as well as members of the Public Health Department and Lyon-Martin Health HIV Services. The crowd carried signs with images of Baker on them and marched to Harvey Milk Plaza in the Castro neighborhood, escorted by Dykes on Bikes.
Jenn Maeader, Joan’s partner for the last three years of her life, spoke at Milk Plaza about the importance of Baker’ activism and her visibility in the AIDS epidemic, saying, “Imagine if a woman here today who might be at risk now gets tested, and if we can tell her she has a life, she has a future, she has a community that supports her.”
René Klijn, a Dutch singer and model who became famous for talking on a Netherlands TV show about his HIV-positive status, dies in The Hague at the age of 30.
Learn More.
Klijn was a former member of the late 1980s Dutch boyband Bam to Bam Bam and a fashion model who achieved his greatest fame in November 1992 by sharing details about his HIV-positive condition on the Dutch talk show De Schreeuw van De Leeuw.
Klijn was born in The Hague of Indonesian immigrants who put him up for adoption as an infant, according to With Pride. When he was 17 years old, he moved to Amsterdam and began working as a fashion model and background singer.
In the late 1980s, Klijn joined the boyband Bam to Bam Bam, which briefly achieved fame for its single “Like a Locomotion.” In 1990, he left the band to embark on a solo career. But his plans were derailed when he tested positive for HIV. Such was the stigma associated with HIV and AIDS, Klijn decided to isolate himself.
Still, word of Klijn’s condition got out, and The Netherland’s most notorious talk show host, Paul de Leeuw, contacted him about making an episode of De Schreeuw van de Leeuw about AIDS. After initial hesitation, Klijn agreed to be his guest on de Leeuw’s show.
“The most important thing I could do was the program,” Klijn said. “Breaking the taboo … Because as soon as people no longer fear the disease, it becomes a lot more pleasant.”
The entire show focused on Klijn and his illness, and featured appearances by Klijn’s family and healthcare providers. De Leeuw, who was known to invite D-level celebrities to his show for the express purpose of making fun of them, took the liberty of cracking jokes about HIV and AIDS. Some viewers were outraged by de Leeuw’s perceived insensitivity toward Klijn, but other viewers found de Leeuw’s approach to be destigmatizing, according to Netherlands media.
The broadcast was viewed by millions and provided a greater awareness of the disease across The Netherlands. The episode of De Schreeuw van De Leeuw won a Bronze Rose d’Or from the European Broadcasting Union.
At the end of the show, Klijn performed the song “Mr. Blue,” which he subsequently recorded the following year with Candy Dulfer on saxophone and background vocals by Loïs Lane and de Leeuw. It was released as a single in early 1993 and reached No. 1 on the Dutch Single Top 100 and Dutch Top 40 charts. It became the country’s best selling single of the year, with all proceeds donated to an AIDS research foundation.
Klijn also started making a full-length album, but was unable to finish it due to the deterioration of his health.
After his death, the René Klijn Foundation was founded to focus on the prevention of AIDS. Klijn was survived by his partner, Maarten Jansen, who scattered his ashes over the Hudson River in New York.
October 29, 1993
17-year-old Hemophiliac Joins Lawsuit Against Japanese Govt
Ryūhei Kawada joins about 400 other Japanese citizens infected with HIV in a lawsuit alleging that Japan failed to require the use of blood-clotting agents treated with heat to kill viruses.
Learn More.
Diagnosed with hemophilia at the age of six months, Kawada became infected with HIV through the use of virus-contaminated blood products imported from the U.S. When he was 10 years old, Kawada was told by his mother that he was HIV positive.
In 1993, he joined as one of about 400 plaintiffs in the “Tokyo HIV Litigation,” a historic lawsuit in Japan that sought financial compensation and an apology from government officials and blood products providers.
During the court proceedings, most of the plaintiffs testified from behind a screen, so that they could protect their identity from the public, according to the Los Angeles Times. Kawada, however, became one of the few plaintiffs willing to be identified by name and face.
Two years later, at the age of 19, Kawada would win his lawsuit. But around this time, his health began to decline and he began more rigorous HIV therapies.
“We’re not simply dying,” he told Japanese media, “we’re being murdered one by one.”
Within a few years, Kawada would become healthy enough to attend Tokyo Keizai University and then University of Cologne in Germany. In 2000, he returned to Japan to support his mother’s campaign for a seat on the country’s House of Representatives. Following his mother’s election, Kawada became her secretary.
In 2007, Kawada would embark on his own political career. He campaigned for a seat in Japan’s parliament on a promise to bring more transparency and accountability to the country’s Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry — and won.
November 20, 1993
Film Director Emile Ardolino Dies
Emile Ardolino, who won an Oscar for the dance documentary He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’ and directed the hit movies Dirty Dancing and Sister Act, dies at his Bel Air home of AIDS-related illness at the age of 50.
Learn More.
Ardolino gained prominence in the mid-1970s as a producer and director of dance programming on television. In the late ’80s, he made a splash in Hollywood with Dirty Dancing, followed by the hits Three Men and a Little Lady and Sister Act.
Born in New York City, Ardolino performed in several theater productions at New York’s Queens College, and portrayed the character “Boy” in a touring version of The Fantasticks.
After studying dance, he founded Compton-Ardolino Films with Gardner Compton in 1967 and concentrated on documentaries, editing, directing and producing. In 1969, he won a special Obie award for the filmed segments in the daring Broadway musical Oh! Calcutta!
Ardolino’s awards mounted through his efforts for the Dance in America series for PBS. He won his first Emmy for directing Choreography by Balanchine IV in the 1978-79 season and a Directors Guild of America award for The Spellbound Child in the 1980-81 season.
Jacques d’Amboise, a principal dancer with New York’s City Ballet, invited him to direct He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’, detailing the dancer’s work with children. The film won Ardolino not only the Oscar but two more Emmys and a Peabody award.
Ardolino also had a long-term relationship with producer Joseph Papp and translated to television such New York Shakespeare Festival works as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Dance and the Railroad.
His first feature film, 1987’s Dirty Dancing, was a huge box-office success, grossing more than $50 million in its initial U.S. release.
“I do love dance,” Ardolino said in a 1987 interview with The New York Times. “I do love music. It was a script in which the dance was used to move the plot along, to reveal character, and the story didn’t stop; in addition to which, I saw a subtext of body language throughout. So I related to all that immediately.”
December 1, 1993
Memorial Plaques Begin Lining Sidewalks of West Hollywood
Bronze plaques commemorating the fallen from AIDS begin to be embedded in the sidewalks along Santa Monica Boulevard between Fairfax and Doheny, as part of “West Hollywood Palms: A Tribute to Life.”
Learn More.
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.
Rocker Ray Gillen dies from AIDS-related illness in New York at the age of 34.
Learn More.
Gillen was best known as the lead singer for Badlands, which was notable for its 1989 self-titled record and 1991’s Voodoo’s Highway. Gillen also performed with Black Sabbath in the mid-1980s and recorded most of the vocals on Phenomena’s Dream Runner album.
Born in New York and raised in New Jersey, Gillen was still a teenager when he began playing the New Jersey club circuit with various bands, including Quest (1978–80), F-66 (1980–81), Savage, and, most notably, Vendetta and Harlette.
“They were quite good, really, performing a small set of original material sandwiched in between credible renditions of numbers by bands like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, and the like,” said Gillen’s friend Marc Fevre. “But it wasn’t really until 1985, when he joined former Rainbow drummer Bobby Rondinelli’s outfit, ‘Rondinelli,’ that Ray’s career began to take real shape.”
In 1986, Black Sabbath started touring for the Seventh Star album when after only a few shows, singer Glenn Hughes got into a fist-fight and lost his voice due to the related sinus and throat injuries. Gillen stepped in and finished the tour, and then contributed to Black Sabbath’s next album The Eternal Idol. However, Gillen and drummer Eric Singer quit before the album was released.
In 1988, Gillen formed Badlands with Jake E. Lee and Eric Singer and toured until 1992. He first showed HIV symptoms around 1990, when his bandmates began to notice his weight loss.
Lee said he was unaware of Gillen’s diagnosis until a meeting with then-Badlands manager Paul O’Neill, who threatened to tell Atlantic Records about his illness if they fired him. Gillen reportedly said to Lee, “Well, it’s not true, so … fire him.”
“So we did fire him. And he did tell Atlantic Records that,” Lee recounted. “And we got kind of screwed on the second record because of it.”
In 1993, publisher of Metalhammer magazine Wilfried F. Rimensberger invited Gillen to Munich perform in a rock festival that would launch a series of concerts across Europe in 1994. But Gillen would bow out when it became clear that he was too ill to perform. He was hospitalized and died soon after.
In February of 1994, vocalist Glenn Hughes organized a memorial concert in tribute to Gillen with performances by a number of rock luminaries, including singer Sebastian Bach of Skid Row, former Mariah Carey guitarist Paul Pescoe, and Hughes’ own band, Trapeze.
December 5, 1993
Gay Journalist John Rowberry Dies
John W. Rowberry, whose career as a writer, editor and critic in gay publishing spanned 20 years, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home near San Diego. He was 45 years old.
Learn More.
Rowberry was committed to fighting censorship and championing LGBT rights, according to the Bay Area Reporter. He coined the term “gay porn,” to boldly distinguish erotic gay magazines from the closeted term used at the time, “all male.”
Known for his strong creative touch at gay magazines such as Drummer and The Alternate, Rowberry encouraged writers to break new ground in their prose.
On a trip to Texas in 1969, Rowberry met artist Charles R. Musgrave and the two would remain together until Musgrave’s death in 1987 from AIDS-related illness. Rowberry and Musgrave moved from Houston to West Hollywood in 1972, where Rowberry worked for The Advocate and then became editor of Entertainment West.
In 1975, they moved to San Francisco, and Rowberry became editor of Drummer and launched The Alternate. In 1985, he left Alternate Publications to publish special interest magazines targetted at the gay community. After Musgrave died in 1987, Rowberry moved to San Diego and then Las Vegas. He returned to San Diego when his health began to decline.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expands its definition of AIDS, declaring those with T-cell (CD4) counts below 200 to have AIDS.
Learn More.
In a report, the CDC revises its case definition of AIDS to emphasize the clinical importance of the CD4+ T-lymphocyte count in the categorization of HIV-related clinical conditions.
In the same MMWR, CDC adds three new conditions — pulmonary tuberculosis, recurrent pneumonia, and invasive cervical cancer — to the list of clinical indicators of AIDS. These new conditions mean that more women and injection drug users are expected be diagnosed with AIDS.
December 22, 1993
‘Philadelphia’ Opens in Movie Theaters Nationwide
The film Philadelphia starring Tom Hanks as a lawyer with AIDS, opens in theaters. Based on a true story, it is the first major Hollywood film on AIDS.
Learn More.
Filmed on location, Philadelphiaincluded in its cast about 50 people living with AIDS, most of them clients of the Action Wellness healthcare center.
Earning $200 million at the box office and several Oscar nominations, Jonathan Demme’s courtroom drama was a catalyst for conversations, acceptance and other film projects that might never been produced.
Philadelphia was inspired by actual legal cases, including that of Geoffrey Bowers, who was wrongfully terminated from the law firm Baker McKenzie after he developed Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his face, just like movie’s leading character Andrew Beckett, according to Looper.
in addition to the Bowers case, the film drew inspiration from the successful discrimination suit filed by Clarence Cain, according to reporting in the Los Angeles Times. Cain, a Philadelphia lawyer who managed the regional office for a chain of low-cost legal clinics, was fired after he told his supervisor that he had AIDS.
December 27, 1993
Pioneer of AIDS Activism Michael Callen Dies
AIDS movement pioneer Michael Callen dies of AIDS-related illness at Midway Hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 38.
Learn More.
Callen was diagnosed early in the epidemic — 1982 — and he responded by becoming involved in every way he could in promoting the self-empowerment of People With AIDS. In fact, Callen is credited with coining the term “People With AIDS,” and insisted on this term instead of the passive and negative-sounding phrase “AIDS victim” commonly used at the time.
Callen was born in Rising Sun, Indiana and raised in Hamilton, Ohio. He graduated in 1977 from Boston University, which he attended on a music scholarship, and then moved to New York, where he sang in cabarets and with the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus.
He grew into political advocacy after receiving a diagnosis of AIDS in 1982. He became an early proponent of safer-sex practices, writing How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach with Richard Berkowitz, Dr. Joseph A. Sonnabend, and Richard Dworkin in 1983.
Among the very first publications to recommend the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of STDs in men having sex with men, the pamphlet was distributed at gay social establishments throughout New York City — 5,000 copies in its first run.
That same year, Callen was a plaintiff in the nation’s first AIDS discrimination lawsuit, when Dr. Sonnabend, his physician, successfully fought eviction from a Greenwich Village co-op for treating people with AIDS. Also in 1983, Callen was a founding board member of the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in Greenwich Village.
On August 1, 1983, Callen was one of three PWAs who testified before a Congressional subcommittee examining the U.S. government’s response to the AIDS crisis. In his statement before Congress, Callen described how he began to feel ill in 1981 and then was diagnosed in the summer of 1982 after being hospitalized with cryptospordiosis.
“It is very difficult when you pick up newspapers or turn on the television, and you hear that no one has fully recovered from this syndrome, and that 80% of those diagnosed with the syndrome are dead after two years,” he said.
A talented writer, Callen became the first editor of the PWA Coalition Newsline and edited the two-volume set Surviving and Thriving with AIDS, published by the Persons With AIDS Coalition in 1988. From 1988-1989, he was editor of AIDS Forum, and his book, Surviving AIDS, published by Harper/Collins in 1990, received honorable mention from the American Medical Writers Association.
Callen wrote extensively on the subject of the politics of sexuality, his essays regularly appearing in magazines, journals, books, and newspapers, including the Village Voice, The New York Native, and Outweek. He was among the first to give AIDS a human face, by making courageous appearances on TV shows such as Nightline, Good Morning America and 20/20. He also appeared on the talk shows Phil Donahue and Geraldo.
Callen moved from New York to West Hollywood to keep up with his busy TV and film schedule. He can be seen in several films and documentaries, including Philadelphia, Zero Patience, and the HBO documentary Why Am I Gay?
Throughout the years of his illness, Callen had a devoted and caring partner in Richard Dworkin, whom he met in June 1982, when Dworkin answered his classified ad seeking gay musicians.
“I called and Michael answered and said, ‘I happen to be getting together with a bass player tonight, do you want to come over?’ So I said OK and went to his house on Jones Street, and there was the bass player, and Michael had made sorbet,” Dworkin told Tim Murphy of The Body. “And we fell in love that night, and I stayed over. He had a piano and books, and to me that was a draw. He moved in with me in the fall of ’82.”
“Michael accomplished so much in the 11 years between his diagnosis and his demise,” Dworkin wrote in his tribute to Callen on Callen-Lorde, the website for the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in New York City (named for Michael Callen and Audre Lorde).
Dworkin listed Callen’s many achievments, including the founding of the People with AIDS Coalition, the Community Research Initiative, and the People with AIDS Health Group. He also mentioned that Callen performed with The Flirtations, “the world’s first gay male politically correct a cappella group,” plus Dworkin helped Callen record and release two solo albums.
Callen also wrote, along with Oscar winner Peter Allen and Marsha Malamet, the song “Love Don’t Need a Reason” Callen would go on to sing this at numerous events, including AIDS walkathons in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights.
Shortly before his death, Callen completed vocal tracks for 48 new songs, 29 of which were released as a double album, Legacy (winner of four Gay & Lesbian American Music Awards).
Ron Sable, M.D., an AIDS activist who was Assistant Director of the Cook County HIV Primary Care Center, dies of AIDS-related illness in Chicago at the age of 48.
Learn More.
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.”
February 13, 1994
AIDS Activist & Scientist Bruce Voeller Dies
Dr. Bruce Voeller, a specialist on sexually transmitted diseases who was in the forefront of the fight against AIDS, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in Topanga, California. He was 59.
Learn More.
Dr. Voeller was highly regarded as a national authority on AIDS research and the gay-rights movement, according to The New York Times. After helping to found the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) in New York City in 1973, he served as its Executive Director from then until 1978.
During this time, Voeller recruited Jean O’Leary, founder of Lesbian Feminist Liberation, to join him as co-director of NGTF and laid the groundwork for an alliance with lesbian groups. NGTF is now known as the Washington-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Born in Minneapolis in 1934, Voeller pursued a career as a scientist, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College in Oregon and then attending Rockefeller University in New York on a fellowship. At Rockefeller, he earned a doctorate in developmental biology, biochemistry, and developmental genetics in 1961, according to the LGBTQ Archives.
By 1964, Dr. Voeller was 29 years old and already a successful academic. He had been promoted at Rockefeller University from research associate to faculty member. He was also married to a woman and had three children.
As he neared his 30th birthday, he decided to make good on a promise he made to himself: come out as a gay man before he was 30. After disclosing his sexual identity, his wife petitioned for a divorce and sought sole custody of their children, according to Reed Magazine.
Dr. Voeller fought and lost the child custody battle in the lower courts, but appealed and appealed again until the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court — where he won. This case became a legal precedent for gay parents seeking child-visitation rights.
While his child custody case proceeded through the justice system, he published numerous scholarly articles and four books, and was promoted to associate professor in 1966, becoming the youngest person in Rockefeller University’s history to hold that position.
Following his court case win, he left his academic career to devote himself fully to
advocating for gay rights. Already a member of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), Dr. Voeller became its third president during its most active years, according to Reed Magazine. He parted ways with the GAA in 1973, when members began to embrace a more radical, activist approach — with rallies and other public actions — when he wanted to move the GAA toward the mainstream of political discourse.
In 1978, Dr. Voeller founded the Mariposa Education & Research Foundation with Karen DeCrow of the National Organization of Women and Aryeh Neier of the American Civil Liberties Union. Funded primarily by private donations, the foundation set out to conduct formal studies of human sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases.
Soon after, Dr. Voeller was in the forefront of the fight against AIDS. In the early 1980s, he returned to his scientific roots and conducted studies at Hunter College and Cornell University on the effectiveness of different kinds of condoms and spermicides in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. He also coined the term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) after pointing out that the early-80s name for the disease, GRIDD (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Disease), was both inaccurate and stigmatizing, according to Village Preservation.
In 1990, Dr. Voeller coedited the book AIDS and Sex: An Integrated Biomedical and Behavioral Approach, and wrote many papers on the subject. At the time of his death, he was still serving as president of the Mariposa Education and Research Foundation.
Randy Shilts, a U.S. journalist who covered the AIDS epidemic and who authored And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic, dies of AIDS-related illness at age 42.
Learn More.
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.
Derek Jarman — British Film Director & Activist — Dies
Derek Jarman, an LGBTQ rights activist and independent filmmaker, dies of AIDS-related illness at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He was 52.
Learn More.
Best known as the director of low-budget surrealistic films such as Sebastiane (1975), Caravaggio (1986) and Edward II (1991), Jarman was credited with infusing 1970s and 1980s independent British cinema with fresh energy and a provocative point of view. He also directed music videos for the Smiths, Bryan Ferry, Pet Shop Boys, Bob Geldof, Patti Smith, and Marianne Faithful, according to The New York Times.
The imagery and energy of Jarman’s work — which included film, painting and writing — reflected the violently homophobic place that London was during the 1970s and 1980s, British director Neil Bartlett wrotein a 2014 tribute to Jarman in The Guardian.
“Jarman’s films – and later, his activism – were crucial points of reference in my generation’s struggles to endure and enjoy life,” wrote Bartlett. “Even before I had the good fortune to meet him in person, I intuited that here was a true ally, fighting in much the same way as I and my friends and colleagues were to find a way through some very dark times.”
Standing out from the backdrop of British traditionalism, Jarman was frequently regarded as the country’s most avant-garde director.
“Critics drew attention to his radical techniques, including the nonnarrative structure of his films, and his ‘painterly’ style,” arts and culture author Tim Lawrence wrote in AIDS, The Problem of Representation and Plurality in Derek Jarman’s Blue. “Ironically, it was Jarman’s anti-commercialism and the financial restrictions that resulted from this stance that pushed him into adopting these techniques.”
Jarman’s final — and perhaps most daring — film project was Blue, which was released at the Venice Biennale four months before his death. The film is both a serene soundscape (by Simon Fisher Turner) and spoken-word account of Jarman’s experience with AIDS, set against a delphinium blue screen.
Blue was inspired by the ultramarine light Jarman saw as his eyesight deteriorated from AIDS. At the end of the film, Jarman narrates his view of the future:
“Our name will be forgotten, in time, no one will remember our work. Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud … I place the delphinium, blue, upon your grave.”
“By showing us around 70 minutes of a static blue screen, Jarman makes a bold choice to make the viewer confront an unchanging reality while he talks about various issues that haunted him,” Swapnil Dhruv Bose wrote. “He explains the choice in the film itself, claiming that ‘blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.’ It contributes to the construction of a paradoxical experience that is simultaneously clinically cold and vibrantly warm, inherent with all the ironies of the human condition.”
After testing positive for HIV in 1986, Jarman spoke publicly about his diagnosis amid the public panic in England about the virus. The same year, he bought a cottage in Dungeness, Kent for 32,000 pounds (roughly US$48,000). He and his partner, Keith Collins, moved in and Jarman soon began designing a garden there.
After Jarman’s death in 1994, Collins continued to live in the cottage until 2018, when he died of a brain tumor. Concerned that the cottage and its accompanying garden would be sold to a private owner, friends of Jarman and Collins raised the money to buy the property and arranged for an arts charity, the Art Fund, to maintain it, according to Rebecca Mead’s article in The New Yorker.
Among those fundraising friends were actor Tilda Swinton, who got her start in Jarman’s films; David Hockney, whom Jarman befriended in the 1960s; and Sandy Powell, the Academy Award-nominated costume designer (including for her work on Shakespeare in Love [1998], The Aviator [2004], and The Young Victoria [2009]). All told, $4 million was raised to save the property and preserve it as a tribute to Jarman and his work. The garden was clearly important to Jarman and his artistic process throughout his illness.
In a journal about his life at the cottage, Jarman wrote: “It isn’t a gloomy garden. Its circles and squares have humor — a fairy ring for troglodyte pixies — the stones a notation for long-forgotten music, an ancestral round to which I add a few new notes each morning.”
In this same journal, published in 1991 as Modern Nature, Jarman wrote in his characteristically unfettered and upbeat way about his illness and declining health:
“As I sweat it out in the early hours, a ‘guilty victim’ of the scourge, I want to bear witness how happy I am, and will be until the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution. And that I don’t regret a single step or encounter I made in that time; and if I write in future with regret, it will be a reflection of a temporary indisposition.”
Throughout his creative career, Jarman took big risks to make gay life and issues central to his work, according to the Associated Press.
Jarman’s breakout film Sebastiane (1975) was considered radical for its exploration of homosexuality in the life of Saint Sebastian. Also hailed as audacious was Jarman’s decision to have the film’s dialog performed in Latin.
In the 1986 film Caravaggio, Jarman interpreted a defining moment in painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s life — a swordfight which ended in the death of Caravaggio’s opponent — as a lovers’ quarrel turned deadly.
In Edward II (1991), Jarman addressed the king’s intimate liaison with his favorite Piers Gaveston. The film was based on Christopher Marlowe’s 1593 play, a work unusual for its time in openly portraying a gay relationship. It begins with Edward II (portrayed by Steven Waddington) and Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan), lounging on a bed, while two sailors are seen having sex nearby.
“Next, a naked man crowned in gold kisses a great big snake,” historian and screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann wrote in The Guardian in his tongue-in-cheek exploration of the historical basis of Jarman’s film. “If you look very closely, you may detect an extremely subtle hint of homoeroticism here.”
Jarman was bold in his work and also in his advocacy for gay rights. According to The Washington Post in its obituary for Jarman, the film director voiced his disapproval of openly gay actor Ian McKellen accepting a knighthood from the queen, because the country’s conservative government had recently adopted anti-gay legislation.
“As a queer artist, I find it impossible to react with anything but dismay to his acceptance of the honor from a government which has stigmatized homosexuality,” Jarman wrote in The Guardian in January 1991.
“Maybe Ian McKellen will use this knighthood to try to influence the government. But I’m not at all certain. I think it’s a co-option and allows anyone to say: ‘The Tory Party isn’t so bad. It’s not really anti-gay. After all it gave Ian McKellen a knighthood.’ And he fell for them and accepted,” Jarman wrote.
For Jarman, it was important to raise awareness about the realities of HIV and AIDS, albeit while maintaining a degree of dark humor about it, because these political gestures were necessary to break through the homophobic stigma surrounding AIDS in society.
“Derek Jarman refused to live, work, or die quietly,” wrote the Thames and Hudson museum on its website. “A prolific artist and activist, he defined the bohemian ’60s in London, blazed into the queer punk scene of the 1970s, and went on to wield his colossal creativity and pride against the stigma and fear of the AIDS epidemic.”
At the time of his death in 1994, Jarman had produced 11 feature films, 10 books, hundreds of paintings, dozens of experimental short films, several music videos – and one fantastical garden.
Dack Rambo, an actor best remembered for playing Jack Ewing in 51 episodes of the TV show Dallas, dies of AIDS-related illness at Delano Regional Medical Center in California at the age of 52.
Learn More.
Rambo had a long list of TV credits spanning four decades and also roles in ten feature films.
Even if you couldn’t name the actor who was born Norman Jay Rambo, his face was beyond familiar to TV viewers of the 1980s, owing to appearances on everything from Charlie’s Angels to Murder, She Wrote. He held a special place in the hearts of soap fans, thanks to his roles on All My Children and Dallas.
He started his TV career with his twin brother in The Loretta Young Show. Both he and his brother played the character Peter Massey, one of seven children being raised by the widowed Christine Massey, played by Loretta Young.
He and his brother later sang as the Rambo Twins, styling themselves after the Everly Brothers, but the act ended in 1967 when his brother was killed at the age of 24 in a car accident.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Rambo made guest appearances on Marcus Welby, M.D.;House Calls;Wonder Woman;Fantasy Island; and The Love Boat. He also acted the lead role in Sword of Justice in 1978-79, and played Wesley Harper on the 1984 TV series Paper Dolls.
While working on Another World in August 1991, Rambo learned that he was infected with HIV.
He was in his dressing room that morning, preparing for his scenes, when the phone call came. After receiving his diagnosis, he put down the phone, went to the set and proceeded to tape his 40 or 50 pages of lines for the day’s work. Then he walked out of the New York studio that Friday afternoon before Labor Day and never went back.
Rambo then flew home to the San Joaquin town of Earlimart, not far from where he grew up. He broke the news to his sister, Beverly, 48, and his mother, Beatrice, 82, according to People magazine. Both took the news hard.
“At first I was totally devastated,” Beverly told People. “We lost one brother, and I didn’t think I could live with losing another.”
Retreating to his Earlimart ranch, Rambo spent the next three weeks in bed, he says, “wallowing in self-pity.”
“First of all, I was scared,” he told The Washington Post. “I felt a lot of anger and a lot of rage. And actually wanting to die. But all those things were short-lived.”
He took time to determine what he wanted to do next. He decided to go public with his HIV-positive diagnosis and released a statement announcing that he had the AIDS virus and would devote himself to working for the cause of AIDS education and research.
Rambo was among the first well-known actors to disclose his HIV status. In an interview with the Los Angles Times shortly after his announcement, he disclosed that he was bisexual and talked about feeling on the set of Dallas that he was suspected of being gay and vulnerable to AIDS.
“I knew there were whispers going on behind my back,” he said. “Either ‘he’s gay’ or ‘he’s this or ….’ People were just assuming. And people didn’t really know anything about my private life.”
He said he adopted a healthier lifestyle and even stopped dying his hair, which had been graying since he was 30 years old.
“I don’t drink anymore … I really baby myself and I’m very selfish with myself,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to interfere with me taking care of myself.”
He said he regularly sought advice on nutrition, read everything he could on AIDS and followed the conventional wisdom of treating the virus before it could become a full-blown disease. He said he had yet to suffer any symptoms of AIDS and was in ongoing discussions with doctors about what medications he should take.
Around that time, Rambo began volunteering with APLA (AIDS Project Los Angeles), one of the largest AIDS service providers in the country.
“He’s very committed to this,” said Anthony Sprauve, director of communications for APLA.
Shortly afterward, Rambo developed an AIDS-related cancer and underwent chemotherapy. He also turned to holistic treatment, according to People magazine. In the summer of 1993, he thought he’d halted the virus through prayer.
“There is no disease that cannot be healed,” he said then. “I will believe that until the day I drop.”
His song, “I Can Dream About You,” reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984 and No. 12 on the UK Singles Chart in 1985. The James Brown song “Living in America,” which Hartman co-wrote and produced, was even more successful, reaching No. 4 in March 1986.
Hartman worked with veteran singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka, who lived near him in Westport. Hartman would invite Sedaka to his home studio to record.
“I was proud to have recorded two LP’s with him,” Sedaka said. “He was so respected, that he was able to get such luminaries as Edgar Winter, Rick Derringer, Mary Wilson, Ashford & Simpson, and Gary U.S. Bonds to join me on several duets.”
Hartman’s longtime friend Glenn Ellison told the website Memories of Dan Hartman: “Dan was the genuine article, full of passion and joy for just living. He definitely has a spiritual side, that wasn’t so religious, as it was about the soul, and how to make the most out of the time we have on earth.”
Ellison said he and Hartman met in January 1984 on a plane travelling from New York to Los Angeles. Two months later, Ellison got a job offer in New York, and Hartman invited him to live in his house until he found a place of his own.
“I was in and out of Westport for the next 10 years,” Ellison said.
One of Ellison’s favorite memories was Hartman’s European tour when “I Can Dream About You” was climbing the charts. He noticed that every time Hartman sang the song, crowds would respond by singing and dancing with him.
“When you hear the song today, there is the same response. It is an all-time pop masterpiece,” he said.
Hartman was diagnosed with HIV in the late 1980s, and kept his HIV status a secret and supposedly did not seek treatment, even after friend and intermittent collaborator Holly Johnson (formerly of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood) announced his own HIV status in 1991.
In 1993, Hartman’s health declined and he was in and out of the hospital. Ellison had returned to California a few years before and was able to see Hartman only periodically.
“As fate would have it, in December, I was out of a job so I flew back and spent the entire month at his newly remodelled home. We had the greatest time of our ten-year friendship,” Ellison recalled. “He rallied and seemed to be making a full recovery. We turned the house into a Christmas fantasy, saw all the holiday shows in Manhattan and laughed 24/7. When I flew back to LA on New Year’s Day, I thought he would live forever.”
British figure skater and Olympic gold medalist John Curry dies of AIDS-related illness in Binton, Warwickshire, at the age of 44.
Learn More.
As a young child, Curry became a skater because his parents wouldn’t let him study dance. But when Curry was 16 years old, his father committed suicide, and two years later, Curry began training in ballet in addition to skating.
His dedication to both arts resulted in a distinctive skating style and this eventually brought him to the Olympic Winter Games at Innsbruck in February 1976, where he won the gold medal.
“Already in the lead after the first two sections of his event, [Curry] skated a program that was superb in its cool beauty of movement,” wrote Dennis L. Bird, a culture writer for the UK publication Independent. “There were three immaculate triple jumps, and the whole performance was a perfect blend of athletic skating and musical interpretation. Leon Minkus’s ballet Don Quixote had surely never inspired such artistry.”
Following the 1976 World Championships, Curry turned professional and founded a skating company. For about 10 years, he choreographed routines for the company and toured his skaters much like a traditional dance company.
In early November 1987, Curry dazzled the audience with two performances at ”Skating for Life – A Celebration of Champions,” an AIDS benefit show in New York City. His first appearance was a solo performance that incorporated mime and dance with skating, and he skated again in a romantic duet with U.S. champion skater Judy Blumberg.
“The image of Mr. Curry as the epitome of a ballroom dancer is new,” wrote New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff. “But unwinding in and out of embraces, he and Miss Blumberg, a first-rate dramatic skater, made for a picture in tenderness.”
Curry’s final public performance would be later that month in “Ice Stars’ Hollywood Revue,” a CBS special.
In December 1987, Curry was diagnosed with HIV, and in mid-1991 with AIDS. In October 1992, he gave an interview to the London Mail in which he spoke about both his disease and his sexual orientation.
“My whole circle of friends died. I don’t mean lovers, but I’m talking about people you go to the theater or to dinner with,” he told the Mail.
Following Curry’s death, Dennis L. Bird wrote in the Independent:
“The word ‘genius’ should be used sparingly, but it is entirely justified in relation to John Curry. To the prescribed disciplines of ice-skating he brought a free-ranging artistry, an innovative imagination and musical sensitivity, which in effect created a new art-form: the re-interpretation of some of the great composers in terms of movement on ice.
“He was not the first in this field. Arthur Cumming in 1914, Gillis Grafstrom in the 1920s, the 1952 world champion Jacqueline du Bief, and Curry’s own contemporary Toller Cranston had all emphasized the artistic aspects of skating. But Curry developed this to a greater extent than any of them.”
Curry is still remembered as one of the greatest stylists and artists in figure-skating history.
May 6, 1994
‘Life AIDS Lobby Days’ Commemorated in San Diego
The City of San Diego proclaims May 6-16 to be “Life AIDS Lobby Days” in recognition of the HIV/AIDS advocacy coalition’s achievements in shaping state policy regarding treatment programs and nondiscrimination laws.
Learn More.
The Life AIDS Lobby, also known as the Lobby for Individual Freedom and Equality, was formed in 1986 in California to coordinate, develop and promote the statewide legislative agenda for providing compassionate and comprehensive healthcare for the HIV/AIDS impacted community.
More than 100 organizations, from LGBTQ and political clubs to unions and religious groups, joined together to represent the HIV/AIDS community and provide guidance to California legislators in crafting HIV/AIDS policies.
The San Diego affiliates of the Life AIDS Lobby were the AIDS Foundation San Diego, Being Alive San Diego, the First Unitarian Church of San Diego, the Greater San Diego Business Association, the Lesbian and Gay Men’s Community Center, and the San Diego Democratic Club.
May 10, 1994
Washington DC AIDS Activist Stephen Smith Dies
Stephen C. Smith, 37, an AIDS activist who lobbied on behalf of federal legislation affecting people with HIV/AIDS, died of AIDS-related illness at the Hospice of Washington at the age of 37.
Learn More.
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.
Assotto Saint, a Haitian-born poet and performance artist, dies of AIDS-related illness in New York City at the age of 36.
Learn More.
Among the first Black activists to disclose his HIV positive status, Saint was one of the first poets to include the subject of AIDS in his work. He was also a performance artist, musician, editor, human rights and AIDS activist, theatrical founder, and dancer.
After immigrating from Haiti to New York in 1970 when he was 13 years old, Saint graduated from Jamaica High School and was briefly enrolled as a pre-med student at Queens College. Soon, however, he turned his attention to theater and dance, and adopted the name Assotto Saint —“Assotto” for a ceremonial drum used in Haitian vodoo rituals and “Saint” for Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture. Through the 1970s, Saint’s passions grew to include poetry, music, and fiction.
In 1980, Saint fell in love with Jaan Urban Holmgren, a Swedish-born composer, and they began to collaborate on a number of theatrical and musical projects. Their relationship would last 14 years, during which time Holmgren would write songs for Saint’s many theater pieces on gay Black life, including including Risin’ to the Love We Needand New Love Song. Saint was the founder and artistic director of Metamorphosis Theater, where many of their collaborative pieces were performed.
“Assotto was always prepared to die,” writes author Victoria Brownworth for Lambda Literary. “If that makes him sound like a fatalist or a Zen master, he was neither. He was just clear about what was going to happen. And he knew the work had to be done and quickly, urgently, before time ran out.”
Here is the beginning of Saint’s final poem for his life-partner, Jan Holmgren, who was dying of AIDS:
A Lover’s Diary
monday, march 29, 1993
-01-
vigil on two chairs
iwhisper “hey, good morning”
he doesn’t respond
iwatch his labored breathings
the head nurse suctions him up
-02-
“he’s turned for the worse”
dr mcmeeking mumbles
weeks, days, just can’t tell
“hours” insists my mother
furious iescort her out
-03-
the oscars come on
the crying game stars don’t win
hoping he can hear
iremind him he’s my light
death rattles my scream for help
-04-
the nurse rushes in
mother returns with prayers
icradle him close
pleading “stay, one more day, stay”
eleven twenty, he’s gone
-05-
bathe him with my tears
parched lips thirst for a wet
kiss
istick my tongue deep
bitter taste of bloody phlegm
moans spat out ishut his eyes
July 1, 1994
‘Radical Faerie’ Barry Cundiff Dies
Barry Cundiff, a member of the leather-faerie community in San Francisco, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 44.
Learn More.
Known in the leather-faerie community as “Daddy Bear Rings,” Cundiff helped fuse the local Radical Faerie and leather movements with the group Black Leather Wings. Gay men, lesbians and other leather enthusiasts created the group as a place where they could combine radical sexuality with spiritual growth.
Cundiff attended his first Radical Faeries meeting in 1982 and also joined the Kathar Sissies, a faerie-inspired group devoted to spiritual healing through erotic ritual.
Born in Kansas, Cundiff relocated to San Francisco in the late 1970s after living for a few years in Los Angeles.
Researchers Recommend AZT to Prevent Mother-to-Infant Transmission
The U.S. Public Health Service recommends that pregnant women be given the antiretroviral drug AZT to reduce the risk of perinatal transmission of HIV.
Learn More.
Following a workshop to develop recommendations for the use of AZT with HIV-infected women who are pregnant, the Public Health Service determines that AZT administered to a selected group of HIV-infected women and their infants is successful in reducing the risk of HIV transmission by approximately 66%.
In its report, the Public Health Service states that because the clinical status of many HIV-infected women may differ from that of the women in the trial, the recommendations should be tailored to each woman’s clinical situation.
“The potential benefits, unknown long-term effects, and gaps in knowledge about her specific clinical situation must be discussed with the woman,” the report states. “This information is intended to provide a basis for discussion between the woman and her healthcare provider so that the woman can weigh the risks and benefits of such therapy and make informed decisions about her treatment.”
August 6, 1994
Surrealist Steven Arnold Dies
Steven Arnold, a multidisciplinary artist and protégé of Salvador Dali, dies of AIDS-related illness in West Hollywood. He was 51.
Learn More.
Out of the fantastical dreamscape of “Zanzabar,” his Los Angeles studio, Steven Arnold created photography, drawings, paintings, makeup design, costume design and set design. He also produced two films, one of which was Luminous Procuress (1971), which starred his childhood friend Pandora in the title role and featured the San Francisco-based gender-bending performers The Cockettes.
“Arnold seamlessly weaved celebrity, glamour, and camp theatricality with ancient ritual, two-spirit philosophy, and eastern art into a majestic Baroque-inspired tableaux,” said culture writer Miss Rosen in her Another Man article, “Steven Arnold, the Queer Mystic Who Shaped 1960s Counterculture.”
Born in Oakland, California in 1943, Arnold would spend hours in the attic of his childhood home, using old costumes and props from a vaudevillian uncle to create his own personal art spectacle, according to Miss Rosen.
In high school, he befriended another student, Pandora, who would become his lifelong friend and collaborator It was also at Oakland Technical High School where the art teacher, Violet Chew, took Arnold under her wing and introduced him to Eastern spiritual traditions, art history, and fashion.
By the early 1960s, Arnold had developed a style that influenced those around him in the Bay Area and that would eventually catch on with the emerging counterculture coast-to-coast but particularly in San Francisco.
“I believe it was Steven who actually initiated hippie dress in San Francisco, long before it was fashionable,” artist Ira Yeager said. “He always wore vintage clothing, carried a cane, top hat, spats, and was always decorated with loads of rings and jewelry.”
In the mid-60s, Arnold was awarded a full scholarship to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, and there he created two films – Messages, Messages (1968) and Luminous Procuress (1971) – that are now considered groundbreaking works of cinema.
His first film was premiered at the St. Regis Hotel in New York by iconic surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and was subsequently invited to Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. Eager to make a big splash in his hometown, Arnold rented the Palace Theatre in San Francisco’s North Beach for the film’s premiere in February 1968, selling 2,000 tickets on opening night.
Following the success of his film screening, Arnold began hosting the “Nocturnal Dreamshow,” a weekly cult movie night at the Palace Theatre in San Francisco that established the “midnight movies” tradition, according to Tyler Akers of Gayletter magazine.
It was here that “The Cockettes” first performed and introduced audiences to outrageous displays of gender fluidity and non-binary presentation.
“Arnold celebrated the idea that male and female are both part of the whole human experience in each of us, like yin and yang,” wrote Akers in Gayletter. “In interviews, he would often discuss the Zen teachings of Eastern philosophies as well as the Native American idea of ‘two-spirit’ people and Carl Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious.”
Arnold’s second film, Luminous Procuress, also brought critical acclaim, and he was honored with the New Director Award at the 1972 San Francisco International Film Festival. He was also invited to New York to exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
After graduating with a Masters of Fine Art, Arnold left the Bay Area to establish a studio in Los Angeles on Beverly Boulevard near North Virgil Avenue. Soon he was inviting friends and acquaintances over so he could dress them up as deities and mystics, and photograph them.
He issued three photographic collections: Angels of Night (1987), Epiphanies (1987), and Reliquaries (1983). A fourth collection, Theophonies, was released posthumously as a photographic exhibit in 2022.
The Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, which exhibited Theophonies, issued a press release that included this description of Arnold’s photographic process:
“Steven Arnold’s tableau photography represents a confluence of his myriad other disciplines. After sketching storyboards inspired by his dreams, a habit from his filmmaking days, Arnold would craft his tableaus using cardboard, seamless paper, metallic and patterned fabrics, cut paper, paint, and selections from his obsessive collection of antiques, costumes, make-up, and dime store finds. Finally, he would dress, paint, and pose his models within his tableau, bringing his vision to life, then captured with his Hasselblad, often utilizing multiple exposures.”
Today, Arnold’s photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Cincinnati Art Museum, according to The New York Times.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Joel Harrison, Founder of Hudson Rep Dance Theater, Dies
Joel Harrison, an Alvin Ailey protégé who founded the Hudson Repertory Dance Theater, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 47.
Learn More.
After spending much of the 1970s and early 1980s dancing with Alvin Ailey’s company in New York, the New York City and San Francisco Opera Ballets, the National Ballet of Venezuela. and the Carlos Carvajal’s Dance Spectrum in the Bay Area, Harrison returned to his hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey and founded the Hudson Repertory Dance Theater in 1983.
Harrison said he was inspired to create his own dance company by Arthur Mitchell, the New York City ballet dancer who created the Dance Theater of Harlem, according an interview with The New York Times.
“The whole premise of the company is to create a facility for minority artists from all cultural backgrounds,” Harrison told Barbara Gilford of The Times, ”and to mount and show their work – whether dancers, choreographers, musicians or composers.”
In the forming of his dance company, Harrison strove to create a microcosm of the racial and ethnic diversity of Hudson County. The result was a company that included Japanese, Chinese, Black, Hispanic and white dancers.
Located in the Barrow Mansion, a large, white Greek Revival-style building on Wayne Street in Jersey City, the Hudson Repertory Dance Theater held classes for its 75 students as well as rehearsals and performances.
The company’s most popular show occurred in December, with Harrison’s annual production of Ebenezer’s Dream, a ballet based on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In 1988, Harrison began holding performances at the Park Theater in Union City, New Jersey.
“We have to educate, especially in Hudson County, and create an impact on the population here,” Mr. Harrison said.
Harrison’s aunt, N. Beatrice Worthy, recalled the day she realized her nephew had a talent for dance.
“One Saturday morning, I was cleaning my room and had gone into another room to get something. When I got back, Odessa’s son Joel, who was about five or six years old, was dancing to one of the records I had on my record player — Brahms or something. He didn’t know I was watching him, but I was so amazed at how he could dance,” she told Karen Leahy of The New Sun. “I didn’t say anything to him, but I went to his mother and said, ‘You have got to put that child in dance school!'”
Harrison became a dedicated student of classical ballet at the American Ballet Theater School and at Juilliard. He undertook additional studies in modern dance at the Merce Cunningham Studio and with Alwin Nikolais, according to The Times.
Harrison’s Aunt Beatrice said that she was also there to help her nephew create the Hudson Repertory Dance Theater, and she was pleased to see that he had grown up to be a man with a generosity of spirit.
“When he was running the dance school, there was a little fellow whose mother couldn’t afford to pay the 25 cents for dance classes, but he would go along with a friend of his and stand in the corner to watch,” Worthy recalled. “Joel turned around and saw the boy trying to do what the others were doing, so he brought him in and let him take classes without charge.”
Following Harrison’s death, Worthy became head of the Hudson Repertory Dance School.
“Of all the things I’ve done in my lifetime, I think I’m proudest of the dance school,” she said.
Billy Wilson, the director and choreographer of Bubbling Brown Sugar and other Broadway musicals, dies of AIDS-related illness at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 59.
Learn More.
“Wilson was known as an experienced and dependable director who injected extra life and energy into his productions, adding small, telling details and encouraging performers to be more expressive than they believed they were,” according to New York Times art critic Jennifer Dunning.
In a 1976 interview in The Times, he described the process of turning Guys and Dolls into a Black musical as something “like taking chicken soup and making it a little more gumbo.”
Born William Adolphus Wilson, he was raised in Philadelphia and received a scholarship at 15 to study classical ballet with Anthony Tudor. He made his New York debut at age 19 in the City Center production of Carmen Jones and went on to dance on Broadway in Bells are Ringing and Jamaica.
He went to London to perform in a production of West Side Story, and remained in Europe for 10 years. From 1961 to 1965, he was a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet, where he starred in Othello, a ballet created for him by Serge Lifar.
He returned to the U.S. an international ballet star.
On Broadway, Wilson choreographed and staged shows that included Eubie, for which he shared credit with Henry Le Tang; Merlin; a production of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off with Sammy Davis Jr.; and Alan J. Lerner’s last Broadway show, Dance a Little Closer, along with the 1976 hit Bubbling Brown Sugar.
He was nominated for three Tony Awards, and he directed and choreographed the all-black production of Guys and Dolls in 1976 and choreographed the Emmy Award-winning television show Zoom.
He married Sonia van Beers, a fellow dancer, and became father to a daughter, Alexis, and son, Parker.
In the late 1970s, Wilson became life partners with Chip Garnett, and they remained together for 18 years, until Garnett died. Wilson would die just six months later.
October 27, 1994
Dave Johnson, First AIDS Coordinator for Los Angeles, Dies
Dave Johnson, who in 1989 became the first AIDS coordinator for the City of Los Angeles, dies of AIDS-related illness at the Chris Brownlie Hospice. He was 39 years old.
Learn More.
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.
Pedro Zamora, an HIV-positive man appearing in MTV’s popular show The Real World, dies of AIDS-related illness at age 22.
Learn More.
As one of the first openly gay men with AIDS in media, Zamora brings international attention to HIV/AIDS and LGBT issues and prejudices through his appearance on MTV’s reality television series, The Real World: San Francisco.
Zamora’s commitment ceremony to his partner Sean Sasser, which is filmed for the show, is also the first same-sex ceremony in television history. Zamora dies just hours after the finale of The Real World: San Francisco aired on MTV.
Gina Brown, who was informed simultaneously by her doctor that she was HIV positive and pregnant, gives birth to an HIV-negative daughter, Jamanii, after entering an AZT research trial in New Orleans.
Learn More.
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.
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.
December 3, 1994
Pediatric AIDS Activist Elizabeth Glaser Dies
Elizabeth Glaser, founder of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 47.
Learn More.
Glaser contracted HIV in a blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth to her daughter, Ariel. She and her husband, Paul, would learn four years later that she was HIV+ and she had unknowingly passed the virus on to Ariel through breast milk and that their son, Jake, had contracted the virus in utero.
The Glasers pulled their daughter out of school, fearful of media exposure and ostracism imposed by parents of other students. Newspapers in 1985 were filled with stories about the plight of Ryan White in Kokomo, Indiana, and the three Ray brothers in Arcadia, Florida — all hemophiliacs who, having been infected with the AIDS virus by blood transfusions, had been ostracized and barred from their schools.
Ariel Glaser had developed AIDS at a time when the medical community knew very little about the disease, and there were no available treatment options for children. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration finally approved AZT in early 1987 as an effective drug to extend the lives of AIDS patients, but the approval only extended to adults. With their daughter’s condition rapidly deteriorating, the Glasers fought to have her treated with AZT intravenously. However, the treatment came too late, and Ariel died in the summer of 1988, shortly after her seventh birthday.
Elizabeth Glaser went to Washington to do research on AIDS at the National Institutes of Health and found that people in power were willing to listen to her story. She was able to mobilize legislators like Senators Orrin Hatch and Howard Metzenbaum to co-sponsor a fund-raising benefit in Washington for her new organization, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
With the help of her friends Susie Zeegen and Susan De Laurentis, Glaser created the foundation to raise money for basic pediatric research. The foundation also supported additional clinical tests for the medication AZT, which was prescribed for adults years before it was given to children.
In 1994, to honor Glaser’s legacy, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation was renamed the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. EGPAF has become the leading global nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing pediatric HIV infection and eliminating pediatric AIDS through research, advocacy, and prevention and treatment programs. Another important legacy of Glaser’s is her son, Jake, who is now a healthy adult who advocates for pediatric research.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves an oral HIV test, the first non-blood-based antibody test for HIV.
Learn More.
FDA says the test, which uses fluid from the mouth instead of blood, will be available only from doctors and will be administered only by people trained to do so.
“As long as a positive test is followed up with a blood test and as long as there is appropriate counseling available, it is a reasonable thing to do,” Dr. Jeff Lawrence tells The New York Times. Dr. Lawrence is a consultant to the American Foundation for AIDS Research.
Studies show that for every 100 people infected with HIV, the oral-fluid-based test will miss one or two, and for every 100 people who are not infected, test results will be incorrectly positive for approximately two people.
December 1994
AIDS Becomes Leading Killer of Americans Aged 25-44
AIDS becomes the leading cause of death among all Americans aged 25 to 44, new Federal data shows.
Learn More.
By the end of 1994, more than 440,000 cases of AIDS, including more than 6,000 among children, are reported since the epidemic was first recognized in 1981.
More than 250,000 people are already dead from AIDS or AIDS-related causes.
About 75% of all cases have been reported in the 25-to-44 age group.
January 2, 1995
Keith McDaniel, Alvin Ailey Soloist, Dies
Keith McDaniel, who was a principal artist with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and on Broadway, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Los Angeles home at the age of 38.
Learn More.
Film and stage superstar Shirley MacLaine said of McDaniel: “He was dynamic, strong, and possessed a muscled body that inspired awe on the stage.”
A Chicago native, McDaniel was known around the world as a master of modern dance technique and for his ability to stand out onstage “for the quiet radiance he brought to all his roles,” according to art critic Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times.
He began his career in 1975 with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where he performed as a naïve youngster in Donald McKayle’s District Storyville and Talley Beatty’s Stack-Up. McDaniel transitioned seamlessly to more mature roles, like the sensual lover in Elisa Monte’s Treading and the ecstatic baptismal celebrant in Ailey’s Revelations.
After he leaving the Ailey Company in 1983, he appeared on Broadway in Leader of the Pack, and then Kiss of the Spider Woman as a lead dancer and dance captain, partnering with Chita Rivera.
McDaniel moved to Los Angeles to work in film, television and music videos, appearing in Beaches, Great Balls of Fire, The Lady Killers, and Basic Instinct. On television, he was seen on the Tracey Ullman Show, Moonlighting, and several Academy Awards broadcasts.
“He was,” remembered Matt Tapscott, his partner, “a very kind, caring, loving and spiritual person who was totally committed to his career and his family.”
Gary Kalkin, a top executive at Walt Disney Studios who guided the marketing campaigns for Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in Los Angeles. He was 44.
Learn More.
As senior vice president of domestic marketing for Buena Vista Pictures Marketing, Kalkin supervised promotion, advertising and publicity campaigns for Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures as well as Disney. Kalkin also played a creative role in promoting Disney’s Broadway stage version of Beauty and the Beast.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Walt Disney studios, said that Mr. Kalkin also guided the campaigns for the hits Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Good Morning, Vietnam and Pretty Woman. Despite his illness, Kalkin helped supervise the marketing of the Tim Allen comedy The Santa Clause, which emerged as one of the most successful films of 1994.
The New York-based act solidified their white-hot status when they won the 1991 Billboard Award for Best New Pop Artist, beating out Boyz II Men, Color Me Badd, EMF and others. After performing an elaborately choreographed medley of their hits, Cole and Clivillés along with vocalists Zelma Davis and Freedom Williams assembled at the podium to accept their award. It was one of the last appearances C&C Music Factory would ever make together.
Cole and Clivillés met in the mid 80s, when both were DJing at New York City clubs. Before they had their big break with “Make You Sweat,” they worked behind-the-scenes, co-writing and producing songs for artists like Chaka Khan and Grace Jones, co-producing remixes, and acting as managers for various groups. Together, they wrote and produced four songs on Mariah Carey’s 1991 album Emotions, including the smash hit title track.
Cole’s success continued to climb as he continued to produce mega-hits with Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, and many top musical acts of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Cole won a Grammy for the soundtrack for the hit movie The Bodyguard(1992) starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston.
Cole died on January 24, 1995 from spinal meningitis brought on by HIV at the age of 32.
Mariah Carey wrote the song “One Sweet Day” in memory of Cole.
“He was one of the only people I used to have in the studio when I would sing, because I respected him as a singer. He would push me in different areas where he could actually sing it to me and I would be like, ‘Oh, this is cool. I like that’ … Half the time, I would lose my voice afterwards, because he would just push me.”
“I remember watching MTV when the news of David’s death broke. The realization that fame and talent could not and would not protect the young and talented knocked the wind out of me. Even now as an adult, I am still saddened by the loss of such a brilliant artist. David Cole, in his all too brief time on this planet, blessed us with a catalog of music that has and will continue to inspire generations. Rest well, David. May you forever dance in peace!”
January 30, 1995
Bay Area AIDS Fundraiser Joseph Hollinger Dies
Joseph Hollinger, a lifelong Bay Area resident who organized several AIDS fundraisers and leather pride parade floats, dies of AIDS-related illness at his mother’s home. He was 32.
Learn More.
Hollinger and his partner, Rodney Barnal, operated a landscaping business in Santa Cruz. When Barnal died of AIDS-related illness in 1988, Hollinger maintained the business until his own health began to decline in 1993, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
In 1990, Hollinger won the title of Mr. San Francisco Eagle Leather and placed third at the International Mr. Leather competition. He wrote a widely-read leather column for the Sentinel and was nominated for a Cable Car award for his work.
February 4, 1995
San Francisco Political Organizer Scott Smith Dies
Scott Smith, a gay rights activist best known for his romantic relationship with Harvey Milk, dies of AIDS-related illness at San Francisco General Hospital at the age of 46.
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.
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 early 1980s, Smith left the world of politics and started afresh as a travel agent, according to SFGATE. He continued to work on the Harvey Milk Archives, earning the nickname of “The Widow Milk” from his friends.
On January 21, 1995, just weeks before his death, Smith attended the world premiere of the Houston Grand Opera’s Harvey Milk, by librettist Michael Korie and composer Stewart Wallace. Smith was well-known as an opera buff, a passion he had shared with Milk. The afternoon before the opening, Smith took part in a panel discussion and traded reminiscences with five others who personally knew Milk.
When news of Smith’s death reached the Houston Grand Opera, they dedicated the final performances of Harvey Milks’ run to Smith. The opera, in which Smith appeared as a principal character, would be reprised at the San Francisco Opera in late 1996.
Following Smith’s death, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, acting on a resolution by Supervisor Tom Ammiano, adjourned its meeting in Smith’s memory. A potluck party was held to celebrate Smith’s life, fittingly, at the photography studio of longtime friend Danny Nicoletta. Nicoletta had worked in Smith and Milk’s camera shop in the 1970s.
In the 2008 feature film Milk, the role of Scott Smith was played by James Franco.
February 10, 1995
Writer-Activist Paul Monette Dies
Paul Monette, author of the award-winning Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, dies at his home in West Hollywood of AIDS-related illness at the age of 49.
Learn More.
Borrowed Time chronicles Monette’s experience caring for his partner Roger Horwitz during his fight with AIDS and eventual death from AIDS. The memoir details the final nineteen months of Horwitz’s life, beginning with the day that he was first diagnosed with AIDS, which Monette describtes as “the day we began to live on the moon.”
Born in 1945 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Monette was educated at prestigious schools in New England: Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University, where he received his B.A. in 1967. Soon after graduating from Yale, he began a prolific writing career, and for eight years, he wrote poetry exclusively.
After coming out in his late twenties, he met Roger Horwitz, who was to be his lover for over twenty years. At around this time, he grew disillusioned with poetry and shifted his interest to the novel, not to return to poetry until the 1980s.
In 1977, the couple moved to Los Angeles, and Monette wrote a number of screenplays that, though never produced, provided him the means to be a writer. Monette published four novels between 1978 and 1982 that were enormously successful, including Taking Care of Mrs. Carrolland The Gold Diggers, and established himself as a writer of popular fiction.
“He was a capable writer, but he had not discovered his voice. When AIDS arrived, he found it,” writes Legacy Project Chicago in its tribute to Monette. “On the front lines of the epidemic he picked up his pen and began to capture the horror as it happened.
In the year following Horwitz’s death in 1986, Monette wrote Borrowed Time, and its 1988 release catapulted him into the national arena as a spokesperson for AIDS. Since very few out gay men had the opportunity to address national issues in mainstream venues at any previous time in U.S. history, Monette’s high-visibility profile was one of his most significant achievements.
For Borrowed Time, Monette won PEN Center West literary award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He went on to write two important novels about AIDS, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991).
In 1992, Monette released the memoir Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, an uncompromising look at coming to terms with being a gay man. In the book, he wrote: “I can’t conceive the hidden life anymore, don’t think of it as life. When you finally come out, there’s a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.”
This would become the first LGBTQ studies title to win the 1992 National Book Award.
He followed Becoming a Man with a book of essays, Last Watch of the Night (1994), which he wrote while being treated for full-blown AIDS, hooked up to three intravenous tubes and taking a daily regimen of numerous oral medications. The book is a collection of essays that move through themes from the painful lives of gay priests to the unending bigotry against gay men.
Monette also wrote an episode for the popular television series Thirtysomething about an advertising executive who learns he has the AIDS virus. The show, written with Richard Kramer, a producer for the series, was one of the first prime-time network series to deal with AIDS.
Olympic gold-medal diver Greg Louganis discloses that he is HIV-positive. The announcement draws criticism from some who believe Louganis should have disclosed his status prior to competing in the 1988 Olympics.
Learn More.
In a TV interview with ABC’s 20/20, Louganis says he knew he was HIV-positive before the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, and was greatly concerned when he hit his head on the board during a dive and shed blood in the pool.
Since the Seoul Games, Louganis’s infection has developed into AIDS, according to the definition established by the Centers for Disease Control.
“According to the CDC, I have AIDS versus HIV,” Louganis told Barbara Walters. “I do have AIDS.”
Louganis, 35, who won four gold medals at the 1984 and 1988 Summer Olympics, retired from the sport in 1988 and was recently pursuing an acting career. He discloses his homosexuality at the 1994 Gay Games in New York.
Olympic athletes are tested for an array of performance-enhancing drugs, but they are not required to reveal their HIV status. Mike Moran, spokesman for the U.S. Olympic Committee, tells the Los Angeles Times that the policy was not likely to change.
Regarding the blood that spilled into Seoul’s Chamshil Pool, the International Olympic Committee and FINA, swimming and diving’s world governing body, issue statements saying that a minuscule amount of blood in chlorinated water poses no threat to anyone.
Louganis, 35, joins two other major athletes who shared their HIV-positive status.. Magic Johnson left the Los Angeles Lakers in 1991 after saying he was infected with HIV. Tennis star Arthur Ashe died in 1993 of AIDS-related causes.
March 11, 1995
South African gospel singer Musa Njoko Discloses HIV-Positive Status
Musa “Queen” Njoko reveals her HIV-positive status to Ilanga, a Zulu newspaper, becoming South Africa’s only recording artist living openly with the virus.
Learn More.
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.”
March 27, 1995
Rapper Eazy-E Dies
Rapper Eazy-E dies from AIDS-related illness at the age of 31, one month after being diagnosed.
Learn More.
As a founding member of the rap group N.W.A. (which stands for Niggaz Wit’ Attitude), Eazy-E was the executive producer of the gangster rap album, Straight Outta Compton, released in 1988. The album’s raps about gunplay, drug dealing, raw sex, gang solidarity and police harassment in a Los Angeles suburb included one song that is a fantasy of violent revenge against racist police officers.
Born Eric Lynn Wright, Eazy-E dies at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after being hospitalized on Feb. 24 for what he thought was asthma. Tests reveal he has AIDS, and on March 16 he would release a statement that he had contracted the disease.
An album that Eazy had been working on would be released posthumously in 1995, and an EP of unreleased tracks would be issued on the seven-year anniversary of his death.
One of his children, singer E.B. Wright, would go on to produce A Ruthless Scandal, a documentary about the final days of her father’s life. His story is also depicted in the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton, directed by F. Gary Gray.
Irish pop star Jimmy McShane, who was a “one-hit wonder” in the U.S. with the song “Tarzan Boy,” dies of AIDS-related illness in his hometown of Derry. He was 37.
Learn More.
“Tarzan Boy” was the 1985 debut single by the Italian-based act Baltimora, which consisted of Jimmy McShane and Maurizio Bassi. The song went top five across Europe, reached number three in the U.K, top five in Japan and reached No 13 in the U.S.
Born in Derry in 1957, McShane was drawn to performing at a young age, and he enjoyed dying his hair and wearing unconventional clothes.
“He had a tough time growing up,” his brother Damien McShane told the Derry Journal in 2018. “He had a larger-than-life personality and naturally people gravitated towards him, but his years at St. Peter’s were difficult for him. Jim was bullied the entire time for being different, and at the time, I never even considered that he was gay, it just wasn’t talked about.”
At the first chance he got, he moved to London to attend stage school and subsequently tried – and failed – to break into the West End musical scene. A few years later, he returned to Derry and took a job as an emergency medical technician with the Red Cross, according to the Belfast Telegraph.
But then a friend from London reached out and things brightened for McShane. Disco singer Dee D. Jackson needed back-up dancers for her European tour, and McShane embraced the opportunity.
When the act toured Italy, McShane fell in love with the country and particularly enjoyed its underground dance scene, according to The Living Room by Matt and Andrej Koymasky. In 1985, he made Milan his new home and learned to speak Italian.
Italian producer Maurizio Bassi approached McShane about being the lead singer for his new project, Baltimora, and in 1985 they released their first single, “Tarzan Boy.” With its distinctive jungle call, the song became a huge hit and Baltimora were suddenly international pop stars. The next year, Baltimora performed their hit song on American Bandstand (actually, McShane lip-synched), and McShane was interviewed by the legendary Dick Clark.
The media began to refer to McShane as “Baltimora,” on the misconception that it was his stage name, rather than the group’s collective title, and this caused internal strife between Bassi and McShane. When the band’s next single “Key Key Karimba” failed to chart in 1987, Bassi broke up the act.
McShane returned to Italy, and in 1994, he was diagnosed with AIDS. He called his family and arranged to move back to his childhood home in Derry to live out the last year of his life, according to the Derry Journal.
McShane’s brother said that before the pop artist died, he spent the last of his savings on a birthday party for his youngest nephew, James.
On the day of McShane’s funeral, the residents of Derry came out into the streets to watch the funeral procession make its way from Long Tower Church to Derry City Cemetery. Many wore red ribbons as a mark of respect for their hometown celebrity.
1995
Capital City AIDS Fund is Created to Serve Sacramento
Capital City AIDS Fund is founded to support HIV/AIDS services in the Sacramento area.
Learn More.
Capital City AIDS Fund (CCAF) launched as a non-profit organization to raise money to support HIV/AIDS services in the Sacramento area. Specifically, CCAF’s activities supported a community fund that, from 1995 until today, donates to various city-area organizations that provide HIV/AIDS services.
From the start, CCAF was governed by an all-volunteer board of directors made up of community leaders, including business professionals, media representatives, and government officials.
Since its inception, CCAF has successfully staged many events including the Capital City AIDS Dance-O-Rama, the Boo Bash, the stage production of Ruby Slippers, the Academy Awards gala “An Evening With Oscar,” and the annual Sacramento Valley AIDS Walk. Over the next 25 years, CCAF would raise and donate over $3 million for Sacramento-area HIV/AIDS services.
In 2001, CCAF teamed with the Elton John AIDS Foundation for the high-profile event Smash Hits with Elton John and Billie Jean King, which raised about $500,000 for the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the CCAF. The event, which was Elton John and Billie Jean King’s ninth in their annual series, featured tennis stars Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras and music icon Carlos Santana, and packed Arco Arena in Sacramento.
In 2002, CCAF launched the Helen Veress-Mitchell Scholarship program to help people living with HIV attend college or technical school. Most scholarship recipients are pursuing careers in the health care field in hopes of helping other people living with HIV, according to CCAF.
In 2005, responding to rising rates of HIV and STD cases among the city’s youth, CCAF began a campaign to raise awareness about safe sex practices and increase availability of free condoms in targeted locations. CCAF’s HIV Prevention and Education Campaign, which continues today, provides free condom dispensers and accompanying Play! But Play Safe! posters upon request.
College campuses and public health agencies now use CCAF’s condom dispensers in locations across the globe, including distant locations in India and Africa. CCAF’s HIV/STD awareness campaign also distributes more than 30,000 free condoms monthly in the bars in downtown Sacramento, according to CCAF Board Chair Joyce Mitchell.
May 26, 1995
Broadway Dancer-Actor Tony Azito Dies
TonyAzito, a dancer and character actor celebrated for his ability to accentuate his lanky, hyperextended body, dies of AIDS-related illness at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in New York City. He was 46 years old.
Learn More.
Tony Azito, the lanky, loose-limbed Broadway actor who led the Keystone Kops in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s 1981 production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” died yesterday at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 46 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was AIDS, said Bonnie Egan, a friend.
Mr. Azito was born in Manhattan and attended public schools in Manhattan and Queens. He studied drama at the Juilliard School, where he worked with John Houseman in the experimental company that later became the nucleus of the Acting Company. He also studied with the dancer and choreographer Anna Sokolow.
He left Juilliard in 1976 to take the role of Mr. Peachum’s assistant in the Shakespeare in the Park production of “The Threepenny Opera.” A year later, he appeared as Dr. Nakamura in the Brecht-Weill musical “Happy End,” which starred Meryl Streep. Both performances were widely praised.
In 1980, he was nominated for a Tony Award and received a Drama Desk Award for his role as the Sergeant in “Pirates.” He also appeared in the film version of the operetta.
Mr. Azito spent four years with the LaMama Experimental Theater Company, appearing in a dozen shows. In the 1970’s, he often performed cabaret at Reno Sweeney and the Ballroom. With the Shakespeare Festival, he appeared as Bardolph in “Henry IV” (1985) and Feste in “Twelfth Night” (1986).
His film credits included “Union City,” “Private Resort” and “Bloodhounds of Broadway,” as well as small roles in “The Addams Family” and “Moonstruck.” In the television series “Miami Vice” he had a recurring role as the drug dealer Manolo.
May 30, 1995
Major League Player Glenn Burke Dies
Glenn Burke, a Dodger and Oakland Athletic outfielder who later became one of the few players in the major league to acknowledge being gay, dies of AIDS-related illness at a Bay Area hospital. He was 42.
Learn More.
Burke was born and raised in Oakland, California. He was a playground legend, an athlete who excelled at every sport he tried. His favorite sport in high school was basketball, but it was baseball that offered him a professional contract after graduation.
Described by many scouts as “the next Willie Mays,” Burke played major league ball with the Los Angeles Dodgers from 1976 to 1978, and with the Oakland A’s in 1978-1979. In the 225 games of his brief career, Burke batted .237, hit two home runs, had 38 RBIs and 35 stolen bases.
In 1977, after Dusty Baker hit a home run, Burke – who was the on-deck batter – gave Baker a high-five as he left the field, and has since been credited with inventing the gesture. Burke is believed to be the first major league ball player to be outed to his teammates and the owners while he was still playing.
Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda was angered by Burke’s friendship with his gay son, and General Manager Al Campanis offered to pay for a lavish honeymoon if Burke would get married (Burke refused), according to The Legacy Project.
The Dodgers then traded Burke to Oakland, where he saw little playing time and was forced to endure manager Billy Martin referring to him as a “faggot” in front of his teammates.
In Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke, author Andrew Maraniss describes how, following a 1979 game at Oakland Coliseum where A’s fans yelled homophobic slurs at Burke in the outfield, he chased down the heckler in the concourse and grabbed him around the neck. In 1980, manager Martin demoted Burke to the A’s minor league affiliate in Utah.
At the age of 27, Burke found that his dream of a being a major league baseball player was over after four short seasons. He later wrote, “Prejudice drove me out of baseball sooner than I should have. But I wasn’t changing.”
The years following Burke’s departure from baseball was rife with drug usage, incarceration, and homelessness, marking a bitter fall from grace. However, in 1982, he won two medals for track in the first Gay Games — the same year his homosexuality was made public in an Inside Sports article.
In the article, Burke said, “It’s harder to be gay in sports than anywhere else, except maybe president. Baseball is probably the hardest sport of all.”
In his last months of his life, Burke received financial assistance from the Oakland A’s (which was under new management) and was cared for in his sister Lutha’s home.
After a few national sportswriters discovered Burke was dying of AIDS, they wrote admiringly of the man who invented the high-five and had been the first Major League baseball player to come out as gay. Soon after, letters began arriving in Lutha’s mailbox and at the Oakland Coliseum.
“There were letters from parents who praised Glenn’s kindness to their kids, letters from adults who had met Glenn as children, and letters from gay men who admired his sacrifices as a pioneer. He’d read the letters and weep,” wrote biographer Andrew Maraniss.
“They make me feel like I was sent to this earth to make certain people happier,” Burke said. “No one can say I didn’t make it. I played in the World Series. I’m in the book, and they can’t take that away from me. Not ever.”
When Burke began to weaken, Lutha arranged for him to be transferred to Fairmont Hospital in San Leandro, just south of Oakland. He died the next day.
In 2013, Burke was posthumously honored in the first class of the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame. Before the 2014 All-Star Game in Minnesota, Burke was honored as a gay pioneer.
In 2017, Burke was inducted into the Rainbow Honor Walk, a series of bronze panels embedded in the sidewalks of the Castro District, recognizing some of the most significant lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender figures in history. The occasion was celebrated on April 1, 2017 at the White Horse Inn, the oldest gay bar in the Bay Area.
In June 2021, the Oakland A’s announced that the organization would honor Burke’s legacy by renaming its annual Pride Night after him.
“Glenn Burke was a trailblazer, and we are excited and honored to recognize his legacy and impact on the game of baseball by naming our annual Pride Night after him,” said Oakland A’s President Dave Kaval. “Glenn Burke Pride Night will continue to be a time of celebration and inclusion at our ballpark as we come together with friends and allies.”
In June 2021, Burke’s biographer Andrew Maraniss wrote a Los Angeles Times column proposing that the Dodgers find a way to honor Burke.
“The first openly gay Major League player was a Dodger,” writes Maraniss. “It’s time for the Dodgers to take ownership of the homophobia that prematurely ended Glenn Burke’s days in Los Angeles so that the organization can move beyond it, stake its claim to history by centering Burke’s experience, and lead the way for LGBTQ rights in baseball.”
Filipino singer-songwriter Rodel Belvis Naval, called “Ody” by his friends, dies of HIV-related illness in Toronto, Canada at the age of 42.
Learn More.
Best known for the songs “Lumayo Ka Man Sa Akin” and “Muli,” Naval was considered one of the most versatile artists in the Philippines entertainment world. He drew thousands of fans to his concerts in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Mexico, Singapore, Japan, and Toronto.
Naval was 26 years old when he immigrated from the Philippines to join other family members already settled in Canada in 1979. A year later, he performed in three major concerts in Los Angeles and then a series of concerts in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, and Mexico.
In 1989, he returned to the Philippines and recorded his first album, Finally. After a 1990 performance in Japan, he released the album Lumayo Ka Man Sa Akin, which featured the hit song “Muli.”
The song became popular with fans both young and old, and it still remains a favored selection in Filipino karaoke bars. The second album also included Naval’s most popular song, “Lumayo Ka Man Sa Akin.”
“When the lyrics of this song was being written by Rodel in Japan, his mind was on our mom who had just passed two months earlier,” his sister Delia told Esquire Philippines. “He missed our mom so much that he wrote the lyrics within 15 minutes.”
Naval’s final album was Once Again (1992), from which the songs “Ikaw Pa Lamang” and “Kailan Kaya” enjoyed platinum success.
In 1993, Naval became ill and returned to Canada to receive medical attention, according to People Pill. While in Toronto, he auditioned for musical production Miss Saigon and won the role of assistant commissar. He continued to give performances, even while his health was in rapid decline. In April 1994, he performed in two concerts, one in Toronto and the other in Los Angeles.
In an interview before his death, Naval said, “Maybe there is a purpose to all of this, and if I can help others because of what happened to me, let it be so.”
Two years after Naval died, two of his sisters founded Rodel Naval Care Outreach (RoNaCo) to help people in the poverty-stricken areas of Manila affected by HIV.
June 13, 1995
Steve Silver — Creator of ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’ — Dies
Steve Silver, the creator and producer of the San Francisco musical revue “Beach Blanket Babylon,” dies of AIDS-related illness at his home in San Francisco. He was 51.
Learn More.
A native of San Francisco who became a fixture in the city’s arts and social scene over the past two decades, Silver was notable not only for the cabaret he created in 1974, but also for his philanthropy and tireless efforts on behalf of many San Francisco charities.
Beach Blanket Babylon, believed to be the nation’s longest-running musical revue, has been seen by more than three million people, including celebrities and dignitaries like Queen Elizabeth and Bob Hope.
The San Francisco Chronicle described the show’s roots as a combination of “Vegas lounge acts, the Follies Bergere, God Rush-era extravaganzas, English music halls, a child’s birthday party gone mad, and dopey beach party movies.”
Silver, who retained creative control of Beach Blanket Babylon until his death, continually updated the show. In one of the newer numbers, actors dressed as Bill and Hillary Clinton are accosted by Newt Gingrich singing “King of the Hill, move over Bill, goodness gracious, Newt is on fire” to the tune of “Great Balls of Fire.”
A former painter, Silver came up with the idea for the show in 1974, naming it after the Annette Funicello-Frankie Avalon “Beach Blanket” movies.
Silver’s grave stone at Cypress Lawn in Colma, California includes a sketch of Silver done by legendary caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, perhaps the only Hirschfeld work executed in stone.
June 27, 1995
National HIV Testing Day is Launched
The National Association of People With AIDS launches the first National HIV Testing Day.
Learn More.
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.
July 7, 1995
U.S. Recommends HIV Testing for Pregnant Women
To address the increasing epidemic of HIV infection among women and their infants, the U.S. Public Health Service encourages pregnant women to voluntarily be tested for the virus.
Learn More.
Developed in collaboration with public health officials, service organization leaders and federal researchers, the recommendation for HIV testing stressed the importance of early diagnosis of infection for the health of both women and their infants.
In an edition of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s MMWR, the results of a clinical trial are announced as a significant advance in HIV-related treatment and prevention. The placebo-controlled, clinical trial indicated that the administration of zidovudine to HIV-infected pregnant women and their newborns could reduce the risk for perinatal transmission of HIV by approximately 66%.
With this CDC-tested treatment, pregnant women who are HIV-positive could benefit from an early diagnosis.
HIV can be transmitted from an infected woman to her fetus or newborn during pregnancy, during labor and delivery, and during the postpartum period (through breastfeeding).
At the time, researchers had confirmed that transmission of HIV to a fetus could occur as early as the eighth week of gestation, but most perinatally transmitted infections occurred shortly before or during the birth process. The CDC estimated that breastfeeding could increase the rate of transmission by 10-20%.
In a 2003 interview with PBS News Hour, Dr. Mary Glenn Fowler, the lead CDC researcher on maternal-to-child HIV transmission, would credit the decline in babies being born with HIV to women following the CDC recommendation to get tested for HIV and the availability of the zidovudine treatment.
“It’s been one of our really strong successes in the HIV epidemic,” Dr. Fowler told PBS. “In the early ’90s we had approximately between 1,000 and 2,000 women delivering infected babies each year, and we have really reduced that [in 2003] down to close to 280 to 370 babies being infected. So it’s almost greater than an 80% decline, and it’s related to use of anti-retrovirals during pregnancy as well as to obstetrical intervention, such as scheduled C-section prior to the onset of labor.”
July 7, 1995
Native American Opera Singer White Eagle Dies
White Eagle, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, dies of AIDS-related illness at age 43 at his home with his family in Mission, South Dakota.
Learn More.
White Eagle was the first Native American to sing lead roles in American musical theater and opera. It was the voice of the great Mario Lanza that inspired the young White Eagle to become an opera singer.
At the age of five, this minister’s son gave his first public performance in his father’s church. In 1971, he made his professional debut as a soloist at one of the nation’s largest churches, and two years later, began working with the vocal group Re-Generation.
When he wasn’t involved in a production, White Eagle often performed in fundraisers for his father’s home for Native American orphans in South Dakota. On these occasions, he was known to don a Sioux chieftain’s hand-beaded white leather jacket and eagle-feather headdress, and sing “Amazing Grace” while the plate was passed.
In January 1989, White Eagle sang at the inaugural gala for newly elected President George Bush. White Eagle made his debut at New York’s prestigious Carnegie Hall in September 1993, one month after being diagnosed with AIDS. After he made his illness public, White Eagle became a tireless advocate for AIDS awareness.
“His role as advocate was equal to his role as artist, because through his voice, through his message, he brought people together,” reads a memorial to White Eagle in the U.S. Congressional Record on July 11, 1995, five days after his death.
Disc jockey JJ Chan, the first Chinese person living with AIDS to speak out about his disease in a government campaign, dies of AIDS-related illness at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong. He was 35.
Learn More.
In April 1995, Chan announced he would become the focus of the Chinese government’s AIDS awareness campaign, according to the South China Morning Post. The move was hailed as a breakthrough, because Chan was the first Chinese-born person to share his story in a government-sponsored campaign.
Talking openly about his disease, Chan countered misconception in his country that HIV/AIDS only afflicted foreigners.
In addition to an obituary, the South China Morning Post published a tribute to Chan, saying, “Society owes a big debt of sympathy and admiration to the former disc-jockey, J.J. Chan, for his courageous decision to disclose his battle with AIDS.
After Chan’s death, the Chinese government continued to broadcast Chan’s message, in which he relayed his experience as a person with AIDS and his relationship with family and friends. He gave advice on ways of preventing contracting the deadly virus.
July 14, 1995
CDC Issues Guidelines on Prevention of Opportunistic Infections
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issue the first guidelines to help healthcare providers prevent opportunistic infections in people living with HIV.
Learn More.
In a precursor to a full report that would be published in the August edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases, the CDC announces that healthcare providers can prevent opportunistic infections in HIV-positive people by adhering to a set of guidelines.
The set of recommendations are rated according to the strength of the recommendation and the quality of evidence supporting the recommendation. The guidelines address prevention techniques for adults, adolescents and children.
July 15, 1995
Thomas Crail, Head of WeHo Chamber, Dies
Thomas Michael Crail, executive director of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, dies of AIDS-related illness in his West Hollywood home. He was 41.
Learn More.
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.
President Clinton Creates Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS
President Bill Clinton establishes his Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS to provide advice, information, and recommendations to his administration regarding HIV/AIDS.
PACHA focuses on programs, policies, and research that address HIV/AIDS, including the consideration of common co-morbidities of those infected with HIV as needed to promote effective HIV prevention and treatment.
The Council continues to exist and provide advice for each successive Presidential Administrations.
August 11, 1995
Rob Eichberg — Co-Creator of ‘Coming Out Day’ — Dies
Rob Eichberg, a psychologist and activist who co-founded National Coming Out Day, dies of AIDS-related illness in Tesuque, New Mexico. He was 50.
Learn More.
Dr. Eichberg and lesbian activist Jean O’Leary chose October 11, 1988 as the inaugural “National Coming Out Day,” because it marked the one-year anniversary of the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, also known as “The Great March.”
“Most people think they don’t know anyone gay or lesbian, and in fact everybody does,” said Eichberg in 1993. “It is imperative that we come out and let people know who we are and disabuse them of their fears and stereotypes.”
Dr. Eichberg was born in Brooklyn in 1945 but lived most of his life in the Los Angeles area, where he campaigned for gay rights and raised funds for organizations serving people living with HIV/AIDS. He moved to New Mexico in 1988, the same year he and O’Leary founded National Coming Out Day, according to the Los Angles Times.
In 1978, Eichberg established a workshop called “the Experience” that helped people in the LGBTQ+ community reveal their sexual identity to family and friends. He ran for the Hollywood-area Assembly seat in the November 1982 election but didn’t win, according to the LA Times.
In 1991, his book Coming Out: An Act of Love was published by Dutton Books and received warm reviews. Publishers Weekly called Eichberg’s book an “exceptionally well-written manual” on coming out to people in all aspects of life, including business associates and employers. Coming Out also offered advice on how to address the fear of rejection and feelings of isolation, guilt, powerlessness, and anger.
“This powerful book will also be helpful to heterosexuals who seek a better understanding of gay relatives and friends,” said Publishers Weekly.
“If you care to have any relationship with gay people, his book is essential,” Lynn Shepodd, president of the Santa Fe Lesbian, Gay and Bi Pride Committee, told the Sarasota Herald-Tribute. “It accurately describes the process that gay and lesbian people go through in their coming out.”
National Coming Out Day is now celebrated annually.
Bruce Boland, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who was the first gay officer to sue that agency for anti-gay discrimination, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 48.
Learn More.
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.
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.”
August 27, 1995
TV-Film-Stage Actor Richard Frank Dies
Richard Frank, a critically acclaimed stage actor who portrayed as Jules Bennett on the ABC sit-com Anything but Love, dies of AIDS-related illness at Midway Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 42.
Learn More.
In Anything but Love (1989-1992), Frank provided comic moments to the series’ love story involving characters played by Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis. Frank also gave a notable performance as Father Vogler in the 1984 movie Amadeus.
On stage, Frank originated the role of infamous lawyer and informal powerbroker Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. The Los Angeles Times’ Myrna Oliver described Frank as “a versatile actor equally comfortable with Shakespeare and modern works.”
He earned the 1991 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his performance as the homosexual window dresser Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. He also won a Dramalogue award for his portrayal of Herman in Five Easy Pieces at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum in 1985.
By 1993, Frank had been public about his affliction with AIDS. In the wake of his public disclosure, Frank was asked to guest-star on the TV show Life Goes On. In the episode “Bedfellows,” Frank played Chester, the hospital roommate of Jesse McKenna (played by Chad Lowe), while both were admitted for illnesses related to their AIDS statuses. Frank’s character lost his battle with AIDS before the episode’s end, but not before passing on wisdom to Jesse for his own dealings with his illness.
Following his landmark appearance on Life Goes On, Frank’s health began a gradual decline, but throughout 1994, he kept up his steady guest turns on series ranging from The Larry Sanders Show to Matlock.
By the beginning of 1995, in order to preserve his health, Frank made the decision to become a television director. That year, an episode of Mad About You he directed became his final work in show business.
In 2006, actor Jamie Lee Curtis told Today that Frank inspired her to participate in the AIDS Walk sponsored by AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA). She also became a member of the advisory board for the Children Affected by AIDS Foundation and helped to raise money for children whose lives were impacted by the AIDS crisis.
“I have tried to keep Rick’s incredible life spirit alive in my daily actions and work, both in and out of show business,” Curtis said. “I write books for children to help them understand the secrets that we adults seem to know about life, feelings, and loss. I dedicated my book Where Do Balloons Go? to Rick.”
August 31, 1995
Author & Activist Steven Corbin Dies
Promising Los Angeles novelist and ACT UP member Steven Corbin dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 41.
Learn More.
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.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorses a National Academy of Sciences report that concludes needle-cxchange programs are an effective method of preventing HIV infection.
Learn More.
In its review of Syringe Exchange Programs — United States, 1994-1995, a report by the National Academy of Sciences. the CDC expresses support for needle-exchange programs, stating that they are effective in reducing HIV transmission associated with drug injection.
The report states that as of December 1994, 35.3% of the 435,319 cases of AIDS reported among adults are associated with IV drug use. In addition, injection of illegal drugs is the risk behavior most frequently associated with heterosexual and perinatal transmission of HIV in the U.S.
The goal of needle-exchange programs is to reduce HIV transmission associated with IV drug use by providing sterile syringes in exchange for used, potentially HIV-contaminated syringes.
September 24, 1995
Tom McBride — ‘Friday The 13th’ Actor — Dies
Tom McBride — an actor who appeared in two films, various commercials, soap operas, and TV movies (including a scene with Bette Davis) — dies of AIDS-related illness in New York. He was 42.
Learn More.
McBride starred in the 1981 horror film Friday the 13th Part 2 as Mark, and had a role in the 1985 movie Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. On Broadway, he appeared in the play Fifth of July in 1981-82.
McBride’s masculine good looks and muscled body made him a familiar sight in TV commercials, print ads, billboards, and films through the ’70s and ’80s. He even became that most emblematic of macho images, the Winston man.
He was also a familiar sight in the most exclusive nightclubs and parties in Hollywood and New York City. Handsome and popular, McBride found he had his choice of sexual partners, drugs, and social situations in New York’s gay scene.
In 1994-95, McBride allowed documentarian Jay Corcoran to film and interview him as his health started to decline from HIV. McBride had taken up photography, and some scenes show him opening packages of recently processed photos of nude subjects and presenting them to his mother.
After McBride’s death, Corcoran released Life & Death on the A-List, a film that featured McBride’s candid views on sex and HIV/AIDS. Corcoran’s film took an unsparing look at McBride as his good looks deteriorated and his health diminished until he was ultimately confined to a hospital bed in his mother’s home.
“We never get the sense that McBride was any more than just another pretty face shilling for laundry detergent,” Galvin wrote.
And yet it is impossible to deny the emotional force of moments when McBride speaks with utter openness and authenticity to his documentarian and asks questions like “What happened to my career?”
Kenneth Craig Innes, aka K. Craig Innes, who achieved stardom as a Broadway dancer, dance teacher and choreographer, dies of AIDS-related illness in San Francisco at the age of 35.
Learn More.
Innes, a native of San Francisco, performed in more than a dozen Broadway and off-Broadway shows, including Cabaret, Carousel and Hello Dolly.
Born in San Francisco and raised in the peninsula town of Redwood City, Innes was a precocious dance student, according to his mother Shirley Gurnett. He had his first taste of theater at the age of 7 as a child extra in a touring company rendition of Carousel with John Riatt.
Innes attended Whitman College in Washington State as a theater major, and moved to Los Angeles to start his career. There, he met his partner, Jimmy Barron in 1978. Innes and Barron were together 14 years until Barron passed away from HIV/AIDS complications in 1992.
Innes performed mostly on and off Broadway in New York productions that included La Cage aux Folles, Me and My Girl, Legs Diamond and Meet Me in St. Louis, where he was also dance captain. He toured nationally with Dream Street as Charlie.
On television, he was a dancer on the TV show Fame and the made-for-TV movie The Mae West Story (1985). He was also a “Steve Merritt Dancer” and danced in several productions by choreographer Tony Stevens.
Innes’s last performance was just a few weeks before his death. Innes wrote, produced, directed and choreographed Saturation, an autobiographical music and dance show performed as an AIDS benefit at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, according to SFGATE.
James “Jim” R. Thompson, a founding member of Being Alive San Diego, died of AIDS-related illness in San Diego at the age of 53.
Learn More.
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.
October 31, 1995
More than 500,000 AIDS Cases Reported to CDC
The number of AIDS cases exceeds 500,000 in the U.S., with 311,381 (62%) of them representing deaths.
Learn More.
In the CDC’sMorbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the total number of persons in the U.S. reported to have AIDS climbs to 501,310.
According to the report, the rates per 100,000 population for reported AIDS cases in 1994 are:
48 in the Northeast,
31 in the South,
29 in the West, and
13 in the Midwest
However, during 1988-1992 and 1993-October 1995, the largest numbers of cases (65,926 and 86,462, respectively) were reported from the South, which also accounted for the largest proportionate increase of reported cases (31%).
November 4, 1995
Poet & AIDS Activist Essex Hemphill Dies
Essex Hemphill, an openly gay poet and activist, dies of AIDS-related illness at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He was 38 years old.
Learn More.
From 1981 till his death in 1995, Hemphill was a focal point of the Washington, DC arts scene, which was considered a second Harlem Renaissance. He was one of the few writers to articulate what it meant to be both black and gay.
In 1976, Hemphill left the University of Maryland after his freshman year and spent the following four years in Los Angeles honing his art. When he returned to the District in 1981, his poetry was stronger, sharper, and more elegant and visceral, according Sarah Kaplan in The Washington Post.
He began staging performances of his poetry with artist Wayson Jones, who had been Hemphill’s roommate at U-Md. Their readings soon graduated from cramped coffeehouses to small, alternative theaters, then to the Kennedy Center, then to New York and London.
In 1991, Hemphill received the Lambda Literary Award for editing the anthology Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men, the continuation of a project started by Joseph Beam, who died in 1988. Hemphill also received the National Library Association award in 1992 for his own collection of prose and poetry, Ceremonies.
The poems and essays in Ceremonies address the sexual objectification of black men in white culture, relationships among gay black men and non-gay black men, HIV/AIDS in the black community and the meaning of family. He also goes on to critique both the institutionalized patriarchy, and dominant gender identities within society.
Much of Hemphill’s poetry and spoken word was autobiographical, and portrayed his experiences as a minority in both the African-American and LGBT communities.He wrote pieces such as “Family Jewels,” which conveyed his frustrations about white bigotry, specifically within the gay community. In his essay “Does Your Momma Know About me?” Hemphill criticizes photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Black Book, which showcased pictures of the penises of black men and excluded the faces of his subjects.
Hemphill repeatedly invoked loneliness throughout his work. Loneliness in Hemphill’s work is a traumatic feeling, a constant sense of rejection. Many of the men returned home after being rejected by white gay communities, only to be rejected within black communities as well. In Hemphill’s poetry, he portrays loneliness as a collective feeling. He defined loneliness as a sense of being, marked by suffering without public recognition. A sense of separation from the public creates a social longing because even though the journey is lonesome, fighting against that journey not to kill you, as Hemphill said in one of his poems, makes you yearn for community and support
After Hemphill’s death, December 10, 1995 was announced by three organizations to be a National Day of Remembrance for Essex Hemphill at New York City’s Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. Cheryl Dunye dedicated her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman to Hemphill.
In his essay “(Re)- Recalling Essex Hemphill” in Words to Our Now, Thomas Glave, pays tribute to Hemphill’s life, focusing on the lasting effects of his actions. Glave writes:
In this now, we celebrate your life and language Essex. So celebrating, we know that we re-call you in what is largely, to borrow from another visionary, a ‘giantless time.’ The sheer giantry of your breathing presence has passed. Now present and future warriors—ourselves and others—will be compelled to learn, as you did and made manifest, that all hauls toward truth—toward venality; ardor, not arrogance; forthrightness, not cowardice.
In June 2019, Hemphill was one of the inaugural 50 American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City’s Stonewall Inn.
President Clinton Holds White House Conference on HIV/AIDS
The President and Vice President convene the first White House Conference on HIV/AIDS in the history of the epidemic, bringing together more than 300 experts, activists and citizens from across the country for a discussion of key issues.
Learn More.
During the conference, President Clinton talked about the toll the HIV/AIDS epidemic was taking on parents, families and communities.
The President also set goals to accelerate progress toward a vaccine and a cure. He urged Congress to maintain the Medicaid safety net; Medicaid paid for the care of nearly half of Americans living with AIDS in 1995, including more than 90% of children with AIDS.
More than 250 participants from 37 states and Washington D.C. were invited to attend the White House conference. In the morning, participants assembled into nine working groups for in-depth discussions on research, substance abuse treatment, transmission prevention, international issues, discrimination, housing and services.
Following lunch, participants gathered for a plenary session in the Cash Room of the Treasury Building for a roundtable discussion with President Clinton; Patsy Fleming, Director of the Office of National AIDS Policy; Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services; and Dr. Scott Hitt, Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. Also included in the roundtable were two community representatives, Sean Sasser of Atlanta, who tested positive for HIV at age 19 (best known for his relationship with activist and reality TV star Pedro Zamora), and Eileen Mitzman of New York, who lost her 26-year-old daughter Marni to AIDS in 1991.
December 7, 1995
FDA Approves First Protease Inhibitor
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the first of a new class of drugs — protease inhibitors — designed to attack the HIV virus. This ushers in a new era of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), which has the potential to extend life expectancies for people living with HIV.
Learn More.
The drug, saquinavir, manufactured by Hoffmann-La Roche, is a member of the new class of drugs called protease inhibitors that attack the ability of the HIV virus to reproduce. It does so by inhibiting an enzyme called protease that is crucial to HIV reproduction.
The first antiretroviral therapies developed for people with HIV are nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), but these drugs would prove to be only partially effective. The addition of an orally administered protease inhibitor reduces HIV plasma concentrations and increases T-cell (CD4+) counts to levels that enable patients to have fairly normal life expectancies.
This combination — two nucleoside analogs and a protease inhibitor — is now considered the cornerstone of active antiretroviral therapy.
January 1, 1996
UN Creates Joint Program to Strengthen AIDS Response
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS is launched to strengthen the way in which the UN is responding to AIDS.
The launch of UNAIDS involved “a long series of meetings, reports, working groups, whispered conversations and angry confrontations in corridors and telephone calls around the world,” according to UNAIDS: The First 10 Years.
With a staff of 91 in the Geneva-based Secretariat and 10 in various regions, the fledgling organization quickly learned how to act on its ambitious agenda.
Political advocacy was high on UNAIDS’ list of priorities. By June 1996, UNAIDS staff had met with political, economic and social leaders in more than 50 countries to brief them on UNAIDS’ mandate and work.
Sally Cowal, Director of External Relations at UNAIDS, would be worried about not having a medical background.
“But as I came to understand more about the epidemic,” Cowal says, “it became clear to me that the political motivation around it, the need to overcome denial and complacency, were probably as important as anything we could do.”
January 1, 1996
United Nations Launches UNAIDS to Strengthen Global Response
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) is launched to strengthen the way in which the UN is responding to AIDS, replacing the Global Programme on AIDS.
UNAIDS assumed the lead in the UN’s global response to HIV/AIDS, which was known as the Global Programme on AIDS, overseen by the World Health Organization from 1986 to 1995.
The need for a more comprehensive UN program on AIDS was confirmed by a resolution of WHO’s World Health Assembly in 1993 and was later endorsed by the governing bodies of the other prospective cosponsors and by the UN’s Economic and Social Council. By early 1996, the six cosponsoring organizations had signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate under the new program, according to UNAIDS: The First 10 Years by Lindsay Knight.
UNAIDS located its main office in Geneva, Switzerland, where it oversees its network of advisers
in approximately 50 countries. The program is governed by a board of representatives from 22 governments from all geographic regions, with a rotating government membership. Also represented are the six cosponsoring organizations, and five nongovernmental organizations, including associations of people living with HIV/AIDS.
April 6, 1996
Dominican Actress-Activist Ilka Tanya Payán Dies
Ilka Tanya Payán, a Dominican-born actress and attorney who later became a prominent HIV/AIDS activist in the U.S., dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 53.
Learn More.
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.
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.
Luis Antonio Gonzalez, former dancer and manager of the San Francisco Dance Center, dies of AIDS-related illness at his home. He was 41 years old.
Learn More.
Before he was 20, Gonzalez was a member of two well-known New York City dance companies — the Ailey II Company and Joyce Trisler’s Dance Company. He then performed with Kei Takei’s Moving Earth Dance Company in New York, the Honolulu City Ballet, and the Moya Ballet in Santa Barbara, California.
Gonzalez had come a long way from his humble birth in Cayey, Puerto Rico, where his mother died in childbirth and he was reared by his grandmother. And yet, in 1984, Gonzalez decided to leave his successful dance career to enter an ashram in Los Angeles. For the next 10 years, he served as a monk.
He emerged from the ashram in 1994 and moved to the Bay Area to become manager of Alonzo King’s San Francisco Dance Center. Friends told SFGATE.com that Gonzalez’s health began to decline in 1995.
In late 1995, Gonzalez’s partner, Ed Kitchen, told The San Francisco Chronicle that they had to wait for 15 days for Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center to provide Gonzalez with a bronchoscopy to confirm what they feared, Kaposi’s sarcoma.
“You have to fight for every appointment. You have to fight for every test. They’re whole goal is to get you out of there,” Kitchen told The Chronicle. “I think they hope you’ll die.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves several new tests and HIV treatments in a three-month period.
Learn More.
Among its fast-track approvals are:
the first HIV home testing and collection kit (May 14)
a viral load test, which measures the level of HIV in the blood (June 3)
the first non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI) drug, nevirapine (June 21)
the first HIV urine test (August 6)
May 20, 1996
Congress Reauthorizes Ryan White CARE Act
Congress reauthorizes the Ryan White CARE Act, continuing federal funding for primary medical care, essential support services, and medications for low-income people with HIV/AIDS.
SCOTUS Strikes Down Anti-Gay Constitutional Amendment in Colorado
In one of the decade’s most important civil rights rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court rejects Colorado’s Amendment 2 — which prevented gays and lesbians from obtaining redress for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation — in a 6-3 decision.
Learn More.
The landmark case for LGBTQ rights was titled Romer v. Evans, named for then-Colorado Governor Roy Romer and plaintiff Richard G. Evans, a gay man who worked for Denver Mayor Wellington Webb.
“It’s hard to say where the story that became known as Romer v. Evans began,” wrote author Susan Berry Casey in her 2021 book Nine Justices and One Colorado Lawyer. “Maybe it was in the 1980s, when homosexuals started to emerge from the closet, determined not only to fight for their equal place in the world, but to battle for their lives as AIDS began taking the lives of so many gay men. Or maybe it was when local governments in Colorado passed human rights ordinances to protect gays and lesbians from the discrimination that was so prevalent, or when scores of anti-gay religious and cultural organizations moved to Colorado determined to push back against those efforts.”
The lead attorney who successfully argued the case against Amendment 2 was Jean Dubofsky. After receiving her law degree from Harvard in 1967, Dubofsky became a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Walter Mondale from 1967 to 1969, and then moved to Boulder, Colorado to practice law, according to the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame. In 1975, she was appointed Deputy Attorney General for Colorado and then, at age 37, she became the first female justice on the Colorado Supreme Court in 1979. Having returned to private practice in 1988, Dubofsky was ready to fight for this case in 1996.
In a legal feat, Dubofsky managed to convince a majority of the justices that Colorado’s amendment was unconstitutional — even though just 10 years before, this Court upheld Georgia’s law that criminalized sodomy (Bowers v. Hardwick). When SCOTUS announced its ruling, striking down Colorado’s Amendment 2, a chain of events began in the LGBTQ legal landscape that still continues today.
“Before the court ruled in that case, gays and lesbians were often fired from jobs when their sexual orientation was discovered. Zoning laws prevented homosexuals from owning homes in certain neighborhoods, and refusing to rent or sell to someone even suspected of being of being a homosexual was legal. Harassment and violence was common, with the police and the justice system often turning the other way. And sex between same-sex couples, in the privacy of their own homes, was a crime,” wrote Susan Berry Casey.
“After Romer v. Evans, through thousands of local and state ordinances and legal decisions upheld by one high court after another, gays and lesbians have become free to live and work where they want, and free to enjoy the same protections and benefits as all citizens.”
May 21, 1996
LA Musician Paul Delph Dies
Paul Delph, former the keyboardist/vocalist for the Los Angeles-based band Zoo Drive, dies of AIDS-related illness at his parents’ home in Cincinnati at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Delph was a Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, producer, engineer, and studio musician whose catalog includes work with many well-known recording artists, including Bryan Adams, Sam Harris, The Pointer Sisters, Donna Summer, The Weather Girls, Suzi Quatro, Bernie Taupin, Toni Basil, Alice Cooper, Roberta Flack and Gary Wright.
In 1980, Delph left the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music to jump into the LA music scene to perform with the band Zoo Drive. For the seven years that the band performed and toured, it also provided the rhythm section for many recording artists. The best known of these projects was the Word of Mouth album by Toni Basil (1982), which featured the song “Mickey” with Delph on Farfisa organ.
In 1990, Delph provided the vocals for two tracks on the re-release of the Bloodsport soundtrack, and he was nominated for a Grammy for his work.
Although Delph contracted HIV early in the epidemic, it did not impact his productive life for nearly a decade. He continued to work on his Music for AIDS projects until failing health forced a return to his family home at Cincinnati early in 1996.
In 1996, Delph released his final album, A God That Can Dance, privately to his family and friends shortly before his death. The album drew its title from a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche(“I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance”), and chronicled the Delph’s struggle with HIV/AIDS.
From 1998 to 2018, Delph’s friends teamed up to form Team Delph in Cincinnati’s annual Walk to Stop AIDS, raising tens of thousands of dollars for Caracole, the city’s largest AIDS service organization. In 1997, the Delph family established the Paul Delph Memorial Scholarship at Delph’s alma mater, Norwood High School.
Conference Attendees Optimistic about HAART Treatment
The 11th International AIDS Conference in Vancouver highlights the effectiveness of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), creating a period of optimism.
Learn More.
The first international AIDS conference in two years, the event is one of the more eagerly anticipated scientific meetings in years. Data on promising new drug treatments for AIDS, insights into the ways HIV infects cells, and the mechanisms of “host resistance” to that attack are scheduled to top the agenda.
Remarkable gains in using combinations of costly new and old drugs promise to slow the progression of AIDS and to allow many people infected with HIV to live longer and healthier lives, conference presenters announce to attendees.
With 15,000 delegates, journalists and commercial exhibitors in attendance, it is the largest conference so far. The theme is “One World, One Hope.”
While it seems that AIDS may finally become a managable disease in developed countries, less developed nations are struggling to scrape together the resources to provide necessary treatment and services to people with HIV and AIDS.
Data would be released at the conference that estimate a total of 21.8 million people to be currently living with HIV/AIDS, the vast majority of whom live in developing countries.
July 15, 1996
Connie Norman, AIDS Activist and Trans Icon, Dies
Connie Norman, a trans activist known in the community as “the AIDS Diva,” dies of HIV-related illness at the Chris Brownlie Hospice in Los Angeles at the age of 47.
Learn More.
Connie Norman became nationally known through her AIDS activism. As the host of an LGBT-focused radio talk show on station XEK-AM (950), she was fierce in her criticism of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations for their lack of HIV support in the ’80s and early ’90s. She also brought a unique and often-overlooked perspective to meetings of the Los Angeles chapter of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
Norman often spoke about her rough childhood. In her teen years, she identified as gay, and left home to live on the streets of Hollywood, where she became addicted to drugs. In 1976, after therapy and becoming drug-free, she underwent M-to-F transition surgery.
“I found out that I am HIV positive in 1987,” she wrote in POZ magazine in 1995. “The first drug I took was AL-721 — yes, the rotten egg thing. It was dreadful, like having to eat vomit every morning. I stayed on it for a couple of months. Then, as information started coming out that there ain’t nothing there, well, I was very happy to quit AL-721.”
Norman said that she and her husband, who also was living with HIV, “tried all the treatment du jour as they came up, especially anything alternative or holistic.”
She began attending the “Hay Rides,” a Wednesday night gathering held in a West Hollywood auditorium for people living with AIDS, their friends, partners, relatives and anyone else interested in attending. The events were coordinated by Louise Hay, a metaphysical counselor who became famous in March 1988 after she promoted her book You Can Heal Your Life on The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Phil Donahue Show. The weekly Hay Rides were often described as joyful and filled with deep meaning for the hundreds of participants.
Norman’s activism often focused on the need to reform AIDS funding formulas that the federal government issued. She also fought for HIV testing to be made part of routine medical visits, and for government and healthcare personnel to treat people living with HIV more humanely, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In the documentary AIDS Diva: The Legend of Connie Norman, the activist is seen linking arms with other ACT UP members in front of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, demanding that they address the epidemic. “We will not be silenced!” they shout while police move to arrest them one by one.
In October 1991, she helped to coordinate a rally and march in Sacramento to protest Governor Pete Wilson’s veto of Assembly Bill 101, legislation that would have added sexual orientation to the list of categories — such as race, sex, age, physical handicap and marital status — protected under the state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. All day, demonstrators marched under the hot afternoon sun through downtown Sacramento chanting, “Wilson is a liar!” In the evening, the protest turned somber with a candlelight vigil.
Norman also worked with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) to campaign for services needed for people living with HIV.
“Connie Norman … was a prescient and powerful voice in the community,” Michael Weinstein, president and co-founder of AHF, told the LA Times. “Her outspokenness frequently made people uncomfortable, but she said things that needed to be said. Her efforts on behalf of gay and lesbian youth, the transgendered community, and people living with HIV and AIDS were extraordinary.”
In addition to her Monday-through-Friday radio show, Norman co-hosted a weekly show on cable television, wrote two columns (“Tribal Writes for San Diego LGBT newspaper Update and “Notes on Life” for Stonewall Speaks). She also appeared in the film Wrecked for Life and performed on stage in An Evening with Connie Norman at Highways Theater in Santa Monica.
When Norman’s health began to decline in early 1996, she looked to her friend Valerie Spencer to continue her work.
“She knew she was dying — she was mindful of that,” Spencer, a Black woman who identifies as trans feminine, told The Body in 2019. “She wanted me to take care of our trans sisters. I was so young, I had no idea what that would entail, but she set me up to deliver this agenda. Even though she knew she was fighting time, she planned accordingly.”
About a year before Norman died, she wrote the following in POZ magazine:
“I live a day at a time. I can’t project into the future, because the future is frightening. And I can’t go by where I’ve been with my health, because I’m never going to be there again. My CD4 cells aren’t going to climb back to 500. You just have to be here now with your disease and deal with it that day for whatever the disease is that day. So my best health plan is doing what I want to do and having a rich, full and active life. That’s the single most important thing a person with AIDS can do for themselves — just get out there and live.”
Norman died at an AIDS hospice facility that just a few years before, she had fought to get funded.
Three months later, on October 13, 1996, David Reid marched with three hundred AIDS activists from the Capitol Building to the White House lawn, where he scattered Norman’s ashes in a protest action called “Ashes Actions.”
Dance Festival Launched on Fire Island to Raise Money
Under the leadership of Hernando Cortez, the organization Dancers Responding to AIDS starts holding the dance festival “Dancers from the Heart,” which would become an annual event to raise funds for the AIDS cause.
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.
August 12, 1996
LA AIDS Activist & APAIT Leader James Sakakura Dies
James Sakakura, one of the most visible HIV-positive Asian Americans in the U.S., dies of AIDS-related illness in Los Angeles at the age of 37.
Learn More.
Sakakura’s death shook the activist world in LA, according to Eric Wat, author of Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles, the first book exploring the history of Asian American HIV/AIDS activism. Wat dedicated his book to Sakakura and devoted an entire chapter to Sakakura’s story.
In a small community that had experienced thousands of AIDS-related deaths in more than 15 years, the loss of Sakakura was significant in that it had a great impact on many people.
“His death was probably the hardest on the Asian American AIDS movement in LA,” Wat wrote. “As much as I talk about joy and resilience in movement building, grief is real. Grief is what makes the other two both necessary and possible.”
Sakakura was brazenly open about his sexuality, HIV status, and struggles with drug addiction and reckless behavior. He often wore a cap emblazoned with “PWA” (“Person With AIDS”) stitched on one side, and “JAP” on the other.
He became widely known as someone who embodied the idea that someone with HIV could have an optimistic outlook on life, even though treatments at the time were largely unsuccessful. His attitude also flew in the face of the stereotype of Asian-descended peoples as “immune” to HIV because they “lived clean lifestyles.”
So strong was his positive attitude, he was frequently sought out by clients of the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (now known as Access to Prevention Advocacy Intervention & Treatment), where he worked on the outreach team. His younger co-workers at APAIT saw him as a role model and many became close friends. Joël Tran was one of them.
“[Sakakura] always told me to keep laughing, keep cooking, keep doing my thing,” Tran told Wat in an interview for Love Your Asian Body. “There were others I buried. He’s just the one that I’ve had the hardest time letting go of … I didn’t know how to process it.”
Another young APAIT staffer was novelist Noël Alumit, who wrote the following about Sakakura for Frontiers in 2011: “My standard of beauty at the time was some white guy. Seeing James, a well-built Asian man with a bald head and full lips, made my head spin. He challenged my concept of beauty.”
Born in 1958, Sakakura and his three siblings were raised in Orange County by hard-working parents. He enrolled at the University of California – Irvine with plans to pursue a pre-med program, but dropped out in the early 1980s after being pulled into the Los Angeles nightclub scene. He began a pattern of immersing himself in a drug-and-sex lifestyle, interspersed with moments of clarity and recovery, according to Wat.
Sakakura became infected with the virus, and his health began to decline in the early 1990s to the point where he had to be admitted to the San Pedro Peninsula Hospital for care. Medical personnel there advised him to reach out to family and close friends and start building a support system he could lean on in the years to come.
His mother, Patricia, began to devote her time to his care, driving him to medical appointments and helping with errands. When they realized there were no HIV resources in the local Japanese American community, Sakakura found APAIT and became a client.
As Sakakura’s health stabilized, he joined APAIT’s team as an outreach worker. He also became more open about his HIV diagnosis and his path of addiction recovery. Soon, Sakakura became “the face of AIDS” in the LA Asian community, according to Wat.
Sakakura accepted an invitation to speak at an AIDS Day event in Tokyo, and when he returned to the U.S., he was more enthusiastic than ever about AIDS advocacy. Dean Goishi, APAIT’s Founding Executive Director, remembers Sakakura as an important member of the team.
“[He] was excellent, from the very start,” Goishi told Wat. “He was empathetic, he was always there, he did his outreach without complaining. He tried to exhibit the example of someone who could live with the virus and be healthy and not dwell on the negative side of things.”
Days before he passed, Sakakura told his friend Joel Tan, “This darkness is not your life.”
In 1997, when APAIT moved to a new location, Goishi announced that the gathering space where APAIT conducted HIV support groups would henceforth be known as the James Sakakura Family Room.
October 1996
AIDS Quilt Covers National Mall in Washington, D.C.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is displayed in its entirety for the last time; it covers the entire National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Learn More.
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.
“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]
December 8, 1996
‘Heat of the Night’ Actor Howard Rollins Dies
Six weeks after being diagnosed with AIDS, Oscar-nominated actor Howard Rollins dies at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York at the age of 46, from complications from AIDS-related lymphoma.
Learn More.
Rollins was an American stage, film and television actor best known for his roles as Andrew Young in 1978’s King, George Haley in the 1979 miniseries Roots: The Next Generations, Coalhouse Walker Jr. in the 1981 film Ragtime, Captain Davenport in the 1984 film A Soldier’s Story, and as Virgil Tibbs on the TV crime drama In the Heat of the Night.
Based on the award-winning 1967 movie about a white Mississippi police chief who teams with a black detective from the North, In the Heat of the Night featured Rollins as Virgil Tibbs for five seasons, opposite Carroll O’Connor as the white southern officer. The show ran from 1988 to 1994, first on NBC, then on CBS.
During the show’s run, Rollins struggled with addiction to drugs and alcohol. He was arrested four times for drug- and alcohol-related crimes and spent one month in jail for reckless driving and driving under the influence. Due to his ongoing personal and legal issues, Rollins was dismissed from the series at the end of Season 6. Rollins returned for several guest appearances in the seventh season of the show in 1993–1994.
Rollins was the youngest of four children born to Ruth and Howard Ellsworth Rollins Sr. in Baltimore, Maryland. His mother was a domestic worker, and father was a steelworker who died in 1980. After his high school graduation, Rollins studied theater at Towson University.
On October 25, 2006, a wax statue of Rollins was unveiled at the Senator Theatre in Baltimore. The statue is now at Baltimore’s Great Blacks in Wax Museum.
“We set up several studies in mid-1995, and by mid-1996 we were able to show that for the first time we could drop the virus down so that it’s not detectable and keep it down for a year or more,” Dr. Ho tells Frontline in a series of interviews in 2005-2006. “That was what was later hailed as the major advance in HIV therapeutics.”
1996
Total of U.S. AIDS Cases Begins to Decline
The number of new AIDS cases diagnosed in the U.S. declines for the first time since the beginning of the epidemic.
Learn More.
Ending the 16-year incline of cases, 1996 data shows that AIDS-related deaths dropped 23% from 1995 to 1996.
Experts credit the downturn with the availability of aggressive new therapies that keep infected patients healthier, as well as the possibility that fewer people are becoming infected in the first place.
African-American women are particularly at risk. In 1994, officials at the Centers for Disease Control reported that black women were almost 15 times as likely as white women to test positive for HIV.
”My new cases among women are often young women, coming in with a first pregnancy who are being tested as part of that pregnancy and finding out that they are HIV-positive,” said Dr. Mary Young, who treats AIDS patients at Georgetown University here.
“The gay community has done a wonderful job of getting the message out. But I don’t know that we target young African-American women very well.”
February 1, 1997
Los Angeles Activist Duke Comegys Dies
Duke Comegys — an activist who helped raise considerable funds for AIDS Project Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center (now known as the Los Angeles LGBT Center) and many other LGBTQ+ organizations and causes — dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 55.
Learn More.
Comegys’ skill as a national fund-raiser for AIDS and progressive causes was “matched only by his own generosity as a contributor,” Lorri L. Jean, then executive director of the LA LGBT Center, told the Los Angeles Times.
Comegys helped create the Center’s Philip Mandelker Clinic, forerunner of the current Jeffrey Goodman Special Care Clinic, and he served as co-chair of the Human Rights Campaign.
Comegys, who was born in Texas, graduated from the University of Texas, Columbia and Harvard Law School. Along with judges Rand Schrader and Steve Lachs, University of California Regent Sheldon Andelson, and West Hollywood Councilmember Steve Schulte, Comegys was considered one of the most influential voices in the LA community.
“Luncheon invitation’s to the Hollywood Hills home of Duke Comegys were coveted, and Comegys would alternate social invitations with fundraisers, so his contributors felt they were getting their money’s worth,” wrote Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney in their book Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (2013). “His parties … were certain to boast good food, a stocked bar, and handsome men by the pool.”
Christopher Boatwright, an international star in the dance world, dies of AIDS-related illness at the Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco. He was 42 years old.
[photo by dancerswelost.org]
Learn More.
Known for his elegant classicism, Boatwright was considered one of the finest dancers of his generation. According to New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning, Boatwright was one of the few Black American ballet dancers to achieve international recognition in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Across his career, Boatwright was recognized wherever he danced for his resplendent, versatile technique; the clarity, nobility, and lyricism of his dancing; and the warmth of his stage presence,” according to Dancers We Lost: Honoring Performers Lost to HIV/AIDS.
”With his long-legged, sustained line, Mr. Boatwright offers a nobility that was, on this occasion, humanized by a certain grace,” Anna Kisselgoff wrote in The New York Times in a 1979 review of his performance as Romeo in the Stuttgart production of John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet. ”One remembers the moment in the balcony pas de deux when he arched his back deeply as an expression of feeling.”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Boatwright trained at the schools of Merce Cunningham and American Ballet Theater and at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. He left the U.S. to study and perform at the Stuttgart in Germany after seeing the company’s 1973 production of Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. While with the Stuttgart, Boatwright performed ballets traditionally off limits to Black artists in America at that time, including Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Jeu de Cartes.
“When we went to Washington, DC, the theater didn’t want me to perform the role with a white ballerina,” Boatwright said in a 1996 interview with Dance Magazine. “They said they’d only present a Black Romeo with a Black Juliet. But the company put me on anyway.”
In the mid-1980s, he returned to the U.S. and performed with the Los Angeles Ballet and Jean-Paul Comelin’s Arizona Dance Theater. Then he moved to San Francisco and danced with the Alonzo King Lines Ballet Company for a year before joining the San Francisco Ballet, where he performed works by Frederick Ashton, Paul Taylor, and the company director, Helgi Tomasson. When he injured his hip, Boatwright taught dance until he recovered, and then he rejoined Lines in 1993.
His final performance was in June 1996, when he danced with Lines in New York City.
March 17, 1997
R&B Lyricist, Singer & Dancer Jermaine Stewart Dies
Jermaine Stewart — best known for his 1986 hit single “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off” — dies of AIDS-related illness in the Chicago suburb of Homewood at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Stewart started his entertainment career as a dancer on both American Bandstand and SoulTrain, the latter of which was televised from his hometown of Chicago. In the early 1980s, he and his long-time friend Jody Watley moved to London to pursue singing careers. He landed a gig as a back-up singer for the pop band Culture Club while Watley (who had left the R&B group Shalamar) began recording with multiple musicians.
After contributing vocals to Culture Club’s 1983 hit album Colour by Numbers. Stewart received help from band member Mikey Craig which led to a recording deal with Arista Records.
In 1984, Stewart released his debut album and single of the same name, The Word is Out. He released his second album, Frantic Romantic, in 1986, led by the hit single, “We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off.” It went platinum quickly and was followed up by second single, “Jody,” inspired by his friend Watley (who was about to experience her own commercial breakthrough).
“Jermaine Stewart had this voice that could break you down and build you back up at the same time,” singer-songwriter Morgxn wrote in 2017 for Billboard. “He made me feel his heart, and made me feel that I was okay in being myself.”
Stewart’s follow-up singles did not rise to the success of “Clothes,” but his album Say It Again gave him a comeback in England in 1988. The album’s title track reached the R&B Top 10 in the UK. According to a tribute to Stewart on Lee Bailey’s EurWeb, this would be his last major hit before leaving the music scene in 1991.
Stewart was working on new material when he succumbed to AIDS-related liver cancer on March 17, 1997. His burial site was left unmarked for over 17 years until 2014, when a fan anonymously paid for a gravestone, according to a tribute to Stewart on Gran Varones.
“We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off” saw a revival in the UK in 2011 when it was featured in a prominent commercial, causing a new generation of fans to download Stewart’s singles. The track has also been sampled for dance hits throughout the 2000s, according to the music fan site TalkAboutPopMusic.
April 25, 1997
First Man Murdered in Killing Spree that Ends with Death of Versace
Fearful that he had the virus that causes AIDS and determined to exact revenge, Andrew Cunanan bludgeons to death 28-year-old Jeffrey Trail, a manager for a propane delivery company, after stalking his victim in Bloomington, Minnesota.
Learn More.
Cunanan, a 27-year-old fixture of the San Diego nightclub scene, would murder four more people in the next three months and then end his own life with a gunshot to the head eight days after killing his fifth victim, world-famous designer Gianni Versace. An autopsy would show that Cunanan did not have HIV.
Earlier in the year, Cunanan became convinced by lingering illnesses that he was HIV-positive. He told an HIV counselor, Mike Dudley, that he was afraid he was infected, according to Andrea Cipriano in The Crime Sheet. This was after years of a party lifestyle that included seeking out older, rich men under the assumed name of Andrew DeSilva, according to Cipriano.
“It was 1997 — probably a year and a half, maybe two years out from when they had figured out the correct medication to give to patients with HIV,” wrote Julie Miller and Joanna Robinson in January 2018 for Vanity Fair magazine. “That transition was so intense to those who had it, and to those around the people who had it, because for 15 years, you were watching people die from this disease there didn’t seem to be a cure for.”
In April 1997, Cunanan left San Diego for Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Trail, a former acquaintance, and 33-year-old architect David Madson, an ex-boyfriend, both lived.
After stalking the two, Cunanan lured Trail to Madson’s apartment and beat him to death with a hammer. He took Madson hostage for two days, and then killed him, shooting him twice with a gun he stole from Trail’s apartment.
On May 4, Cunanan took Madson’s car and drove to Chicago. There, he entered the home of Lee Miglin, a 72-year-old real estate developer and millionaire, and killed him. After binding Miglin with duct tape, Cunanan stabbed him 20 times with a screwdriver and severed his throat with a hacksaw, according to Emma Dibdin’s 2018 account of Cunanan’s murders in Bazaar magazine.
After leaving Madson’s red Jeep for Miglin’s green Lexus, Cunanan fled Chicago and headed east. After driving more than 13 hours, Cunanan arrived in New Jersey, where he came upon his fourth victim, William Reese, the 45-year-old caretaker of Finn’s Point National Cemetery.
After Reese’s wife Rebecca came to the cemetery looking for her missing husband and found his office door ajar, she called the police. Officers found Reese’s body in the basement of the building, a single 40-mm bullet in his head.
By now, law enforcement officials were able to connect the Minneapolis murders to the murder of Miglin in Chicago, and had identified Cunanan as a suspect. After locating Miglin’s Lexus in New Jersey, officials released a multi-state bulletin for Cunanan’s arrest on suspicion of multiple murders.
Local police in New Jersey speculated that Cunanan killed Reese for his red Chevy pickup truck, which was far less conspicuous than the Lexus, according to the New York Daily News.
Cunanan drove Reese’s truck south and when he reached Miami Beach, he checked into an inexpensive hotel. By this time, the FBI had put Cunanan on its “Ten Most Wanted List,” making him the subject of a nationwide manhunt.
On July 15, 1997, Cunanan carried out his final act of murder as designer Gianni Versace was on the front stairway of his Miami Beach home, having just retrieved his morning newspaper. Cunanan shot Versace twice, killing him instantly.
A bystander attempted to chase Cunanan as he fled the scene, but was unable to catch him, according to Miami Beach police. Abandoned nearby were the red truck, the clothing Cunanan shed following the shooting, and newspaper articles about his murder spree.
Cunanan broke into a houseboat and was able to hide there for several days. But on July 24, law enforcement closed in. As police prepared to storm the houseboat, Cunanan took the same gun he used to kill Madson, Reese and Versace, and committed suicide.
For weeks afterward, the media covered the story with sensational details, often with speculation about the HIV status of Cunanan and his victims. Ultimately, a Miami Beach coroner’s report revealed that Cunanan did not have HIV.
But the crime story lived on, first in lengthy magazine articles and then a 1999 book by Maureen Orth, who had covered Cunanan’s murder spree for Vanity Fair magazine. In January 2018, the subject of Cunanan and his murders resurfaced in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a nine-episode series broadcast on FX.
The TV series was based on Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History. Orth’s book had claimed that Versace was HIV-positive, and likewise, the series depicted Versace as someone with a serious illness, although the word “HIV” was never specifically used.
Prior to its release, the Versace family lambasted the series and challenged its truthfulness. Executive producer Ryan Murphy defended the project on Vanity Fair’s “Still Watching: Versace” podcast, saying he felt it was necessary to include scenes about Versace’s illness in the storyline.
“I think it’s moving and powerful, and I don’t think there should be any shame associated with HIV,” Murphy said
The series — which starred Édgar Ramírez, Darren Criss, Ricky Martin, Penélope Cruz, and Judith Light — premiered to 5.5 million viewers, making it one of cable’s highest-rated series debuts.
May 18, 1997
President Clinton Sets Goal of HIV Vaccine by 2007
President Bill Clinton announces that the goal of finding an effective vaccine for HIV in 10 years will be a top national priority, and calls for the creation of an AIDS vaccine research center at the National Institutes of Health.
Mark Harrington of TAG & ACT UP Receives ‘Genius Grant’
Mark Harrington, the 38-year-old executive director of the Treatment Action Group (TAG), is named a 1997 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, becoming the first AIDS activist to receive the “Genius Grant.”
Learn More.
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.”
July 19, 1997
Red Dress Party Held at Gold Coast in WeHo
The inaugural Red Dress Party, which has inspired many gay men to don fiery frocks for the day, is held at the Gold Coast bar. The event is a fitting tribute to a beloved bartender who died of AIDS-related illness.
Learn More.
Mark Ferguson and Yves-Claude became close friends as they tended bar at the Gold Coast, the gay bar once located just east of West Hollywood City Hall. As reported by Hank Scott in WeHoville, both were struggling to maintain their health as HIV-related illnesses routinely sent each to the hospital.
Sharing a dark sense of humor, Ferguson and Claude made a pact: When one of them died, the other would show up at the memorial service in a red dress. This was during a time when effective treatment for AIDS and HIV was just starting to surface, but sadly these developments didn’t reach many in time.
Ferguson was the first to die, and his memorial was held before Claude could return home from a trip. But Claude was determined to make good on his promise. With the blessing of Gold Coast’s owner, Bob Hastings, Claude threw a party to celebrate Ferguson’s life and asked all attendees to pay tribute to the late bartender by wearing a red dress.
“The bar was a sea of red,” Hastings later told WeHoville.
“That Ferguson would suggest showing up at a friend’s funeral in a red dress was no surprise to those who knew him,” former WeHoville editor Hank Scott wrote. “Known for his support of other people living with HIV, he visited them at the hospital dressed in drag as a nurse.”
The Red Dress Party was so popular (and successful in raising money for area organizations serving the needs of HIV-positive people), it became an annual event. Sadly, Claude also died a few years later of AIDS-related illness. But his Red Dress Party for his friend became an annual tribute to all those in the community who died of AIDS, according to WeHo Times.
What’s more, Red Dress fundraisers began springing up far and wide, from nearby San Diego and Sacramento to far-reaching cities like Seattle, Chicago and Toronto. In 2008, the Red Dress Party in Portland was notably attended by Chelsea Clinton, the former “First Daughter” who was preparing to write her doctoral dissertation on global efforts to tackle the AIDS pandemic.
Meanwhile, in West Hollywood, the Gold Coast would host the event every July for 23 years. The event even became a book — Drag Queen for a Day (2017) by Paul Joseph Hamel, who took photos of the Red Dress Party from 2003 to 2013. Then another pandemic struck — COVID-19 — and the bar closed.
In 2021, as bars and restaurants were permitted to re-open, the Gold Coast remained shuttered and was put up for sale. Trunks Bar and Micky’s WeHo took up the red-hued mantle and jointly brought the Red Dress Party back to West Hollywood on November 14, 2021.
The next year, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence of Los Angeles assumed the role of event organizer and took the event to the next level, receiving financial and promotional support from the City of West Hollywood. With the The Sisters at the helm, the event is now held in the fall at various businesses in West Hollywood’s Rainbow District and continues to raise money for people living with HIV.
August 2, 1997
Afrobeat Star & Activist Fela Kuti Dies
Musician and activist Fela Kuti, a pioneer of Afrobeat music who was repeatedly arrested and beaten for writing lyrics that questioned the Nigerian government, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 58.
Learn More.
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.
Douglas Hevenor, a former dancer with Joffrey Ballet, National Ballet of Washington and California Ballet of San Diego, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 48.
Learn More.
A resident of the East Bay, Hevenor was honored the world over for his stunning technique, receiving awards at the International Ballet Competition in Varna, Bulgaria — the first American so honored — and the World Ballet Concours in Tokyo.
Hevenor was lauded for his performances in The Nutcracker (1987) and Giselle (1983) with the California Ballet. When dancing with the Washington Ballet, he was featured on Music in Motion, a half-hour documentary broadcast on Washington DC local television about Choo San Goh, the company’s resident choreographer. In the documentary, Hevenor is seen in the dances “Lament” and “Birds in Paradise.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves Combivir, the first one-pill combination of the two most widely used antiretroviral medications for AIDS and HIV infection.
As the first combination agent, the medication significantly simplies HIV therapy. Combivir becomes the gold standard nucleoside “backbone” until the mid-2000s, when the introduction of newer fixed-dose combinations with improved tolerability and toxicity arrive.
November 21, 1997
Congress Pushes FDA to Accelerate Drug Approval Process
UNAIDS estimates that 30 million adults and children worldwide have HIV, and that, each day, 16,000 people are newly infected with the virus.
December 1997
Protease Inhibitor Use Leads to Drug Resistance in Some
As a greater number of people begin taking protease inhibitors, resistance to the drugs becomes more common, and drug resistance emerges as an area of grave concern within the AIDS community.
January 6, 1998
Actor-Screenwriter Murray Salem Dies
Murray Salem, screenwriter of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film Kindergarten Cop, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 47.
Learn More.
Salem’s desire to succeed as an actor took him to London and Glasgow, where he began acting on the stage before moving to the screen. After attending the Drama Studio London for two years, and staying in an apartment where he slept in the washroom to save money, he received an offer to join the Glasgow Citizen’s Company in 1972, winning one of five slots among a pool of 300 actors.
Salem remained with the Scottish troupe for two years, performing in productions like Eva Peron and Arden of Feversham. He received critical praise from the Financial Times as a “large and graceful man who, astonishingly, emits both the sultry masculinity of a Joe Dallesandro and the petulant transvestism of another Warhol star, Holly Woodlawn,” for his turn as Eva Peron.
From 1975-1977, he acted with the New Shakespeare Company in London where he played roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and Love’s Labour Lost, before his connections led him to the film world of London.
Salem started his film career in British exploitation movies, with a small part as a “heavy” in the sexploitation classic Let’s Get Laid (1979) and a larger supporting role in Hussy (1980), a gritty tale of a prostitute in 1970s London starring Helen Mirren. In the latter, Salem plays a scheming drug runner with an ebullience that provides much needed color and energy to a generally depressing and grinding film. His character is introduced in a crowded bar where he bounds onto the dance floor and commands the attention of the entire audience with over-the-top humor.
After moving to Los Angeles, he had roles in a number of film and television productions, including memorable turns in the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Holocaust (1978), and Riding High (1981), a film built around a motorcycle stunt competition.
Soon he started screenwriting, which provided both financial stability and a modicum of fame. After a bit part as an Arab gold dealer in the pilot of Magnum P.I., Salem gave up being in front of the camera and dedicated his time to screenwriting, eventually crafting Kindergarten Cop in 1988-1989.
In all, Salem wrote nine scripts over 15 years and sold all of them except one. The studios mothballed all the screenplays they purchased, except Kindergarten Cop. His scripts ranged in topics from teenagers in prison to a father-son story about Central American refugees during the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s.
While living with AIDS, Salem publicized information on pill exchanges to help others who did not have access to HIV medication.
Knowing he was likely to die of AIDS, he wrote a series of letters to his young niece and nephew that they were to open once a year from 1998-2015. Each letter contained a video he wanted them to watch so they could understand his love of cinema (Funny Girl, Sound of Music, Some Like it Hot, Cabaret, Ghost, Ben Hur, West Side Story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Dr. Zhivago, Silence of the Lambs, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, Camille).
March 7, 1998
Nearly Half of U.S. AIDS Deaths are in Black Population
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases new data showing that Black people account for almost half of U.S. AIDS-related deaths.
Learn More.
The CDC invited Black community leaders, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, to a briefing to discuss the highly disproportionate impact of HIV and AIDS in Black and Hispanic communities.
In the weeks ahead, the leadership coalition would develop a call to action, requesting that President Bill Clinton and Surgeon General C. Everett Koop declare HIV/AIDS to be a “State of Emergency” in the Black community.
AIDS-related mortality for Black people was almost 10 times that of White people and three times that of Hispanic people, according to the CDC report. Only 13% of the U.S. population was Black, but they accounted for 49% of AIDS deaths. Moreover, Black Americans were experiencing less dramatic declines in AIDS deaths than whites.
“Ultimately how we succeed in affecting the course of the HIV epidemic in communities of color will be a measure of our collective ability to better target HIV prevention, research, and treatment,” says Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, CDC Director.
The CDC report expresses hope that partnerships with black communities are becoming stronger in recent months, when black community leaders join with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Congressional Black Caucus to create more HIV prevention programs in communities of color.
Federal Funding Continues to be Withheld from Needle-Exchange Programs
Donna Shalala, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, determines that needle-exchange programs are effective and do not encourage the use of illegal drugs, but the Clinton Administration refuses to lift the ban on use of Federal funds for these programs.
Haitian Asylum-seekers Die while in Immigration Limbo in NYC
Three Haitian immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. die of AIDS-related illness within a single week in New York City. They are among the 20 HIV-positive refugees who have died in the five years following their release from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Learn More.
In 1993, 200 Haitian asylum-seekers were confined to Camp Bulkeley at the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Under a judge’s order, they were finally allowed into the U.S., with most of them settling in Miami and New York City.
According to reporting in The New York Times, the vast majority of them had not won the political asylum they sought. Twenty of them had already died, while others lived lives of quiet desperation, unable to get work and dependent on dwindling social programs.
Earlier in 1998, three New York social service agencies lost a total of $600,000 in federal grants that were used to fund housing, health care, counseling, and legal counseling for Haitian refugees, wrote reporter Garry Pierre-Pierre for the NYT.
“The pie is getting smaller, and people are less sympathetic toward refugees and immigrants,” Gabrielle Kersaint told the NYT. Kersaint oversaw the Haitian Women’s Program, one of the organizations whose financing was eliminated.
May 29, 1998
Congressional Black Caucus Declares AIDS State of Emergency
The Congressional Black Caucus urges Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to invoke a Federal law allowing her to release up to $45 million to combat the HIV epidemic in Black communities.
Learn More.
In an initiative led by California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the Caucus also requested that President Bill Clinton adopt state of emergency measures to address the HIV/AIDS disparities in Black communities. This action followed a March 1989 report by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention showing that Black Americans are disproportionately impacted by HIV/AIDS.
Although Black people comprised 12% of the U.S. population in 1998, they represented 43% of new AIDS cases. Also, AIDS was cited by the CDC as the leading cause of death for Black people between the ages of 25 to 44.
In the coming days, President Bill Clinton would direct government agencies to examine ways to reduce disparities in health status that affect racial and ethnic minorities.
Sub-Saharan Africa Shows More Women Infected than Men
In June, UNAIDS reports that the number of women living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa now exceeds that of men.
June 25, 1998
SCOTUS Rules ADA Covers People Living with HIV
The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Americans with Disabilities Act covers those in earlier stages of HIV disease, not just those who have developed AIDS.
July 18, 1998
Thomas Steel, Bay Area Civil Rights Lawyer, Dies
Thomas Steel, a San Francisco lawyer who champtioned free speech, freedom of religion, LGBT rights, and the civil rights of minorities, dies at a San Francisco hospital of AIDS-related complications. He was 48 years old.
Learn More.
One of the first of Steel’s cases to be followed widely was his 1978 defense of Huey P. Newton, a leader of the Black Panthers, on assault charges in Alameda County, according to The New York Times. In his cross-examination of a key witness, Steel was able to get the witness to admit that he didn’t know who was responsible for the assault. Newton was acquitted.
In perhaps Steel’s most celebrated case, he won a $920,000 settlement for a Vietnam War veteran who was nearly killed by a U.S. Navy munitions train while he sat on the tracks to nonviolently blockade a weapons shipment to El Salvador. The man, whose legs were severed in the incident, used the settlement money from the federal government to be fitted with artificial limbs.
Steel was known for taking on unpopular causes and controversial cases. He successfully sued the City of San Francisco in several police brutality cases. Even his opponents couldn’t help but admire him.
San Francisco City Attorney Louise Renne said, “He was always for the underdog. He fought very hard for his clients. He was an excellent attorney who cared very much about people and civil rights.”
Senator Barbara Boxer from California said, “He devoted much of his life to fighting for the disadvantaged, and he will be sorely missed.”
Steel grew up on a peach ranch north of Sacramento. Both his grandfather and father were County Superior Court judges. According to the San Francisco Examiner, his father would conduct mock court at the dinner table, using forks and knives to map property lines, and challenging his children to determine fair resolutions to cases.
In 1975, Steel earned his law degree from Hastings College of the Law, where he joined the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive attorneys’ group, and formed the Gay Caucus, the guild’s first LGBT committee. He later helped found the nation’s first gay and lesbian bar association, the Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom.
After opening his own firm, Steel he agreed to represent the Mitchell Brothers and other adult entertainment businesses against the City of San Francisco’s efforts to curtail them, successfully arguing for the business owners’ First Amendement rights.
In 1979, Steel pushed the San Francisco district attorney to prosecute and convict a police officer for battery after he and several drunken friends invaded a local lesbian bar. He then sued the city over the incident on behalf of the injured patrons, which at the time was unusual.
In the last few years of his life, Steel continued to fight for the rights of others. In 1995, he helped the city’s Board of Supervisors craft Proposition G, which fortified the rights and purview of the Office of Citizen Complaints and its investigations of reports of police misconduct. He also brought suits over the course of 15 years under the federal Freedom of Information Act on behalf of journalists and others seeking FBI records.
In 1996, Steel won a federal appeals court ruling that the City of San Francisco’s ownership and display atop a hill of the 103-foot Mount Davidson cross violated the constitutional separation of church and state. A lower judge permitted the cross to stay, saying it was mainly historical, not religious, and it was often shrouded by fog. The appeals court reversed his decision, saying, “Constitutional guarantees should not depend on weather, especially in San Francisco.”
The Pride Law Fund has named its most prestigious fellowship award after the late civil rights icon. The Tom Steel Post-Graduate Fellowship provides a $30,000 award for a new lawyer to work in the U.S. on an innovative, public interest law project that serves the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
August 13, 1998
Bay Area Reporter: ‘No Obits’
After more than 17 years of covering the AIDS crisis and some weeks with as many as 31 obituaries,San Francisco’s gay weekly newspaper Bay Area Reporter runs the following headline on its front page: “No obits.”
Learn More.
“It seems a new reality may be taking hold, and the community may be on the verge of a new era of the epidemic,” wrote Timothy Rodrigues in the BAR‘s front-page article. “Perhaps.”
Derek Gordon, director of communications for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said the recent decrease in the number of obituaries reflected a parallel trend in his personal experience. The introduction of new anti-HIV drug regimens have been successful in reducing the number of AIDS deaths.
“I don’t have any obits to personally tell,” Gordon told the BAR.
But Gordon cautioned that the epidemic is not over.
Dick Pabich, AIDS policy advisor to Mayor Willie Brown, told the BAR that the lack of obituaries was symbolically very important, but that the fight to end the epidemic needed to continue full force.
Pabich cited recent statistics that suggested that 10 people in San Francisco were being infected by HIV each week, and that an estimated 15,000 people living in the city were HIV-positive.
“The folks who are dying are not necessarily BAR readers,” said Guy Vandenberg, director of external programs at Continuum HIV Day Services.
Vandenberg told the BAR reporter about the death of a Continuum client who died alone, sitting in a chair in his hotel room in the Tenderloin district. “He had no one to write his obituary,” he said.
BAR was quick to begin covering the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, and would print notices of people dying from AIDS-related illness that were often submitted by friends, partners and family members of the diseased. Media outlets worldwide covered news of BAR‘s “No Obits” issue, which marked the first time the newspaper received no death notices in a given week since the start of the epidemic.
September 2, 1998
AIDS Researchers Die in Plane Crash
Jonathan Max Mann, M.D., known as the “architect of the global mobilization against AIDS,” and his wife, Mary Lou Clements-Mann, M.D. of Johns Hopkins University, are among the 229 people who die in the crash of Swissair Flight 111. The couple were traveling to an HIV vaccine meeting in Geneva.
Learn More.
Dr. Mann, 51, was world-renown for his role as the founding director of the World Health Organization’s Global Program on AIDS He had recently become dean of Allegheny University of the Health Sciences’ School of Public Health in Philadelphia.
Dr. Clements-Mann of Johns Hopkins University, also 51, was a distinguished researcher in vaccine development at Johns Hopkins University.
“This is shocking,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, said to the Los Angeles Times. “We’ve lost two fine human beings, as well as two major contributors to the AIDS effort who were there from the very beginning.”
The couple often travelled to Geneva, the headquarters of WHO and site of numerous international scientific meetings on AIDS. The regular Swissair flight out of New York to Geneva was considered by many as “a U.N. airbus,” because so many U.N. agencies were based in Geneva.
Also dying in the plane crash were Klaus Kinder-Geiger, a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory; Per Spanne, also Brookhaven researcher; Roger Williams, a cardiovascular geneticist at the University of Utah; and several staff members from the United Nations.
As the first director of the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) campaign against AIDS, Dr. Mann was known world over for his early efforts to combat AIDS. Hailed as a human rights leader, he traveled to scores of nations to bring global and political attention to the seriousness of the epidemic.
“I was struck at the time that he looked much more beyond the research. He was very interested in the political implications of the epidemic. He was already convinced that AIDS would have broad social implications,” said Peter Piot, who worked with Dr. Mann in Zaire in 1984. “He changed my vision and view on all this.”
One of the world’s foremost authorities on global AIDS, Dr. Mann co-wrote two books defining and analyzing the global epidemic. Although his background was in medicine and not law, he contributed significant work to many law-related publications on the subject of human rights and healthcare.
In a 1996 essay for The John Marshall Law Review titled “Human Rights and AIDS: The Future of the Pandemic,” Dr. Mann argued that general principles of international human rights law, and specifically those grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, should guide medical personnel, public health policy makers, and governments in their responses to HIV and AIDS.
“His article reflected a global vision that the only appropriate responses to the HIV and AIDS pandemic would link human rights to public health,” wrote Mark E. Wojcik, a law professor at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago, in his tribute to Dr. Mann.
As the director of WHO’s campaign against AIDS from 1986 to 1990, Dr. Mann founded the United Nations’ Special Programme on AIDS on the principle that international cooperation was essential to combat the disease.
“Assurance of global collaboration is of the highest priority,” Dr. Mann said at the time, “for AIDS cannot be stopped in any country until it is stopped in all countries.”
Under Dr. Mann, the UN’s HIV/AIDS program (later renamed the Global Programme on AIDS) developed evidence that the only effective responses to HIV were those that respected the human rights of persons affected by the disease, according to Professor Wojcik.
“This stance influenced subsequent declarations on AIDS by focusing not only on the need for international cooperation, but on the protection of human rights as a fundamental public health strategy,” wrote Wojcik in 1998 for the UIC Law Review. “Mann’s advocacy for the protection of human rights as a key to public health also came in severe contrast to the positions of some governments and public health officials, who argued that the only effective response to AIDS was to imprison or deport persons with the virus.”
Dr. Mann received constant resistance to his humane approach to HIV/AIDS care, some times from within the UN system, and this led him to resign from WHO in protest in 1990.
His wife, Dr. Clements-Mann, was remembered by colleagues as a tireless advocate for vaccines, according to The Washington Post. She was working on a vaccine for HIV infection at the time of her death.
“In designing and conducting clinical trials for vaccines, she was as good as anyone in the world,” said Donald Burke, the director of the Center for Immunization Research at the school.
In 1999, the CDC Foundation would create the Jonathan M. Mann Memorial Lecture Fund in honor the late AIDS advocacy pioneer. The grant supports the annual Jonathan M. Mann Memorial Lecture, which is administered by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists during its annual conference. The CDC Foundation is a nonprofit which supports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s critical health protection work.
Also in 1999, the Mary Lou Clements-Mann Memorial Lecture in Vaccine Sciences would be created by National Foundation for Infectious Diseases to honor the vaccinologist and her work. The lecture is presented each year at the NFID Annual Conference on Vaccinology Research.
October 12, 1998
Congress Approves Funding for Hemophilia Relief
Congress enacts the Ricky Ray Hemophilia Relief Fund Act, honoring the Florida teenager infected with HIV through contaminated blood products.
Learn More.
The Act authorizes payments of $125,000 to individuals with hemophilia and other blood clotting disorders who were infected with HIV by unscreened blood-clotting agents between 1982 and 1987. The funding program also includes payments for individuals who were infected with HIV through perinatal transmission from a hemophiliac parent.
October 28, 1998
President Clinton Declares Crisis in Minority Communities
President Clinton declares AIDS to be a “severe and ongoing health crisis” in black and hispanic communities in the U.S. and announces a special package of initiatives aimed at reducing the impact of HIV/AIDS on racial and ethnic minorities.
Learn More.
The initiative invests an unprecedented $156 million to improve the nation’s effectiveness in preventing and treating HIV/AIDS in racial and ethnic minority communities.
The funding is spread across three broad categories: technical assistance and infrastructure support; increasing access to prevention and care; and building stronger linkages to address the needs of specific populations.
The majority of the funding would be sourced from the omnibus federal budget passed the week before, and the remainder “was redirected from other discretionary spending programs,” according to President Clinton in his announcement.
The move came in response to a call from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, who argued that “AIDS is a public health crisis in the black community.”
Although blacks constitute only 12% of the population, they comprise more than one third of all HIV/AIDS cases and 43% of new cases, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
In May 1998, the Congressional Black Caucus called on Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala “to declare an AIDS state of emergency because of the unchecked spread of the disease in the nation’s minority community.”
“This is a national crisis,” said caucus chair Waters. “We will not rest until it is understood as one, until it is considered as one and worked on as one.
When a Congressional body declares a “state of emergency,” it typically results in raising public awareness about the issue and alerts government leaders that more money and energy should be directed toward addressing the issue.
Denise Stokes, a 29-year-old advisor to President Bill Clinton and a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, spoke at the White House announcement of a new initiative to address AIDS in racial and ethnic minority communities.
Learn More.
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.
November 8, 1998
Country Blues Artist Lonnie Pitchford Dies
Lonnie Pitchford, a Mississippi blues musician who played guitar and the diddley bow, dies of AIDS-related illness at his Lexington home in Holmes County. He was 43.
Learn More.
Pitchford was largely a self-taught musician, starting at the age of 5 with a single-stringed instrument called the diddley bow that he made himself. He progressed to other instruments, including piano and a guitar that he shared with four brothers. But he never left the diddley bow behind, and he explored ways to bring out new and complex sounds from the seemingly simple instrument.
When he was 16, Pitchford met folklorist and civil rights worker Worth Long, who taught him the importance of music and blues in Black American history. This was around the time that Long was introducing Black folklore and music to the Smithsonian American History Museum, creating a space for a history that had been long distorted and neglected.
The next year, Pitchford travelled to Washington, D.C. to play at the 1973 National Folk Festival and the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival, and he astounded audiences with his ability to play the material of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. And when Pitchford pulled out his diddley bow and created old-world blues sounds from one taut string and a shiny dime, audiences couldn’t believe their ears. He was 17 years old.
He sought out lessons to improve his technique, and was mentored by Eugene Powell, an old Mississippi bluesman who sometimes recorded under the name Sonny Boy Nelson. Robert Junior Lockwood, whose stepfather was Robert Johnson, also helped Pitchford learn more about replicating Johnson’s style.
For a while, Pitchford performed at major blues gatherings around the South with Lockwood and another blues legend, Johnny Shines. But then Pitchford always returned home to resume work as a carpenter. According to Richard Skelly of AllMusic, Pitchford wasn’t often booked for tours, because he didn’t have any solo recordings.
“He was able to make occasional road trips to Memphis and other cities where his music was appreciated,” writes Skelly. “He divided his time between road trips to play blues and working as a carpenter. Pitchford was voted as one of Living Blues magazine’s ‘top 40 under 40’ new blues players to watch.”
Pitchford appeared in documentaries about the blues, including ‘The Land Where the Blues Began‘ (1980), and he was recorded for five blues anthologies, according toNew York Times music critic Jon Pareles. He also made an album with the New Africa String Band, which included blues greats Eugene Powell and Big Jack Johnson.
Pitchford’s wife, Minnie, said he liked to play for members of the Lexington community where he lived, often giving impromptu concerts in cafes and at the park.
In 1994, when he was almost 40 years old, he recorded his one and only solo album, All Around Man, for Rooster Blues Records. On the cover, Pitchford is pictured with various guitars (electric, acoustic, one-string).
“That CD included songs he had learned from Robert Johnson’s protégé Robert Jr. Lockwood, as well as a previously unrecorded track that Lonnie’s mother-in-law had learned from her friend, the late slide guitar master Elmore James,” Jim O’Neal wrote in 1998 in Delta Boogie.
Shortly after All Around Man was released, Grammy-winning rock musician John Mellencamp invited Pitchford to his studio in Belmont, Indiana to play the slide guitar on one of the tracks for his 14th album, Mr. Happy Go Lucky (1996).
Mellencamp later told the Associated Press of his concept for the album: “When we started making this record, I thought I’d marry the rhythm of Black music of the ’90s, which is rap, and the sounds of Black blues music of the ’30s and ’40s. We’d have Robert Johnson-type guitar licks playing with this rap rhythm underneath it. It didn’t always work out that way, but that’s the place we started from.”
In late 1997, Pitchford began working on a second album for Rooster Blues, but as his health began to decline, he was unable to continue, according to Delta Boogie writer Jim O’Neal.
O’Neal said that a few months before Pitchford died, he had the opportunity to play a slide guitar that had belonged to Elmore James (1918-1963).
Pitchford’s grave is located near the grave of Elmore James at the cemetery of the New Part Baptist Church in Homes County, Mississippi. A diddley bow is featured on the headstone, which was paid for by Southern rocker John Fogerty (whose brother Tom died of AIDS-related illness in 1990) and Rooster Blues Records.
November 8, 1998
HIV+ Politician Thomas Duane Elected to NY State Senate
Thomas K. Duane is elected to New York’s State Senate and becomes first openly-gay and first openly HIV-positive member of the Senate.
Learn More.
In his inaugural remarks, Sen. Duane promised he would work to expand the Medicaid program to meet more fully the needs of low-income New Yorkers. He also intended to expand both public and private healthcare benefits so that they would include provisions for mental health services and the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction.
The new senator was entering office at a time when the NY Senate was dominated by conservative Republicans from rural areas of the state and was led by Senator Joe Bruno, a notoriously anti-LGBTQ social conservative.
“Duane’s record of activism, however, in and out of public office, holds out hope for a larger impact than we might expect from a single legislator, and a lowly freshman at that,” wrote Laura Engle in her February 1999 column for The Body.
Sen. Duane would go on to serve multiple terms, and would be a pivotal figure during the 2011 battle over same-sex marriage in New York State.
Highlights of his time in the Senate would include closing loopholes for people trying to avoid child- and spousal-support payments, requiring health insurance plans to cover treatment for mental illness, and adding sexual orientation to the list of protected categories in state laws. He would also garner a reputation as a fierce advocate for tenants’ and civil rights.
Duane began his political career as a staffer for the New York City Comptroller. In 1991, he ran for City Council and won a contentious race after disclosing his HIV-positive status. In 1994, Duane ran for Congress but lost to Jerry Nadler.
Duane’s senatorial district included the Upper West Side, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, Greenwich Village, and parts of the East Side, including the East Village, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village and Waterside Plaza.
Congress Allocates $156 Million for Minority AIDS Initiative
At the urging of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congress funds the Minority AIDS Initiative to address the growing disparity of HIV infection among communities of color.
Learn More.
An unprecedented $156 million annual budget is dedicated to improving the nation’s effectiveness in preventing and treating HIV/AIDS in minority communities.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California’s 43rd district, led efforts within the U.S. House of Representatives to establish the Minority AIDS Initiative (MAI) during her tenure as Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The establishment of the MAI was announced on October 28, about two weeks prior to the Congressional vote, at an event sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus. The event featured the participation of President Bill Clinton, Secretary of Health & Human Services Donna Shalala, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and representatives of HIV/AIDS service and advocacy organizations.
While the number of new AIDS cases in the U.S. began to decline in 1996, AIDS remained the leading cause of death for Black men between the ages of 25 and 44 and the second leading killer of Black women in the same age group.
Though representing approximately 13% of the U.S. population, Black people comprised more than 40% of all new HIV/AIDS cases in 1998, and Black women made up 60% of all new female cases. Likewise, the Hispanic population represented over 20% of new HIV/AIDS cases and only 11% of the U.S. population.
The MAI was the latest in a series of 1998 Clinton Administration initiatives to address racial and ethnic health disparities in the American public, according to the Clinton Digital Library.
In 2009, Congress would codify the MAI within the reauthorization of the Ryan White CARE Act. Today, the Minority AIDS Initiative continues to fills gaps in prevention, treatment, surveillance, infrastructure, outreach and education across communities of color.
Sources: Photo courtesy of the Clinton White House Archives: Rep. Maxine Waters with Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS member Denise Stokes and President Bill Clinton at the Congressional Black Caucus event announcing the creation of the Minority AIDS Initiative on October 28, 1998 William J Clinton Presidential Library
November 30, 1998
Simon Tseko Nkoli, South African Activist, Dies
Simon Tseko Nkoli — whose activism extended to the anti-apartheid, gay rights and AIDS awareness movements — dies of HIV-related illness in Johannesburg at the age of 41.
Learn More.
“His enduring legacy is that he brought black people and the tenets of liberation ideology into the gay SA subculture, thus providing a pre-emptive strike against the ‘Homosexuality is Un-African’ arguments of people like Robert Mugabe, and paving the way for the ANC’s understanding of gay equality as a human rights issue,” wrote Mark Gevisser for the South Africa Sunday Times.
Born in Soweto, Nkoli became a youth activist against apartheid, joining the Congress of South African Students and the United Democratic Front.
After joining the Gay Association of South Africa in 1983, Nkoli became disenchanted with the mostly white membership when he found scant support for anti-apartheid activism.
Nkoli spoke at rallies in support of rent-boycotts in the Vaal townships, and in 1984 was arrested and faced the death penalty for treason with 21 other political leaders in the Delmas Treason Trial. While under arrest, he came out publicly and, by doing so, helped raise awareness of the fight for gay rights. He was acquitted and released from prison in 1988.
He founded the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) in 1988. GLOW was both a reaction to GASA’s white apolitical standpoint and a way Nkoli could combine both sides of his activism, according to South African History Online. With LGBT activist Beverley Palesa Ditsie, he organized the first Pride parade in South Africa held in 1990.
Nkoli was one of the first gay activists to meet with President Nelson Mandela in 1994. He campaigned for the inclusion of discrimination protections in the 1994 South African constitution’s Bill of Rights.
In 1996, Nkoli was presented with the Stonewall Award in the Royal Albert Hall in London.
After becoming one of the first publicly HIV-positive African gay men, he founded the Positive African Men group in Johannesburg.
In the last year of his life, he campaigned to repeal South Africa’s sodomy law, which was successfully abolished in May 1998.
In a memoir published in Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, Nkoli wrote: “If you are black in South Africa, the inhuman laws of apartheid closet you. If you are gay in South Africa, the homophobic customs and laws of this society closet you. If you are black and gay in South Africa, well, then it really is all the same closet, the same wardrobe. Inside is darkness and oppression. Outside is freedom. It is as simple as that.”
At his funeral, Nkoli’s coffin was draped with the Pride Flag, a symbol of his unique struggle and incredible perseverance.
Canadian filmmaker John Greyson made a short film about Nkoli titled A Moffie Called Simon in 1987. Nkoli was also the subject of Robert Colman’s 2003 play, Your Loving Simon, and Beverley Ditsie’s 2002 film Simon & I.John Greyson’s 2009 film Fig Trees, a hybrid documentary/opera includes reference to Nkoli’s activism.
December 17, 1998
Gugu Dlamini Killed by Neighbors in South Africa
After speaking about her HIV-positive status on Zulu-language radio and television, activist Gugu Dlamini is stoned and stabbed to death by men in her South African community.
Learn More.
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. “
January 1999
Congress Examines HIV/AIDS Impact on Hispanic Community
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, convenes hearings on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the Latino community.
January 20, 1999
Victory Fund Co-Founder John Thomas Dies
John Thomas, the founding executive director of the Resource Center of Dallas and later a founder of the Victory Fund, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 51.
Learn More.
As a founding board member of the Victory Fund, John Thomas helped to create in 1991 what would become one of the most powerful and influential LGBTQ organizations in the country. Through its efforts to develop grassroots support of LGBTQ candidates running for public office, the Victory Fund raises money for political campaigns.
Thomas emerged in the late 1970s as an important member of the Dallas LGBTQ community when, as an openly gay man, he was hired as vice president of human resources at the Dallas Times Herald. Thomas also was head of the membership committee for the Dallas Gay Alliance (later known as the Dallas Gay & Lesbian Alliance).
“John’s magnetism was a tour de force. He could enter any room, gathering, or event and be immediately recognized and admired,” said William Weybourn, a 20-year friend who followed Thomas into a life of activism.
Thomas convinced Weybourn to join the Dallas Gay Alliance, which soon expanded from being a purely political organization to a service agency. As the AIDS epidemic hit the Dallas community, the DGA created a food bank, health clinic, and legal hospice to help with last-minute wills.
“The various committees of the DGA were like tentacles that reached out into the community, organized events, and held fundraisers,” Weybourn recalled in a 2021 article for the Dallas Voice.
After Thomas’ death, Weybourn was provided with Thomas’ journals, and he shared the following passage Thomas wrote on January 19, 1985:
“1984 – the year AIDS seriously hit Dallas. I began to scan the death notices in the newspaper. The severity and desolation is matched only by the apathy and fatalism within our community and the minimal, nominal concern and resources from the government.”
With the AIDS crisis escalating, Thomas left his corporate job to become executive director of the newly formed Foundation for Human Understanding and its AIDS Resource Center. Meanwhile, Weybourn became president of the Dallas Gay/Lesbian Alliance.
“John’s leadership in those early days was instrumental in creating one of the nation’s largest community-based organizations and, along with others, helped lead our response to AIDS,” Weybourn wrote in 2020 for The Dallas Way. “There are no words to describe the devastation [AIDS] imposed on our community, friends, and families, but John’s ‘hugs’ always seemed to provide much needed solace.”
The AIDS Resource Center’s future was threatened on February 23, 1989, when a 26-year-old man set fire to the building, resulting in the near-complete destruction of the center and adjacent businesses. But Thomas made sure the organization continued to deliver food and services to clients in spite of the loss of the center, and then he immediately spearheaded the fundraising and construction of a new center, according to Weybourn.
Just a few weeks later, Thomas appealed to the Dallas City Council for help, saying, “I am here speaking on behalf of my best friend, Mike Hearn, who died on January 4, 1986. Do not allow AIDS to be dehumanized by mere numbers or statistics. People with AIDS have names and faces and jobs and families.”
The AIDS Resource Center would eventually become known as the Resource Center, and today continues to provide programs of interest to LGBTQIA+ community members and critical assistance to people living with HIV and AIDS.
When Weybourn moved to Washington, DC in 1991 to head the newly founded Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, Thomas remained in Dallas to oversee the AIDS Resource Center but served as a Board Member of the new organization.
In 1992, Thomas was one of the plaintiffs in Texas vs. Morales, in which the Court of Appeals of Texas held that a state statute criminalizing private sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex was unconstitutional. This pivotal ruling declared Section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code invalid under the Texas State Constitution.
Meanwhile, the Victory Fund was becoming known as a political powerhouse in the U.S. Among the earliest beneficiaries of the organization’s support was Tammy Baldwin, who in 1992 won a seat in the Wisconsin State House of Representatives. In 1994, the Victory Fund endorsed candidate Sheila James Kuehl and helped her become the first openly LGBTQ person in the California state legislature, according to the organization’s website.
In an April 1995 speech, Thomas said, “What I say to myself and to you: Take control of your own life and make a difference for others with integrity and dignity. Stop hiding and lying, and start being responsible for your own life and world. My symbols are rainbows and butterflies, as they represent hope and transformation.”
In the late 1990s, Thomas called Weybourn to tell him that he had tested positive for HIV.
“His fear that day was not about himself, but how it would look in the media for the head of the AIDS Resource Center, a leading advocate for AIDS prevention, to become HIV positive,” Weybourn wrote in 2021.
According to Weybourn, Thomas had contracted a particularly virulent strain of HIV and, by 1998, was very sick. The latest treatment, highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), was proving to not be effective for him.
“I flew to Dallas almost every weekend, relieving caretakers and friends,” Weybourn recalled. “Some weekends, when he felt like it, we would go to a nearby movie theater — it didn’t matter what was playing. We walked in the middle of some movies and walked out of many others because he was just too tired … Mostly we just talked, covering every subject imaginable.”
Weybourn said that Thomas decided to stop taking his medications in May 1998 – “essentially taking himself off life support.”
Of Thomas’ final moments, Weybourn wrote: “John was so pale. I put my hand on his chest and said, ‘John, I’m here.’ I held his hand, and he took one look at me. Instead of taking another breath, he just exhaled. That was his last breath.”
At a rally to honor the memory of Thomas, Weybourn said:
“While John is at rest, his work is not. With John’s passing, we may believe today that there is no one who can do the work with the force and effectiveness that he did. We may think there is no equal. But there will be but a brief shortage of the someone else’s to put things right. Who knows? Because of his legacy, the next John Thomas may be in this room today. It can even be you.”
National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Raises Visibility
The first National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day is launched as a grassroots-education effort to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS prevention, care, and treatment in communities of color.
February 7, 1999
Bay Area AIDS Activist Reggie Williams Dies
Reggie Williams, a longtime AIDS activist and former head of the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention, dies in Amsterdam, where he had lived for the last five years. He was 47.
Learn More.
Williams was an early leader in calling for public awareness of the problem in the Bay Area’s Black community. Through his job as founding director of the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention, he advanced the public’s understanding of the challenges facing HIV-infected minorities.
Launched in 1985, the San Francisco-based National Task Force on AIDS Prevention developed culturally sensitive research and training programs and shared them with HIV/AIDS advocates and organizations working across the country.
“You need to look at a different model from one that works for gay, white men,” said Williams in the late 1980s. “There is a host of other issues we gay men of color deal with on a daily basis. We have to deal with impoverishment, homophobia in our own community, and pervasive racism in society.”
Born and raised in Cincinnati, Williams graduated from Withrow High School in 1969 and enrolled to be trained as an X-ray technician at Cincinnati General Hospital. In the late 1970s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he took and job at Cedars-Sinai Hospital and first encountered patients severely ill with the disease that years later would become called AIDS.
In the early 1980s, Williams and his partner, Tim Isbell, moved to San Francisco. At a time when AIDS was already approaching epidemic proportions, he started working as an x-ray technician at University of California San Francisco’s Moffitt Hospital. It was in this environment that Williams realized that information and prevention efforts were not reaching the gay and bisexual Black community.
Williams called a meeting at his home to take action, and soon he and others founded the AIDS Task Force of the San Francisco chapter of Black and White Men Together. The organization would quickly expand and rebrand as the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention (NTFAP).
The groundbreaking work of NTFAP’s early years included the first national survey of more than 900 Black men who had sex with men, collecting data on knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. The first national data collection of its kind, the survey showed that a full third of Black gay and bisexual men were privately homosexual but publicly involved with women, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“These men go into a relationship with a woman because they need to feel accepted within the ranks of the black community. As a result, there’s greater risk that the virus will spread not only among them, but among women and the family when they go home,” Williams told The Chronicle.
In 1986, at the age of 35, Williams was diagnosed with HIV. Eight years later, he moved to Amsterdam to be with his partner, German-born Wolfgang Schreiber, whom U.S. law prohibited from moving to the U.S. because he had tested positive for HIV.
Williams and Schreiber officially registered their partnership in Amsterdam on October 20, 1998, and in December, they took what would be Williams’ last trip to California, according to the National Black Justice Coalition’s tribute to Williams. They visited the San Francisco AIDS Office to see a new project that had been named in his honor, Project Reggie, a computerized client registration and information/referral system for city residents.
Williams and Schreiber returned to their home in Amsterdam, and on February 7, 1999, Williams died peacefully at the Academisch Medisch Centrum Hospital. His funeral service was held at Westerveld Crematorium in Driehuis, Netherlands, and his ashes were buried at his mother’s grave in Cincinnati, Ohio.
In Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Cincinnati, memorial services were held to celebrate Williams’ life and honor his achievements. National Black AIDS Awareness Day is now observed each year on February 7, which coincides with the anniversary of Williams’ passing.
A room at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center is dedicated in his honor. Williams also is featured in a photo exhibit sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, featuring photographic portraits of people living with AIDS in the early years of the epidemic.
U.S. Firm Begins Human Trials for Vaccine in Thailand
VaxGen, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company, begins conducting the first human vaccine trials in Thailand.
March 9, 1999
New Book on Versace’s Murder Divulges HIV Status
In Vulgar Favors, Maureen Orth writes that iconic designer Gianni Versace was HIV-positive and, at the time of his 1997 murder, was experiencing a recovery from AIDS-related illnesses.
Learn More.
In the wake of the book’s release, members of Versace’s family would deny Orth’s claim. But she would defend her reporting, saying that Paul Scrimshaw, the lead detective of the Miami Beach Police Department, told her on the record that the medical examiner stated on his autopsy report that Versace’s blood tested positive for HIV.
Years later, when Vulgar Favors would become the basis of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a 2018 TV anthology on FX, Orth would say: “[The claim that Versace was HIV-positive] also goes along with other people who told me that he was very weak at one time and he needed [his partner] Antonio to help him walk, and they came over to his house when he was having breakfast and he had 27 bottles of pills in front of him. Now, does that mean they’re for HIV? But the blood thing from on record from the Miami Beach police, that’s pretty [solid].”
Orth also suggested in her book that stigma wasn’t the only reason Versace might have been reluctant to disclose his HIV status. During that time, the Versace family was considering taking the company public, according to Vanity Fair, and the value of the Versace brand might have declined if it were known that the designer was HIV-positive.
In her book, Orth also revealed that Versace had a history of paying young men for sex, and that Cunanan and Versace had met in San Francisco in 1990.
She theorized that as the most famous person Cunanan had ever met, Versace became his obsession. According to Orth, Versace was someone whose name Cunanan frequently dropped to show acquaintances how connected he was, but also the designer represented the stark contract to Cunanan’s own life, one that included the abandonment of his father and the repeated loss of lovers and friends.
Orth speculated that Versace became Cunanan’s ultimate target because of his wealth, success and accessibility, and killing him would guarantee Cunanan instant fame.
May 1, 1999
Black AIDS Institute Founded
In May, activist Phill Wilson founds the Black AIDS Institute. The Institute’s mission is “to stop the AIDS pandemic in Black communities by engaging and mobilizing Black institutions and individuals in efforts to confront HIV.” Its motto: “Our People, Our Problem, Our Solution.”
Paddy Chew, the first Singaporean to go public with his HIV status, dies of AIDS-related illness at Singapore’s Communicable Disease Centre. He was 39 years old.
Learn More.
On December 12, 1998, Chew publicly disclared his HIV-positive status during the first National AIDS Conference in Singapore.
For 13 years, Chew worked for Singapore Airlines as a flight attendant, after which he joined the Boom Boom Room, Singapore’s first drag cabaret. He said he was not aware of AIDS or HIV during the first half of his career as a flight attendant.
As a result, Chew did not start using a condom and adopting other safe sex techniques until 1986. Two years after leaving his airline job, be came ill. Inexperienced medical personnel failed to recognize Chew’s condition of oral thrush as a possible byproduct of HIV/AIDS, and he was put through a battery of standard medical tests before being administered an HIV test at his request.
After his diagnosis, Chew travelled to Brussels to begin receiving treatment unavailable in Singapore, but by 1996, he had lost 45% of his body weight and his health was failing rapidly.
He left the Boom Boom Room, and in 1998, he began performing Completely With/Out Character, an an intensely personal one-man show exploring prejudice against people with AIDS and the lack of support from the Singaporean government.
With dark humour, Chew told anyone who would listen about what it was like to shop for his own coffin and get his funeral portrait taken. He shared his regret for not taking more care of his mother, and he describes other people with AIDS who he felt were less fortunate than he was. He told the story of how he risked infection.
Chew was invited to speak at the National AIDS Conference in Singapore, and became a public figure overnight. He granted many interviews, wishing to raise awareness about the spread of HIV, and his photo was published in local and foreign publications.
When Chew was attacked in the media as a promiscuous bisexual and publicity-seeker, he responded by saying:
“Who wants to be famous for having AIDS? For goodness sake … I have seen too many AIDS patients die. Most die alone. There is no warmth, no care for them. They are not ready to die — you can see it in their eyes. I told myself I had to do something worthwhile for myself and for the cause, to clear the path for future patients, so that they will not die like that.”
The final version of Completely With/Out Character was produced by The Necessary Stage and staged at The Drama Centre in May 1999. At the end of each performance, Chew would strip to his shorts and raise his arms to better allow the audience to see his emaciated frame. This was followed by a frank question and answer session. All proceeds from the play were donated to Action for AIDS, a service organization for which he was an outspoken volunteer.
Chew planned to write a book and take a last trip to Europe, but in June 1999, his illness began to rapidly progress and he admitted himself to the Communicable Disease Centre, where he would die surrounded by family two months later.
November 1999
AIDS Becomes Number One Killer in Africa
The World Health Organization announces that HIV/AIDS has become the fourth biggest killer worldwide and the number one killer in Africa.
Learn More.
WHO estimates that 33 million people are living with HIV worldwide, and that 14 million have died of AIDS.
December 10, 1999
CDC Updates HIV Definition to Help Extend State Reach
he U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases a new HIV case definition to help state health departments expand their HIV surveillance efforts and more accurately track the changing course of the epidemic.
December 13, 1999
U.S. National Champion Figure Skater Robert Wagenhoffer Dies
Professional figure-skating champion and AIDS activist Robert Wagenhoffer dies of AIDS-related illness in Torrance, California at the age of 39.
Learn More.
Wagenhoffer never won an Olympic medal or a world title, but he was considered one of the most entertaining skaters of his time and a brilliant technician. His performances typically included backflips, cartwheels and other unusual athletic feats.
In the 1981 U.S. Nationals, Wagenhoffer began to draw attention when he won the bronze medal. The following year, he won the silver medal and beat world champion Scott Hamilton in the short program. He became widely respected by his peers for, among other things, practicing quadruple toe loops in the 1970s, ten years before the first one was landed in competition.
“Without question, [Wagenhoffer] left an indelible footprint on the sport and left the ice better than [he] found it,” wrote Ryan Stevens, a former figure skater who created the online skating archive Skate Guard.
In 1982, Wagenhoffer turned pro to join the Ice Capades. He also skated with the Tour of World & Olympic Champions, World Cup Champions on Ice, and Gershwin on Ice. He went on to choreograph the Gershwin production and Brian Boitano’s “Skate Against Hate” network television special.
Wagenhoffer did many benefit performances for shows that raised money to combat AIDS, including “Rock on Ice” in 1993 and “Ice Fantastic” in 1998 and 1999 in Sacramento.
In January 1996, he talked about his sexuality in an interview with Monica Friedlander for Blades on Ice magazine. He spoke about the heartbreak of losing his brother to AIDS in 1992 and then his life partner of six years, Billy Lawe, in 1995.
At Wagenhoffer’s funeral, his longtime friend and former skating partner Linda Allen said:
“I know of so many people that have Robert to thank for their special moments, insights, and inspirations …. There will only be one Robert Wagenhoffer. I am so honored to have such a close friend pass through my life. He is charismatic, unique, non-conforming and completely charming. Orchestrating his programs and the programs of others, serenading us with his effortless dynamic skating. No tension, just the enjoyment of watching grace on ice. But more importantly, he is a confidant and a truly treasured friend. Robert, your charm and character will always stay with me. You’ve made your mark!”
January 1, 2000
Dick Pabich, AIDS Activist & Harvey Milk Campaign Manager, Dies
Dick Pabich, a long-time political consultant who helped to elect San Francisco gay icon Harvey Milk, dies of AIDS-related illness. He was 44.
Learn More.
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.
January 6, 2000
Toy Company Introduces Beanie Baby in Honor of Ariel Glaser
With embroidered flowers inspired by the drawing made by a child who died of AIDS-related illness in 1988, “Ariel the Bear” becomes the newest Beanie Baby to hit the market. Sales of the toy would raise $3.4 million for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Learn More.
Ariel Glaser was the young daughter of Elizabeth and Paul Michael Glaser. Her mother was the exhibit director of the Los Angeles Children’s Museum who became an influential AIDS activist after she and her two children contracted HIV, and her father was a successful television actor (Starsky & Hutch, Ray Donovan).
“Ariel the Bear” arrived in stores with a little poem in tribute to her namesake:
In Memory: 1981-1988 May little children everywhere Remember that we’ll always care And Ariel’s dreams will all come true Because she’ll share them all with you!
Founded in 1986, Ty Inc. was known primarily for its “Beanie Babies” series of bean-bag plush toys, which were widely collected in the late 1980s and 1990s. The toy company created “Ariel” to help raise money for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF), which was founded in 1989 to eliminate pediatric HIV and AIDS and advocate for the wellbeing of the world’s youngest people living with HIV. Incorporated into EGPAF’s logo is a painting inspired by the artwork that Ariel Glaser enjoyed making.
In 1991, Elizabeth Glaser’s book In the Absence of Angels was published. She died on December 3, 1994, at the age of 47.
January 10, 2000
UN Addresses AIDS as Global Peace & Security Threat
he United Nations Security Council meets to discuss the impact of AIDS on peace and security in Africa. This marks the first time that the council discusses a health issue as a threat to peace and security.
January 27, 2000
President Clinton Announces Global Vaccine Initiative
In his State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton announces the launch of the Millennium Vaccine Initiative to create incentives for developing and distributing vaccines against HIV, TB, and malaria.
Learn More.
In his address, President Clinton calls for concerted international action to combat infectious diseases in developing countries. The President asks for foundations, pharmaceutical companies, international agencies, and other governments to join in this task.
February 23, 2000
Israeli Star Ofra Haza Dies
Ofra Haza, an Israeli Yemenite Jewish singer, actress and Grammy Award-nominee recording artist, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 42.
Learn More.
Known in the Western world as the “Israeli Madonna,” Haza was known for combining traditional and commercial music styles, fusing elements of Eastern and Western instrumentation, orchestration and dance-beat. In addition to earning many platinum and gold records, Haza was an influential cultural figure in Israel who helped to popularize Mizrahi culture.
After Haza’s death was announced, Israeli radio stations played non-stop retrospectives of her music. The decision by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to report the cause of her death as AIDS was controversial in her homeland.
The revelation of Haza’s AIDS-related illness caused surprise among fans, and brought debate about whether the media invaded her privacy by reporting it. Many in the media speculated about how she had acquired the virus, some blaming her husband for infecting her with the disease (her husband contended that she became infected from a blood transfusion received following a miscarriage).
Haza is buried in the Artists section of Yarkon Cemetery in Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv.
April 2000
Randy Krivonic, San Francisco Dancer, Dies
Randy Krivonic, a dancer who performed with Dance Spectrum, San Francisco Opera Ballet, and Falcon Dance Theater in San Francisco, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 47.
Learn More.
After his performing career, Krivonic became a dance writer for several local publications. He also participated in many AIDS fundraisers and contributed generously to groups struggling to bring the HIV/AIDS losses in the dance community to light.
President Clinton Declares HIV/AIDS a National Security Threat
President Clinton declares that HIV/AIDS is a threat to U.S. national security.
May 10, 2000
U.S. Begins Importing HIV Treatments to Developing Countries
President Clinton issues an Executive Order to assist developing countries in importing and producing generic HIV treatments.
May 10, 2000
AIDS Activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya Dies
Kiyoshi Kuromiya — who dedicated his life to LGBTQ activism, AIDS healthcare expansion, civil rights, and anti-war efforts — dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 57.
Learn More.
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.
July 2000
Global Pressure Results in Reduced Drug Cost for Developing Countries
UNAIDS, the World Health Organization, and other global health groups announce a joint initiative with five major pharmaceutical manufacturers to negotiate reduced prices for HIV/AIDS drugs in developing countries.
July 19, 2000
Stephen Gendin — Iconic AIDS Activist — Dies
Stephen Gendin, an AIDS activist and writer who founded a nationally known mail-order prescription service for people infected with HIV, died of AIDS-related illness in New York’s Roosevelt Hospital. He was 34.
Learn More.
Firmly planted at the center of AIDS activism for 15 years, Gendin is credited for having promoted constructive changes in government policy that would improve the lives of HIV-positive people. His activism was pivotal in reforming the FDA drug approval process to expedite HIV and AIDS patients’ access to more effective anti-retroviral treatments.
He was involved with ACT UP (New York and Rhode Island chapters), Sex Panic!, Community Prescription Service, and the Radical Faeries. He also wrote a widely read column in POZ magazine. In this column, he shared the toll AIDS took on his body in graphic details and other personal experiences.
“Stephen was a willing guinea pig, his body a non-stop experimental laboratory for new treatment strategies. His curiosity and courage contributed to what we have all learned about anti-retroviral treatment,” wrote Sean Strub, POZ Magazine’s founder and advisory editor.
Strub said he met Gendin in 1988, shortly after Gendin graduated from Brown University. In ACT UP/New York, they worked together on the fundraising committee. In 1990, Strub hired Gendin to work for his company, and for ten years they collaborated on various projects, including fundraising for community non-profits, publishing POZ magazine and launching the Community Prescription Service.
As a co-founder and the chief executive of the Community Prescription Service, Gendin oversaw the organization’s mail-order pharmacy service that distributed medication and information for people with HIV and AIDS, according to the New York Times.
G8 members make up most of the world’s largest economies, and include: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
August 13, 2000
John Brisbois, Soldier Who Fled ‘HIV Hotel,’ Dies
John O. Brisbois, a former soldier who fled the Army’s HIV ward in October 1988, dies of AIDS-related illness. He was 36.
Learn More.
After a blood test showed that John Brisbois was positive for HIV, officials ordered the 24-year-old Army private to be restricted to a special barracks for HIV+ soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas. The barracks became known on base as the “HIV Hotel” and “the leper colony.”
Brisbois told Newsday reporter Laurie Garrett that after being confined to the barracks for about three months and enduring daily harassment from other soldiers on base, he went Absent Without Leave.
Brisbois fled 250 miles south to ask for advice from Robert Edwards, director of the San Antonio AIDS Foundation. Edwards, known in his community as “Papa Bear,” brought in Louis Font, an attorney who specialized in military law, to help. They advised Brisbois to surrender at Lackland Air Force Base, where they heard that treatment of HIV+ soldiers was better.
“We advised the Army and the Air Force that he was in a delicate frame of mind,” Edwards told Garrett.
But two days after arriving at Lackland, Brisbois was turned over to military police who put him in handcuffs and leg irons, transported him back to Fort Hood, and put in the stockade.
“There, he was handed a bottle of delousing shampoo labeled poison in bold print,” Garrett wrote in her story, which was published in Newsday and reprinted throughout the U.S. “Brisbois walked back to the showers and drank the shampoo. The guards had Brisbois’ stomach pumped and returned him to the stockade.”
The Army discharged Brisbois in April 1988, about six months later.
Brisbois told Garrett that an Army career was all he ever wanted, but after being demoted and harassed for his HIV status, he felt forced to leave it behind.
“I feel I don’t have a future anymore,” Brisbois said. “I don’t want to die, but I get so depressed.”
On his tombstone is his Army rank of Private First Class and “Beloved Son.”
August 19, 2000
U.S. Congress Responds to Need for Global Assistance
UN Adopts Millennium Development Goals to Reverse Spread of HIV
As part of its Millennium Declaration, the United Nations adopts the Millennium Development Goals, which include a specific goal of reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB.
Soccerplayer Job Komol Suspended after Testing Positive for HIV
Job Komol, a Cameroon-born footballer training for a Dutch professional football club in the province of Gelderland, tests positive for HIV and his diagnosis is announced to the world by club officials.
Learn More.
After officials at Vitesse, the oldest football club in The Netherlands, announce that Komol tested positive for HIV, the Royal Dutch Football Association suspended Komol’s playing license. Komol was the first player in Dutch football to be HIV positive, and this caused a shock. Clubs started routinely testing their players for HIV, and questions arose over whether Komol could transmit the disease to other players.
When research showed that the risk of transmission during the game was less than 0.1%, Komol was granted permission to play again. But Komol’s training regimen was hindered by his HIV treatment and he was unable to regain his standing at the club.
March 8, 2001
‘Barbara Lee Day’ Celebrated in San Francisco
San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown proclaims it is “Representative Barbara Lee Day” in honor of the Congresswoman’s considerable work on HIV/AIDS.
Learn More.
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.
May 18, 2001
HIV Vaccine Awareness Day Observed
May 18 is the first annual observance of HIV Vaccine Awareness Day.
June 25, 2001
UN General Assembly Calls for Global Fund
The United Nations (UN) General Assembly holds its first Special Session on AIDS (UNGASS) and passes the UNGASS Declaration of Commitment and the ILO (International Labor Organization) Code of Practice on HIV/AIDS in the Workplace.
Learn More.
The meeting also calls for the creation of an international “global fund” to support efforts by countries and organizations to combat the spread of HIV through prevention, care, and treatment, including the purchase of HIV medications.
2001
U.S. Reaffirms HIV/AIDS Is National Security Threat
Newly appointed U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, reaffirms the U.S. statement that HIV/AIDS is a national security threat.
2001
Major Pharma Companies Further Reduce Cost of Therapies
After generic drug manufacturers offer to produce discounted, generic forms of HIV/AIDS drugs for developing countries; several major pharmaceutical manufacturers agree to offer further reduced drug prices to those countries.
2001
HRSA Prioritizes Untreated HIV+ Individuals
The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) begins focusing on individuals with HIV disease who know their status and are not receiving HIV-related services. HRSA instructs its grantees to address this population’s “unmet need” for services.
2001
CDC Strategic Plan Addresses Major Curtailment in HIV Transmission
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announce a new HIV Prevention Strategic Plan to cut annual HIV infections in the U.S. by half within five years.
August 8, 2001
Activist Campaign Forces Chinese Officials to Stop AIDS Denial
Years after two female doctors began campaigning about the spread of AIDS in villages, Chinese leaders finally acknowledge the large scale of the epidemic.
Dr. Wang, who was stationed at a blood collection center which received plasma obtained from paid donors, became concerned about transmissible viruses lurking the Chinese blood bank when she discovered that several donors tested positive for hepatitis C. She was well aware of the unhygienic practices of commercial blood bank operators. When the so-called “bloodheads” extracted plasma from poor villagers, they would often use dirty needles, and then they would pool the leftover blood for future transfusions.
When Dr. Wang warned local health officials about hepatitis C being spread in these conditions, she was told that it would be too expensive to change procedures. With her own money to fund testing equipment, Dr. Wang began evaluating samples of donated blood for HIV, according to The Washington Post, and in 1995, she found the virus present in plasma. Again, local health officials told her it was too costly to do anything about it.
Dr. Wang escalated her concerns to the Ministry of Health in Beijing, and was met with accusations of producing shoddy medical work. One day, a “retired leader of the Health Bureau” arrived at her clinical testing center and smashed her sign with a baton, Dr. Wang told The Washington Post. When she tried to stop him from destroying her equipment, he struck her with the baton. Later, local communist party officials cut the power to her laboratory, resulting in the destruction of her blood samples.
“Because of my whistle-blowing, I was kicked out by the station leaders,” Dr. Wang wrote in 2012 for China Change. “Plasma collection was for-profit, and my actions impeded the business.”
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 refused to acknowledge the prevalence of HIV in the country’s blood supply or the existence of an AIDS crisis among its rural citizens.
Around the same time, retired gynecologist Dr. Gao Yaojie was providing medical care in a small village a few hundred miles away. Dr. Gao was alarmed when one of her patients, a woman who was exhibiting advanced AIDS symptoms, tested positive for HIV. She already had doubts about the ruling party’s insistence that China had successfully prevented HIV from entering the country.
Drs. Gao and Wang joined together to launch a campaign to educate the public about HIV and AIDS, which was a very dangerous endeavor. 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.
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. Dr. Wang also secretly shared information with a U.S. Foreign Service officer assigned to the U.S. embassy in China.
“[Dr. Wang] provided rock-solid, highly sensitive internal information about the HIV epidemic and the Chinese leadership’s disappointingly weak response,” wrote retired U.S. Foreign Service officer David Cowhig. “That in turn seized the attention of the Clinton White House.”
The AIDS epidemic in rural China had become an international scandal and associated with the “Bloodhead controversy,” named for the for-profit plasma donation sites that proliferated in China after its 1986 ban on the importation of blood products. The act of whistle-blowing often comes with great personal sacrifice, and amidst her work on HIV/AIDS, Dr. Wang and her husband (who was an employee of the Ministry of Health) divorced.
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.
The same year, Chinese officials refused to issue Dr. Gao a passport to travel to the U.S. to be honored by the Global Health Council with the “Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights.”
2001 was also the year that Dr. Wang immigrated to the U.S., settling in Salt Lake City with her daughter and taking a position as a research worker at the University of Utah. She remarried in 2005 and had two more children. On Sept. 21, 2019, Dr. Wang died of a heart attack while hiking; she was 59.
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. Dr. Gao died on December 10, 2023 at her home in New York City; she was 95.
October 1, 2001
Kenny Greene of R&B Group INTRO Dies
Kenny Greene of the R&B group INTRO dies of AIDS-related illness in New York City at the age of 32.
Learn More.
Greene was a the lead vocalist and songwriter for INTRO, an R&B fan favorite from the 1990s. He wrote two early hits for Mary J. Blige – “Reminisce” and “Love No Limit” – which helped to make her a star. He also wrote songs for other artists, including 98 Degrees and Will Smith.
“Kenny managed to leave behind some great music in his short time here on earth, whether it was with his group Intro or working with other artists,” Mosley wrote.
INTRO’s self-titled debut for Atlantic Records dropped in 1993 with the lead single, “Come Inside.” The song climbed to No. 9 on the R&B charts and did well on pop charts, too, according to Edward Bowser in Soul in Stereo.
Two years later, INTRO released their sophomore album, “New Life,” but it failed to replica the success of their first one. Soon after, the group called it quits, and Greene started to make a name for himself as a producer and songwriter.
In a July 2001 interview with Sister 2 Sister magazine, Greene revealed that he was bisexual and that he was diagnosed with AIDS.
“The pressure to be a straight man in the alpha-male world of being a black man and a R&B singer was enormous,” writes music blogger tlewisisdope. “He didn’t want to allow the pressures and hate that goes on toward gay and bisexual men in the R&B world to go on in secret. It was important to him to make sure that people understood that what they see isn’t necessarily who the artist is.”
Post-9/11 Anthrax Threat Triggers Survivors of AIDS Crisis
AIDS activists on the front lines of the epidemic in the 1980s observe that the “hysteria” over post-9/11 anthrax scares is “unsettlingly familiar.”
Learn More.
The anthrax scare “carries with it some of the same uncertainties,” but lacks the “sexual stigma” of AIDS, according to Greg Scott, the newly elected president of the People With AIDS Coalition of Broward County, Fla.
In comments to the Miami Herald, Scott recalled the relentless anxiety he felt during the 1980s as many became sick and died.
“I remember the hysteria. I’ve noticed how similar the tone is,” Scott said to the Herald.
The way public health officials failed to muster a confident response to the anthrax threats, giving the public “conflicting or bare-bones” information, was reminiscent of the early days of the AIDS crisis, said Dr. Margaret Fischl, an AIDS researcher at the University of Miami.
Dr. Fischl, who was an early responder to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, told the Herald that public health officials could learn from the AIDS experience.
“Education is how you deal with the fear. Recognizing how (HIV) was transmitted and how it was not transmitted. We would hammer that out with bulletins … I think all of those were progressively important things that helped us with HIV,” she said.
Health officials could use a similar information campaign to help calm the public’s fears about anthrax attacks, said Dr. Fischl.
Soon after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, letters laced with anthrax began appearing in the U.S. mail. Five Americans were killed and 17 were sickened in what became the worst biological attacks in U.S. history, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In August 2008, Department of Justice and FBI officials were about to bring charges in the case against a suspect, Dr. Bruce Ivins. Before he could be arrested, however, 62-year-old Ivins committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills.
On February 19, 2010, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service formally concluded the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks.
November 4, 2001
Doha Declaration Affirms Right to Generic HIV/AIDS Treatments
The World Trade Organization (WTO) announces the Doha Declaration, which affirms the rights of developing countries to buy or manufacture generic medications to meet public health crises such as HIV/AIDS.
November 26, 2001
Paul Starke, West Hollywood Leader, Dies
West Hollywood community leader Paul Andrew Starke dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 38.
Learn More.
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.
December 22, 2001
Lance Loud of PBS’s ‘American Family’ Dies
Lance Loud, the eldest son in a family made famous in the 1970s by the groundbreaking cinema vérité series An American Family, dies of hepatitis C and HIV-related illness at the Carl Bean hospice in Los Angeles at the age of 50.
Learn More.
On May 30, 1971, the TV documentary An American Family began filming in Santa Barbara, where the Loud family — including then-20-year-old Lance — opened their lives to the world. Considered the first reality TV show, the ground-breaking 12-episode documentary first aired on PBS in January 1973 on Thursday nights at 9:00 p.m.
Lance Loud became a gay icon by coming out to an audience of 10 million TV viewers. His sexual orientation became a topic of national controversy, but the positive feedback from the gay community led Loud to embrace this role with passion and often self-deprecating wit.
Almost 30 years later, Loud asked Alan and Susan Raymond, the Academy Award-winning filmmakers of the original An American Family series, to film a final episode in the Loud story. He was dissatisfied with how An American Family ended, and wanted the public to see the Louds as the family he knew them to be. So the Raymonds filmed Loud and his family as he lived out his final days at the Carl Bean hospice in Los Angeles, and this would become a film, Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family.
Loud was the first reality TV star. Although he was initially vilified by the media, the American public loved him and found him to be an inspiration.
In 1973, Loud moved to New York City and performed with his high school friend Kristian Hoffman in their resurrected band, the Mumps. The Mumps flourished for five years in the New York club scene, regularly selling out clubs such as CBGB and Max’s. The band disbanded in 1980 when it became apparent that record labels weren’t interested.
After the breakup of the Mumps, Loud relocated to Los Angeles and became a magazine writer. Over the next 20 years, he wrote articles for publications including Circus, Interview, American Film, Details, and Vanity Fair. Loud also had a regular column in The Advocate, “Out Loud,” in which he wrote about his role as a gay icon.
In an article Loud wrote for The Advocate shortly before his death, he said, “Though for years I had told myself that all my unbridled drinking, drugging, and unsafe sex were going to lead exactly here, I’d never really believed it.”
January 22, 2002
Global Fund Launched to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a worldwide partnership between governments, civil society organizations, the private sector, and affected communities, is established.
Learn More.
In April of 2002, The Global Fund approves its first round of grants to governments and private-sector organizations in the developing world. The grants total $600 million for two-year projects.
April 25, 2002
Global Fund Issues 2-year Grants
The Global Fund approves its first round of grants to governments and private-sector organizations in the developing world. The grants total $600 million for two-year projects.
June 2, 2002
Robbin Crosby — Guitarist of Glam-Rock Band Ratt — Dies
Former Ratt guitarist Robbin Crosby dies at his Hollywood apartment of a heroin overdose and AIDS-related illness at the age of 41.
Crosby, who grew up in San Diego and played in various local bands, met Stephen Pearcy, whose band Mickey Ratt also played local venues. In 1981, they moved to Los Angeles and soon started playing under the band name Ratt. The LA music scene welcomed the style of rock n’ roll that Ratt performed, attacting fans of other LA-based bands like Van Halen and Quiet Riot, according to the Rock and Roll True Stories website.
After Atlantic Records signed Ratt to a major recording contract in 1984, the band released their debut album Out of the Cellar. Appearing on the front cover of the band’s first EP and LP was Crosby’s girlfriend, Tawny Kitaen. Out of the Cellar would be the biggest album of the band’s career, going triple Platinum.
As Ratt headed into the studio to record their album Detonator in 1990, Crosby left for rehab. He then joined the band on tour, but found it difficult to stay sober. He played his final gig with the band in 1991 in Osaka, Japan, according to the Rock and Roll True Stories website.
“When I die, nobody cry at my funeral, in fact let’s all have a party,” he told VH1. “I’ve lived the life of ten men. I lived all my dreams and more.”
After Crosby’s death, his bandmates (who called him “King”) released various tributes on the Ratt website, calling him kind-hearted, compassionate, intelligent, and talented.
June 9, 2002
Cuban Singer Elena Burke Dies
Elena Burke, considered one of the best Cuban singers of all time, dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 74.
Learn More.
Burke’s career hit its high point in the 1960s, when she introduced the world to the boleros and romantic ballads of Cuba. In 1964, she performed at the Festival of Song in Viña del Mar, Chile, and closed the Cannes Film Festival with an exuberant performance. She also performed for large audiences in Japan in 1967 and Mexico in 1969.
“She was “sentiment in full voice,” said Omara Poruondo, the female singer of the internationally acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club. “Burke virtually vibrated with the songs of César Portillo de la Luz, José Antonio Méndez, and Isolina Carrillo.”
In 1978 she performed with the Orquesta Aragón at New York’s Lincoln Center to great acclaim. Critics noted that her voice seemed to become stronger with age, and her musical style continued to develop until every song she sang came with an emotional weight, giving her the nickname “Señora Sentimiento” (“Lady Feeling”).
She made her last international tour in 1997.
June 25, 2002
Access to Drugs Improved for Poor Countries
The United States announces a framework that will allow poor countries unable to produce pharmaceuticals to gain greater access to drugs needed to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other public health crises.
July 2002
HIV/AIDS Tops Causes of Death in Sub-Saharan Africa
UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS) reports that HIV/AIDS is now by far the leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa, and the fourth biggest global killer. Average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa falls from 62 years to 47 years as a result of AIDS.
July 2002
Dozens of Countries Suffer from HIV/AIDS Spread
The 14th International AIDS Conference is held in Barcelona, Spain from July 7-12. Dozens of countries report they are experiencing serious HIV/AIDS epidemics, and many more are on the brink.
2002
10 Million People Aged 15-24, Worldwide, Live With HIV
Worldwide, 10 million young people, aged 15-24, and almost 3 million children under 15 are living with HIV. During this year, approximately 3.5 million new infections will occur in sub-Saharan Africa, and the epidemic will claim the lives of an estimated 2.4 million Africans.
2002
Side Effects, Drug Resistance Call Therapy Strategy Into Question
Side effects and increasing evidence of drug resistance call into question the “hit early, hit hard” strategy.
September 2002
India, China, Russia, Nigeria & Ethiopia Represent Next Wave of Epidemic
The U.S. National Intelligence Council releases Next Wave of the Epidemic, a report focusing on HIV in India, China, Russia, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.
November 7, 2002
FDA Approves New Rapid-Diagnosis Test
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announces the approval of the OraQuick Rapid HIV-1 Antibody Test with 99.6% accuracy. A second FDA-approved rapid HIV test, Single Use Diagnostic System for HIV-1, remains available.
Learn More.
Unlike other antibody tests for HIV, this blood test can be stored at room temperature, requires no specialized equipment, and may be used outside of traditional laboratory or clinical settings, allowing more widespread use of HIV testing.
The new test provides a result in about 20 minutes, while the fastest test currently in use takes 90 minutes. In practice, however, most people who seek AIDS testing aren’t given their results for a week or more after they provide a blood sample.
The OraQuick Test requires that a person prick his finger and use a wire loop to capture a drop of blood. The drop is then put in a vial containing a diluting solution.
Then a paper tab attached to a cap is lowered into the solution. A dark line appears on the tab if it makes contact with certain universal blood proteins. If antibodies to HIV are present, a second dark line appears.
Public health officials are hopeful that the test will substantially increase the number of people seeking testing, and decrease the fraction who, once tested, never return for the results.
December 26, 2002
Fashion & Celebrity Photographer Herb Ritts Dies
Herb Ritts, one of the top photographers to emerge from the 1980s, dies in Los Angeles of AIDS-related illness at age 50.
(Photo by Richard Gere)
Learn More.
A photographer whose subjects ranged from Madonna to the Dalai Lama, Ritts relied on clean, graphic compositions that often portrayed models and celebrities in the visual language of classical Greek sculpture.
Born in Los Angeles in 1952, Ritts grew up in a prosperous family and graduated in 1975 from Bard College in upstate New York with a degree in economics (he also majored in Art History). He returned to Los Angeles to work for his family’s furniture company but was sidetracked when he started taking photography classes.
In the late 1970s, while waiting for a tire to be changed, he took pictures of a young actor friend who was with him that day. The actor was Richard Gere, and the photographs were ultimately published in various national magazines and served as the catalyst for Ritts’s career as a portraitist.
”His purpose was always to make you look good,” Gere told The New York Times shortly after Ritts’ death. ”He had an extremely elegant aesthetic. Some photographers are working so hard to be elegant that they pummel you with it, but to Herb it came effortlessly.
”Some photographers embalm their subjects, but he enlivened them.”
Unlike many other contemporary commercial photographers, Ritts imposed little of his own sense of artistry onto his pictures. One of Ritts’s most memorable photographs in this vein was a Vanity Fair cover that featured fashion model Cindy Crawford pretending to shave the face of singer K.D. Lang, who was in drag.
Ritts’s work extended beyond celebrity portraiture to fashion photography, artful nudes and the direction of television commercials and music videos. He captured the 1980s era of the supermodel with Amazonian images of Crawford, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell.
For a year from 1996, his work was showcased in Boston at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that was attended by around 250,000 people or more. In 2003, he was given space for a solo exhibition in Japan’s city Kyoto at the Daimaru Museum.
Ritts directed some music videos. In 1989, he directed Cherish by Madonna. Two years later, he received MTV Video Awards for making videos for Chris Isaak and Janet Jackson.
Ritts was committed to HIV/AIDS-related causes and contributed to many charitable organizations, among them amfAR, The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation , Project Angel Food, Focus on AIDS, APLA, Best Buddies, and Special Olympics. He was also a charter member on the Board of Directors for The Elton John AIDS Foundation.
In December 2002, Ritts was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital with pneumonia. According to Ritts’ publicist, “Herb was HIV-positive, but this particular pneumonia was not PCP (pneumocystis pneumonia), a common opportunistic infection of AIDS. But at the end of the day, his immune system was compromised.”
Prior to his death, Ritts communicated his desire to create a foundation that would carry on his passion for photography and his longstanding charitable support for HIV/AIDS research, advocacy, and care. In 2003, in accordance with his wishes, the Herb Ritts Foundation was established.
Ritts’ photographs continue to be displayed, enjoyed and celebrated across the world. In 2007, Ritts’ photograph, Stephanie, Cindy, Christy, Tatjana, Naomi, Hollywood, 1989, was sold at the Elton John AIDS Foundation Benefit Auction for $190,000. The sale of the photograph set a record price for a Herb Ritts limited edition Silver Gelatin photograph, and raised awareness around the Herb Ritts Foundation’s key role in raising funds for HIV/AIDS research.
In 2011, the Getty Museum acquired from the Herb Ritts Foundation a collection of 69 photographs consisting of nudes, portraits, and images made for high-fashion ad campaigns. The Getty considers this acquisition to be the most significant body of the artist’s work on the West Coast. The museum’s Ritts exhibit in 2012 drew 364,656 visitors.
In 2015, 20 years after The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston showcased the exhibit Herb Ritts: WORK, the museum presented a collection of his major works. Even more recently, Ritts’ images have been incorporated into snowboards and his artwork has been displayed in exhibitions in Berlin, Milan, Seoul, Montreal, Lisbon and London.
January 15, 2003
President Bush Disenfranchises Minority AIDS Initiative
President George W. Bush uses a previous Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action to gut the country’s Minority AIDS Initiative and effectively downgrade minority-led nonprofits from the country’s funding priorities.
Learn More.
Created in 1998 by President Bill Clinton in response to urging from the Congressional Black Caucus, the Minority AIDS Initiative (MAI) originally focused on building organizations and infrastructure in communities of color to address the epidemic. In the 1990s, people of color continued to be disproportionately impacted by HIV, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Starting in 1999, the MAI under President Clinton received an annual budget of $156 million dedicated to raising awareness of HIV and improving access to treatment programs in minority communities, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The program was part of a larger $865 million increase in government spending on anti-AIDS programs.
But in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take on Affirmative Action. And President Bush used the public awareness raised around the hotbed issue to take a side in the case, urging for SCOTUS to rule unconstitutional any public policies that favored minority individuals or groups.
Even though the Supreme Court would in Grutter vs. Bollinger (2003) decide in favor of student admissions policies that prioritize underrepresented minority groups, President Bush moved forward with new policies to curtail federal funding to minority-led projects, including those prioritized by Clinton’s MAI.
“That simple change decimated many of the minority-led HIV organizations. To this day, it is still being used as the reason change is impossible,” said Paul Kawata, the executive director of the National Minority AIDS Council.
Kawata added: “An unintended consequence is that 10 years after the MAI was gutted, people of color became the majority of new cases and the majority of people living with HIV.”
January 19, 2003
LGBTQ Rights Pioneer Morris Kight Dies at 82
Morris Kight, longtime leader in Southern California’s gay rights movement, dies at the age of 83.
Learn More.
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.
January 28, 2003
President Bush Announces PEPFAR with $15 Billion in Funding
President George W. Bush announces the creation of the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Learn More.
In his State of the Union address, President Bush made a historic commitment to the fight against global HIV/AIDS. Later the same year, President Bush would sign the legislation that had been approved with strong bipartisan support for the program’s initial funding of $15 billion for five years. The program was built to provide funding with a focus on countries with a high burden of infections and little money to address the issue.
PEPFAR was the largest international health initiative to fight a single disease, according to the National Institutes of Health. The program helped bring life-saving treatment to millions of people around the world.
The first five years of PEPFAR funding had the following goals:
Prevent 7 million new infections (60% of the projected new infections in the target countries):
The initiative sought to implement large-scale prevention efforts, including voluntary testing and counseling.
Treat 2 million HIV-infected people: Capitalizing on advances in ARV treatment, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief sought to be the first global effort to provide advanced antiretroviral treatment on a large scale.
Care for 10 million HIV-infected individuals and AIDS orphans: The initiative sought to provide a range of care, including support for AIDS orphans.
February 24, 2003
Early AIDS Vaccine Trial Fails
VaxGen, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company, announces that its AIDSVAX vaccine trial failed to reduce overall HIV infection rates among those who were vaccinated.
March 30, 2003
Tony & Emmy Award-winning Actor Michael Jeter Dies
Tony award-winning charactor actor Michael Jeter dies of complications following an epileptic seizure at the age of 50.
Learn More.
Michael Jeter was a character actor of film, stage, and television. Much of his work specialized in playing eccentric, pretentious, or wimpy characters, and perhaps his most famous role was that of convicted felon Eduard Delacroix in The Green Mile (1999).
Jeter fared well playing extreme characters, such as in his small but scene-stealing role as a homeless cabaret singer with AIDS in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991). He was nominated for another Emmy for playing an eccentric frog breeder in a 1993 episode of the quirky CBS-TV drama Picket Fences — a part written specially for him.
Jeter was born in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, and landed his first film role in Milos Forman’s Hair in 1979. He had small parts in film and television and was a frequent performer Off Broadway during the early 1980s. He appeared onstage in Alice in Concert and G.R. Point, and in 1982 was a cast replacement in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, which was directed by Tommy Tune.
In an emotional TV interview with Jann Carl of Entertainment Tonight in July 1997, Jeter disclosed that he had tested positive for HIV. He remained active in the industry, turning in an acclaimed performance in The Green Mile and joining the cast of the sitcom Evening Shade from 1990 until 1994 and then the long-running PBS children’s series Sesame Street from 2000 until 2003.
After a turn in Jurassic Park III (2001), Jeter had a notable supporting turn as one of the loveable losers hoping for a big heist in Welcome to Colinwood (2002) and was tapped by director-star Kevin Costner to appear in the Western Open Range (2003).
In 1998, Jeter performed in a benefit reading of The Boys in the Band, bringing down the house in the role of Emory, the lonely, mischievous, heartbroken man that delights in taunting.
Around the time of that performance, Jeter told POZ magazine that he was infected with the AIDS virus in 1995, a year in which he was “so depressed” that he found himself dating a series of Hollywood parasites and stargazers.
Just before his death, Jeter had completed his work on Robert Zemeckis’ film The Polar Express, starring Tom Hanks. The filming was suspended for a day upon word of Jeter’s death.
He had been in good health for many years, according to his partner Sean Blue, who said Jeter’s death was due to complications following an epileptic seizure.
Gates Foundation Donates $60 Million to HIV Research
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awards a $60 million grant to the International Partnership for Microbicides to support research and development of microbicides to prevent transmission of HIV.
April 18, 2003
CDC Announces New Prevention Initiative
CDC announces Advancing HIV Prevention: New Strategies for a Changing Epidemic, a new prevention initiative that aims to reduce barriers to early diagnosis and increase access to, and utilization of, quality medical care, treatment, and ongoing prevention services for those living with HIV.
2003
Majority of New U.S. Infections Come from Lack of Knowledge
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calculate that 27,000 of the estimated 40,000 new infections that occur each year in the U.S. result from transmission by individuals who do not know they are infected.
October 15, 2003
1st National Latino AIDS Awareness Day
The first annual National Latino AIDS Awareness Day in the U.S.
October 23, 2003
Clinton Foundation Secures Generic Drug Price Reductions
The William J. Clinton Foundation secures price reductions for HIV/AIDS drugs from generic manufacturers, to benefit developing nations.
November 14, 2003
Dancer-Actor Gene Anthony Ray of ‘Fame’ Dies
Gene Anthony Ray, who starred as Leroy in the 1980 movie Fame and the later television series, dies of AIDS-related illness in Manhattan at the age of 41.
Learn More.
Ray was cast as a character in Fame that seemed to be a natural fit. Like Leroy, Ray grew up on the streets of New York during the 1960s and 1970s. And like Leroy, Ray had never had professional dance training but he had a raw talent that choreographers found compelling.
New York’s High School of the Performing Arts was the setting for the movie and television series. Born in Harlem, Ray had actually attended the city’s performing arts school for a year before being expelled for disruptive behavior.
It was at neighborhood block parties where Ray honed his dance skills. According to the LondonTimes, Ray later recalled, “All the blocks had parties, not just ours. And I’d go to them and scoop all the prizes.”
At his Fame audition, which he skipped school to attend, he was one of 2,800 teenagers trying out for a part. Ray’s character, who helped popularize Lycra pants and leg warmers in the early ’80s, was one of the few characters revived for the television series Fame, which ABC began airing in 1982.
Just 20 years old when the television series began to air, Ray’s personal fame was at its peak. However, the show failed to gain an audience in the U.S. and was dropped by ABC. A strong following of 11 million regular viewers in the United Kingdom essentially save the show, and and it was picked up by MGM Television for distribution abroad from 1983 to 1987.
In 1982, Ray toured Britain with other Fame cast members in a 10-concert tour of the show The Kids from Fame. The following year, a television special based on the tour was aired in the U.S.
Ray’s other film credits include Out of Sync (1995), which was directed by his Fame co-star Debbie Allen, and Eddie (1996), which starred Whoopi Goldberg.
In June 1983, the $400,000 house Ray had purchased in a white neighborhood of Rockland County, New York, was intentionally set afire. Ray, who was using the house on weekends, had planned to move into the house permanently after his younger brother finished high school in the Bronx.
The two-story home was set ablaze in four separate locations on the house’s exterior. Although the fire was thought to be racially motivated arson, no one was ever charged.
Soon after, members of Ray’s family were arrested in a drug raid. Ray missed scores of Fame rehearsals during the time family members were tried in felony court proceedings. He also (self-admittedly) was using drugs between shoots, and in 1984, he was fired from the show.
Ray spent the remainder of his life attempting to reclaim his place in the spotlight but was never successful. His use of drugs and alcohol continued unabated, and he squandered his wealth to maintain his habits.
In 1996, Ray was diagnosed HIV-positive. The high toxicity of the drugs he was then required to take made him weak, although he did appear in Dr. Pepper and Diet Coke advertisements during the late 1990s.
His mother helped care for Ray in the last years of his life. He suffered a stroke in June 2003, and died about five months later.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announces the “3 by 5” initiative , to bring treatment to 3 million people by 2005.
January 2004
Congress Authorizes First $350 Million for PEPFAR
The U.S. Congress authorizes the first $350 million for the United States President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
February 2004
Global Coalition on Women and AIDS is Formed
UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS) launches The Global Coalition on Women and AIDS to raise the visibility of the epidemic’s impact on women and girls around the world.
March 26, 2004
Diagnostic Test Based on Oral Fluid Samples Approved
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the use of oral fluid samples with a rapid HIV diagnostic test kit that provides the result in approximately 20 minutes.
April 2004
South Africa Advances Treatment Options after Long Fight
Antiretroviral treatment is made available to South African residents living with HIV, marking a reserval in a policy based in AIDS denialism held by the country’s leaders.
President Mbeki questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, and the official treatment recommendation for AIDS by Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang was taking beetroot, garlic and other herbal alternatives. Their delay in rolling out HIV/AIDS treatment is estimated to have needlessly caused the death of millions.
“There was a sense, especially for those of us living with HIV, that we might not be the ones that benefited from the struggle and that we were perhaps really doing this for the next generation,” said Vuyiseka Dubula, former general secretary of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African group founded in 1998 to fight for access to HIV treatment.
Born in the former Transkei province of South Africa, Dubula was diagnosed with HIV at the age of 22 in 2001, at the height of AIDS denialism in her country.
“When I first learned of my HIV status, science had already gifted humanity with drugs to treat the virus,” Dubula wrote in The Guardian in 2021. “However, South Africans like myself, and many other people living in poverty, continued to die in the millions. The highly effective antiretroviral therapy cost nearly $10,000, well beyond our reach.”
During its first decade, TAC focused on challenging government health policies that were not evidence-based and were putting multinational profits above people. The organization’s leaders also forged alliances with activists in Brazil, India, Thailand, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries, creating a global movement to fight drug company profiteering. TAC went to court to challenge the patents of drug companies that sold essential HIV/AIDS medication without competition, according to Debula.
By gathering affidavits of people living with HIV and health care workers, together with evidence of prices from the generic drug industry, TAC was able to expose the drug companies’ profiteering methods and pressure South Africa’s Competition Commission to open the market to allow more drug companies to compete.
As a result, South Africa adopted a more competitive market and the price of HIV drugs drastically fell. TAC activists then pushed the government to expand access to HIV treatment, but they were countered by an extremely hostile political environment.
“Under the leadership of former President Thabo Mbeki, the Health Ministry focused on making excuses for why government was unable to provide HIV treatment,” recalled Dubula. “It eventually became clear that we were dealing with a denialist government that went so far as to publicly refute the crisis in the health system.”
TAC organized volunteers to create and manage grassroots branches across South Africa that educated, organized, and mobilized communities. Human rights and the science behind HIV were the subjects of TAC campaigns in all these newly activated locations. Over time, TAC’s efforts led to a new awareness about HIV/AIDS and treatment options, and that’s when things began to change.
With ARVs’ introduction as the recommended treatment for HIV, thousands of patients immediately began a course of recovery, according to Dr. Francois Venter, deputy executive director of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Centre in South Africa.
For Dubula, the victory meant she could live a normal life. She would go on to marry an HIV-negative man and give birth to two HIV-negative children. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and left TAC to become Program Director at Sonke Gender Justice, which strives to
advance gender justice and women’s rights, prevent gender-based violence and reduce the spread of HIV and the impact of AIDS.
May 17, 2004
First Legal Same-Sex Marriage Performed in U.S.
Marcia Kadish and Tanya McCloskey marry at Cambridge City Hall in Massachusetts, becoming the first legally married same-sex partners in the U.S. The legalization of same-sex marriage has been linked to the cultural impact of the AIDS crisis.
Learn More.
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.
May 27, 2004
FDA Expands Availability of Therapies in Africa and Developing Countries
FDA issues a guidance document for expedited approval of low cost, safe, and effective co-packaged and fixed-dose combination HIV therapies so that high-quality drugs can be made available in Africa and developing countries around the world under PEPFAR.
June 10, 2004
Ghana’s Kiki Djan — Keyboardist for Osibisa — Dies
Ghanaian keyboard Kiki Djan dies of AIDS-related illness and drug-related complications at the age of 47. He is found dead in a church bathroom, with the equivalent of 70 cents in his pocket.
Learn More.
Djan, also known as Kiki Gyan, performed on the keyboards for the 1970s Afro-rock group Osibisa and also recorded a series of disco records as a solo artist. A prodigy who started playing the piano at the age of five, he joined the UK-based Osibisa at the age of 15. He travelled internationally with the band during the 1970s, playing to large audiences around the world.
By the age of 18, Djan had made more than a million dollars, performed for the Queen of England, and partied with Elton John and Mick Jagger, according to BBC News. He also met Marvin Gaye, Peter Tosh and Steve Wonder during the FESTAC event in Nigeria.
In 1979, he left Osibisa to pursue a solo career and recorded the popular single “24 Hours in a Disco,” which featured a 16-piece orchestra. He was briefly married to the daughter of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, but then divorced her to marry a Ghanaian woman.
In the early 1980s, Djan became addicted to narcotics and adopted a lifestyle which eventually led to a diagnosis of AIDS in the late 1990s. Djan went in and out of rehabilitation during much of the last six years of his life. Mac Tontoh, who signed him with Osibisa and kept in touch with him throughout the years, told BBC News that Djan had become homeless and begged on street corners.
“I’m sad, not because Kiki’s dead – he was suffering too much,” said Tontoh. “I’m sad because he should’ve died with dignity.”
June 10, 2004
G8 Promotes Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise
Leaders of the “Group of Eight” (G8) Summit (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) call for the creation of a “Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise,” a consortium of government and private-sector groups designed to coordinate and accelerate research efforts to find an effective HIV vaccine.
December 17, 2004
Erasure’s Andy Bell Announces HIV+ Status
Andy Bell, the lead singer of English synth-pop duo Erasure, publicly announces that he has been HIV-positive since 1998.
Learn More.
“Once you find out you have HIV, it’s like starting from year zero,” Bell said in a 2015 interview with The Guardian. “When I was diagnosed, I was so low that I wasn’t bothered if I was going to live or die. It took a lot to start rebuilding everything.”
Born in 1964, Bell is known for his soulful voice and flamboyant stage persona. An openly gay man, Andy has become an icon within the LGBTQ community for his honesty, compassion and support.
Among his tireless support of various LGBTQ causes, Bell has served as an ambassador for New York’s Hetrick-Martin Institute and is currently a patron of the Cambridge-based charity Dhiverse, and for Above The Stag, London’s only LGBTQ theatre.
For the Red Hot + Blue album (1990) to raise funds for AIDS and HIV research, Bell reinterpreted the Cole Porter song “Too Darn Hot.” The music video for this song featured Bell as a news reporter alongside clips of AIDS activists at ACT UP demonstrations and facts about the epidemic.
More recently, Erasure’s 1988 hit single “A Little Respect” was voted the “Ultimate Pride Anthem” in a poll from radio station Virgin Radio Pride UK, beating out anthems by Xtina, Lady Gaga, Cher, and Madonna.
In 2021, Erasure released the single “Secrets” and an album, The Neon Remixed, which was described as one of the most elevating moments in an otherwise difficult year.
In September of that year, Bell gave the keynote address at The Aging Positively — Reunion Project 6th annual HIV conference, a collaboration between the HIV+ Aging Research Project – Palm Springs, DAP Health (formerly the Desert AIDS Project), and other community partners.
In an interview with DAP Health prior to the conference in Palm Springs, Bell said, “I am so grateful to be alive and be a beneficiary of the cutting-edge science used to create our medications. I salute all of those who passed before us and the brave activists who still fight for us every day.”
Bell currently lives in Miami with his husband, Stephen Moss, and their dog, Angel Baby.
January 6, 2005
Son of South African Leader Nelson Mandela Dies
Makgatho L. Mandela dies of AIDS-related illness at the age of 54. On the day of his son’s death, Nelson Mandela announces the cause of the death to help raise awareness about the disease and reduce the stigma associated with it.
Learn More.
Nelson Mandela holds a press conference to announce that his son had died of AIDS in a Johannesburg clinic. Makgatho Mandela had been seriously ill for more than a month, but the nature of his ailment had not been made public before his death.
The elder Mandela says he was disclosing the cause of his son’s death to focus more attention on AIDS, which is still a taboo topic among many South Africans. South Africa has the largest number of people living with HIV (~6.8 million) in the world.
“That is why I have announced that my son has died of AIDS,” he says. “Let us give publicity to HIV/AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of HIV/AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.”
January 2005
World Economic Forum Prioritizes HIV/AIDS
During its annual meeting in January, the World Economic Forum approves a set of new priorities, including one with a focus on addressing HIV/AIDS in Africa and other hard-hit regions.
January 26, 2005
700,000 in Developing Countries Receive Antiretroviral Therapies
The World Health Organization (WHO), UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS) , the U.S. Government, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria announce results of joint efforts to increase the availability of antiretroviral drugs in developing countries. An estimated 700,000 people have been reached by the end of 2004.
January 26, 2005
FDA Approves Generic Regimen for PEPFAR
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) grants tentative approval to a generic copackaged antiretroviral drug regimen for use under the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
May 19, 2005
1st National Asian/Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
This day marks the first annual National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day in the U.S.
Learn More.
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.
June 2, 2005
UN General Assembly Reviews Progress on 2001 Targets
The United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS meets to review progress on targets set at the 2001 U.N. General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS).
June 6, 2005
HIV/AIDS in Africa Becomes Focus of G8 Summit
The “Group of Eight” (G8) Summit focuses on development in Africa, including HIV/AIDS. G8 members make up most of the world’s largest economies and include: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
June 2005
POZ Life Weekend Seminars Begin in LA Area
Life Group LA launches its POZ Life Weekend Seminar, a place HIV+ men, women, youths and family members can come be themselves, feel comforted and receive support in their effort to live a long, healthy life.
Learn More.
The POZ Life event is free and focused on the spiritual, emotional and physical well-being of people living with HIV and those who support them through education, empowerment and emotional support.
The goal of the program is to empower people to make informed choices and decisions regarding their healthcare and personal well-being. The POZ Life Weekend Seminar is also open to those seeking to help someone HIV-positive and overcome the fears associated with HIV.
At the event, which still is held four times a year in the LA area and also in major cities across the U.S., a team of facilitators lead emotional support groups. These facilitators have been trained in the art of active listening and conduct themselves with empathy and compassion.
A minimum of 10 workshops are offered during each weekend seminar, dealing with but not limited to: HIV Drug Treatment Options, Insurance and Public Benefits, U=U, PreP, Stress Management, Alternative and Complementary Therapies, Nutrition, Women and HIV, Medication Adherence, Recreational Drug Use, Clinical Trials, Sex and Intimacy and HIV Disclosure. Workshops at the event are known to be extremely interactive, with presenters welcoming questions and comments from attendees.
For more information about the Life Group LA and its events, please go to http://thelifegroupla.org/
January 5, 2006
Bono & Bobby Shriver Found (RED) Initiative
At the 2006 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Switzerland, musician and activist Bono and former Santa Monica Mayor Bobby Shriver announce the launch of (RED), an initiative to engage businesses in the fight to end AIDS.
Learn More.
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.
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.”
March 10, 2006
Nat’l Women & Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day is Launched
March 10 is the first annual National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day in the U.S.
March 20, 2006
1st National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
March 20 is the first annual observance of National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day in the U.S.
May 3, 2006
NIH Sponsors AIDS Conference for Native Americans
On May 3-6, the Office of AIDS Research, in the National Institutes of Health (NIH), sponsors Embracing Our Traditions, Values, and Teachings: Native Peoples of North America HIV/AIDS Conference, in Anchorage, Alaska.
Learn More.
The conference involves nearly 1,000 participants from the American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, First Nations, and U.S. Territorial Pacific Islander communities.
May 31, 2006
UN Convenes on Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS
The United Nations convenes a follow-up meeting and issues a progress report on the implementation of the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS .
June 5, 2006
25th Anniversary of Initial AIDS Cases
June 5 marks 25 years since the first AIDS cases were reported.
June 24, 2006
Ric Weiland, Microsoft Employee #2, Dies
Richard “Ric” Weiland, a programmer who founded computer giant Microsoft with Bill Gates, commits suicide after battling HIV and depression. He was 53.
Learn More.
At the age of 35, Weiland retired from Microsoft in 1988 and turned his attention to philanthropy. He made donations of $21.5 million before his death, and bequeathed an additional $170 million.
“His R&D was exhaustive, and he did a lot of the due diligence,” Kris Hermanns, CEO of the Pride Foundation, told Geek Wire.
The Pride Foundation, Seattle’s gay umbrella organization, received more than a third of Weiland’s fortune, $65 million, to share with the groups it oversees. It was the largest single-donor gift ever made to an LGBTQ organization, according to Kevin Phinney’s article in Seattle Met.
GLSEN was another recipient of Weiland’s generosity. The organization, which advocates for LGBTQ students, used the donation to help thousands of high schools across the country create new Gender and Sexuality Alliances (formerly called Gay-Straight Alliances). A 2015 GLSEN survey showed that fully half of all students now have such an alliance at their school.
Weiland also left trust funds for his friends, relatives and ex-lovers, with incomes ranging from $40,000 to $100,000 a year for the rest of their lives.
After creating his will, Weiland decided to end his life. He was being treated for chronic depression and was coping with the recent deaths of his father and sister. His belief that HIV was starting to adversely impact his health, after years of lying dormant, contributed to the despair he felt, his partner, Mike Schaefer, told Nina Shapiro of The Seattle Times.
September 2, 2006
NYC Dancer & Choreographer Willi Ninja Dies
Willi Ninja, famous for his appearance in the documentary film Paris is Burning, dies at New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens of AIDS-related illness at age 45.
Learn More.
Considered the Godfather of Vogue and revered for founding the House of Ninja in New York City’s ballroom scene, Ninja influenced both underground and popular culture. Ninja’s dance style emerged from the underground scene to popular culture in 1990 when superstar Madonna incorporated voguing in her hit record and video Vogue.
Ninja was a self-taught performer whose influences included Fred Astaire, Great Performances on PBS, Asian culture and Olympic gymnasts. He rose to prominence in the Harlem Drag Ball scene in the 1980s.
Ninja described himself as “a butch queen,” performing a fluid gender presentation in a scene that celebrated “woman realness,” the ability to pass as biological women. His style showcased his talents and techniques, and reflected his authentic androgynous self.
While Paris DuPree is credited with the invention of the vogue dance style, Ninja was the one who refined it and brought it to a worldwide audience.
At a ball he was judging hosted by the House of Field, Ninja met impresario Malcolm McLaren and soon found himself on McLaren’s tour of European fashion houses. Willi modeled in runway shows for Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, Karl Lagerfield.
After taking voguing to Europe and Japan, be trained supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Iman in the art of voguing as well as in other artful displays of grace and poise. His skill was immortalized in the 1990 documentary film Paris Is Burning.
In its review of Paris Is Burning, the New York Times called Ninja “a lithe, articulate young man who also happens to be a master in the art of ‘voguing,’ in which dancers attempt to top each other by using gymnastics and the gestures of high-fashion models.”
Even after achieving fame, he would visit the Christopher Street pier to dazzle onlookers young and old, and teach his dance moves to the next generation of ballroom stars.
Ninja outlived many of his co-stars in Paris Is Burning, including Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Angie Extravaganza, and Avis Pendavis.
Since his death, Ninja continues to inspire artists and music DJs.He is a central figure in LGBTQ studies, gender studies, and performance studies for his nonconforming and transgressive gender expression as an artist. His presence is articulated in the book Black Sexualities by Juan Battle and Sandra L. Barnes.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) release revised HIV testing recommendations for healthcare settings, recommending routine HIV screening for all adults, aged 13-64, and yearly screening for those at high risk.
December 2006
Study Indicates Medical Circumcision Reduces Risk for HIV
A study of Kenyan men suggests that medical circumcision reduces by 53% their risk of acquiring HIV during heterosexual intercourse.
Learn More.
Conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago and supported by the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Canadian Institute of Health Research, the analysis of the clinical trial confirmed the importance of established risk factors for HIV and identified practices (such as circumcision) that warrant further investigation.
The study’s researchers said their goal was to “determine whether male circumcision had a protective effect against HIV infection, and to assess safety and changes in sexual behaviour related to this intervention.”
After compiling data from 2,784 men aged 18-24 years in Kisumu, Kenya, the researchers concluded that male circumcision significantly reduces the risk of HIV acquisition in young men in Africa.
“Where appropriate, voluntary, safe, and affordable, circumcision services should be integrated with other HIV preventive interventions and provided as expeditiously as possible,” the report stated.
December 19, 2006
Congress Reauthorizes Ryan White Act for 3rd Time
On December 19, the U.S. Congress reauthorizes the Ryan White CARE Act for the third time.
March 4, 2007
Activist & Clinton Advisor Bob Hattoy Dies
Bob Hattoy, an activist who spoke about AIDS at the 1992 Democratic Convention, dies of AIDS-related illness at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento at the age of 56.
[Portrait by Greg Loudon, for an art series for the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine]
Learn More.
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.”
May 30, 2007
WHO & UNAIDS Issue Testing Guidelines, Criticism Follows
In an attempt to increase HIV testing, the World Health Organization and UNAIDS recommend “provider-initiated” HIV testing in healthcare settings.
Learn More.
The WHO/UNAIDS guidelines state that in addition to expanding access to HIV testing, “equal efforts must be made to ensure that a supportive social, policy and legal framework is in place to maximize positive outcomes and minimize potential harms to patients.” The recommended framework includes social mobilization, health care provider training, a strong monitoring and evaluation system and laws and policies against discrimination based on HIV status, risk behavior or gender.
In a response to the WHO/UNAIDS guidelines, Human Rights Watch pointed out that “few countries have strong legal frameworks in place and enforced, and that in many regions and countries resources are inadequate.”
HRW presented the following facts that could undermine the WHO/UNAIDS guidelines:
Worldwide, less than 10% of injecting drug users have access to HIV prevention.
About the same percentage of pregnant women living with HIV in Africa has access to the medicine necessary to prevent transmission to their infants.
“The United Nations set a goal of universal access to HIV prevention and treatment by 2010, but currently only an estimated 2 million of the 7 million people living with HIV in urgent need of treatment are receiving it,” HRW stated.
June 4, 2007
AIDS Activist Jean O’Leary Dies at 57
Jean O’Leary, a former nun who became a leading AIDS activist, dies at her San Clemente home of lung cancer. She was 57.
Learn More.
A pioneering lesbian activist, O’Leary helped raise discussion of gay equality to a national level in 1977 through a historic White House meeting during which she brought delegation of gay and lesbian advocates to meet with members of the Carter administration.
“Jean O’Leary was a link of kindness and humanity and inclusive politics who helped the women’s movement to recognize the universal cost of homophobia and the gay movement to see that marginalizing the voices of lesbians would only diminish its power,” feminist icon Gloria Steinem told the Los Angeles Times.
Born in Kingston, N.Y., and raised in Cleveland, O’Leary attended Catholic school from third grade through high school, and decided to enter a convent upon graduation. She joined the Sisters of the Holy Humility of Mary, a liberal order of teachers and nurses based in Ohio, and became a nun.
“I thought that if I dedicated my life to God, I could get rid of my feelings for women,” she said in Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, a 1985 book by Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan that devoted a chapter to O’Leary’s story.
Instead, her feelings intensified and she began having intimate relations with another nun, according to O’Leary’s account in Lesbian Nuns. She decided in 1971, nearly five years after entering the convent, to rejoin the outside world and moved to New York City, where she “jumped right into the [gay rights] movement with both feet.”
She became a member of the Gay Activists Alliance, but decided to start her own organization — Lesbian Feminist Liberation — when she became frustrated with the dismissive behavior of the male leadership. When activist Bruce Voeller, a former colleague, founded the National Gay Task Force (later renamed the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force) in 1975, she joined him as co-executive director.
At the 1976 Democratic convention, O’Leary tried unsuccessfully to incorporate gay rights language into the party platform, but the effort resulted in a friendship with political operative Midge Costanza, who became a special assistant to the newly elected president, Jimmy Carter.
Soon after, O’Leary contacted Costanza to request a meeting on gay rights in the White House. On March 26th, 1977, members of the Carter administration met with O’Leary and other activists to discuss LGBTQ+ issues, including healthcare needs, the military ban on homosexuality, and other discriminatory laws.
“It’s difficult now to imagine what a breakthrough moment the White House meeting was, but at the time it was national news,” wrote Eric Marcus in Making Gay History.
In 1981, O’Leary moved to Los Angeles to became executive director of the National Gay Rights Advocates, a nonprofit law firm which took on cases that would set legal precedents in the protection of gay and lesbian rights. NGRA also provided legal representation for people living with HIV/AIDS facing discrimination. Before leaving that post eight years later, she helped establish “National Coming Out Day” on Oct. 11, 1988 with Rob Eichberg, the founder of The Experience, a program designed to develop self-esteem in gay men and lesbians.
In 1998, she served as co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Gay and Lesbian Caucus and a member of the DNC Executive Committee, according to Lisa Rapp of the LGBT Archives. Together with fellow Gay and Lesbian Caucus member Jeff Soref and California Assemblywoman Carole Migden, O’Leary put forward an amendment to party rules requiring the inclusion of gay men and lesbians in all state delegations — a measure that was unanimously adopted.
Upon hearing about O’Leary’s death, activist and writer Sean Straub wrote, “I’ve considered Jean’s activism unique in that she achieved credibility, respect and had a big impact in four distinct arenas: the women’s movement, gay and lesbian rights movement, Democratic Party activism, and AIDS activism.”
Straub, who had been friends with O’Leary since 1985, said that she tended to downplay her role in the AIDS crisis. But under O’Leary’s leadership, NGRA’s AIDS Civil Rights Project was critical in establishing the legal rights of people with HIV/AIDS in the mid-to-late 1980s, Straub said.
June 2007
Rwanda Hosts Int’l HIV/AIDS Implementers Meeting
The Rwandan Government hosts the International HIV/AIDS Implementers Meeting, drawing 1,500 delegates to share data and ideas.
Learn More.
Sharing lessons on HIV prevention, treatment, and care, attendees participate in an open dialogue about future directions of HIV/AIDS programs, with a strong emphasis on implementation and identification of critical barriers and best practices.
A session titled “Making care truly comprehensive and providing a preventive care package for people living with HIV” featured lessons on providing comprehensive care, mostly based on the holistic palliative care model deveopled in Cote d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa. It was noted, however, that none of the speakers mentioned TB prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
A satellite meeting organized by PEPFAR and the Secretariat of the TB/HIV Working Group at WHO was attended by implementers from 22 countries. The main topic of discussion was how PEPFAR funds can be used to support TB control activities.
Cosponsors include WHO; UNAIDS; the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; UNICEF; the World Bank; and GNP+ (the Global Network of People Living with HIV) .
July 7, 2007
Social Justice Leader Ferd Eggan Dies
Ferd Eggan, longtime HIV/AIDS activist and leader of Los Angeles city services, dies at his home in Hollywood at age 60 after a six-month illness complicated by HIV.
Learn More.
While serving as AIDS Coordinator for the City of Los Angeles between 1993 and 2001, Ferd opened doors for the funding of self-organized programs for women with AIDS, city authorization of and funding for needle exchanges, housing for People With AIDS who might still be active drug users, and a landmark study and intervention program for gay men using crystal meth.
Eggan’s activism began during his college days at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, initially in the southern Black civil rights movement and later in anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, women’s and gay liberation and HIV/AIDS struggles.
“Picture me and a Black GI on leave from Vietnam, in his car in the moonlight, windows steamy, ducking as headlights swept past,” Eggan wrote in his autobiographical essay, Fags and Dykes Want Everything: Dreaming with the Gay Liberation Front. “We could be beaten or killed for what we were doing.”
In the years that followed, Eggan traveled between New York City (where he was around the corner from Christopher Street on the first night of the Stonewall riots, but was “too afraid to join in”) and San Francisco. In 1972, while appearing as an extra in a San Francisco Opera production of Aida, Eggan and two others unfurled a banner from the stage reading, “Dykes and Fags Support the Vietnamese Peace Plan.”
Eggan returned to the Chicago area with his then-partner, documentary filmmaker Carel Rowe, where he soon joined the Chicago chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. He worked for a while with a childcare co-op run by women connected with the “Jane” group, which helped women get underground abortions, and he taught Puerto Rican high school students for 11 years.
Diagnosed with HIV in 1986, Eggan helped to found ACT UP Chicago and the national ACT UP PISD Caucus (People with Immune System Disorders), before moving to Los Angeles in 1990 to become Executive Director of Being Alive.
In 1993, Eggan became the city’s third AIDS coordinator, a position created in 1989 by then-Mayor Tom Bradley to spearhead the development of a comprehensive local approach to combating the spread of AIDS. He served in this position until 2001, when he became too ill to continue in the job.
After retiring on disability, he concentrated on his creative writing, journalism, video art, and his blog, “Communiques from a Cranky PWA.” In June 2007, less than three weeks before his death, the Los Angeles City Council honored Eggan for his service.
“We would not be where we are today if it had not been for people like Ferd,” said Dr. Michael Gottlieb, who in 1981 authored the first medical case report that heralded the advent of AIDS. “Part of the founding generation of AIDS activists, he has been involved with AIDS for the life of the epidemic. Even if there were activist leaders waiting in the wings — and regrettably there aren’t — Ferd Eggan would be irreplaceable.”
His long-term friend Walt Senterfit, national board chair of the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project, said, “He was a warrior, strategist, writer, artist, activist, and friend in the political, social, and intellectual movements for liberation of our time.”
2007
Over 565,000 U.S. Deaths From AIDS
CDC reports over 565,000 people have died of AIDS in the U.S. since 1981.
October 2007
CDC Launches ‘Prevention IS Care’ Campaign
In October, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launch Prevention IS Care (PIC), a social marketing campaign designed for healthcare providers who deliver care to people living with HIV.
November 8, 2007
Dr. R Scott Hitt, AIDS Specialist on Presidential Advisory Council, Dies
Dr. R. Scott Hitt, an AIDS specialist who was the first openly gay person to head a presidential advisory board, dies at his West Hollywood home of colon cancer. He was 49.
Learn More.
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 TheNew 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.”
HIV/AIDS implementers from around the world gather in Kampala, Uganda for the 2008 HIV/AIDS Implementers’ Meeting, where three activists were arrested by Ugandan police.
Learn More.
In recognition of the rapid expansion of HIV/AIDS programs worldwide, the focus of the meeting was building the capacity of local prevention, treatment, and care programs; enhancing quality; and promoting coordination among partners.
A total of 1,700 attendees convened at the meeting, representing governments, nongovernmental organizations including faith- and community-based groups, multilateral organizations, the private sector, and groups of people living with HIV/AIDS.
Cosponsors of the four-day conference include the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS); the World Health Organization (WHO); the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF); the World Bank; and GNP+ (the Global Network of People Living with HIV).
During the conference, three Ugandan LGBT activists were arrested as they protested the statements made by a Ugandan government official who refused to direct funds toward HIV programs that targeted men who have sex with men.
The Uganda Police Force arrested and detained Pepe Julian “Patience” Onziema, Valentine Kalende and Usaam “Auf” Mukwaya — all members of the LGBT organization Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) — when the three activists took the stage at the conference to distribute leaflets and hold up small placards demanding attention to HIV vulnerability among the LGBT community.
The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission immediately issued a press release condemning the arrests of the activists and calling for their immediate and unconditional release. The commission expressed concern for the safety of the activists, and noted the Ugandan government routinely discriminated against those speaking up for the LGBT community.
On July 25, a few hours after the activists attended their hearing for their arrest, Kampala police officers abducted one of the activists, Usaam “Auf” Mukwaya, as he returned his hotel.
A patrol car stopped the taxi he was riding in and four men identifying themselves as police officers abducted him and took him to a location where he was held for more than 24 hours without access to a lawyer or any reason provided for his arrest.
Mukwaya told Human Rights Watch that his abductors asked him questions in Luganda, a local dialect, about SMUG’s funders and supporters, and about his own role “among the homosexuals.” They also demanded he give them information about other individuals involved in LGBT rights.
According to Mukwaya, three police officers pushed him through a dark corridor to a room where they sat him on a chair. Mukwaya reported seeing four other men in the room; they were close to his own age and appeared to have been beaten. One appeared to have a broken leg.
One of the abductors scraped his knuckles with a razor-like object. Another tied him to a machine that stretched his arms. After forcing Mukwaya to strip to his underwear, they asked him if he was a man or a woman, and made him walk around the room unclothed.
The following day, they released him, dropping him on the streets of central Kampala.
Human Rights Watch would issue a statement decrying the treatment of government officials of Mukwaya and noting that “torture and ill-treatment is a pervasive problem” for the LGBT community in Uganda.
July 31, 2008
Bush Reauthorizes PEPFAR, Promises to Loosen HIV Travel Ban
President George W. Bush signs legislation to extend the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and announces he will loosen the HIV travel ban.
Learn More.
The legislation budgets $48 billion for PEPFAR to operate an additional five years and also contains a rider that gives the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services the authority to admit HIV-positive travellers to the U.S. on a “case-by-case” basis.
In PEPFAR’s first five years, the program helped bring life-saving treatment to more than 2.1 million people and care for more than 10 million people – including more than four million orphans and vulnerable children – around the world
By 2008, PEPFAR was supporting life-saving antiretroviral treatment for more than 2 million people living with HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, a dramatic increase from 2003, when only 50,000 people in all of Sub-Saharan Africa were receiving antiretroviral treatment.
the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission for women during more than 16 million pregnancies.
the prevention of nearly 240,000 infant infections.
more than 57 million counseling and testing sessions for men, women, and children.
Bush’s announcement that he would loosen restrictions on HIV-positive travellers to the U.S. was seemingly in response to pressure from members of Congress. Nearly 60 House Democrats, including Henry A. Waxman (California), chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent President Bush a letter urging him to “take swift action on the issue.” according to The Washington Post.
During its reauthorization of PEPFAR, Congress voted to repeal the ban imposed on people living with HIV seeking to travel or immigrate to the U.S. However, the ban remained in place while the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stalled on whether to rewrite its rules to allow the admission of people living with HIV/AIDS.
In an editorial, The Washington Post urged the HHS to “act soon to end a de facto form of discrimination that puts the United States in the company of countries such as Libya, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.”
The travel restrictions were first imposed in 1987, at the height of AIDS hysteria, by then-Senator Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina known for his anti-gay stances on a variety of issues. Helms inserted language into a bill that directed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to add HIV to the list of medical conditions barring immigrants and visitors to the U.S. In protest of the ban, the International AIDS Conference began boycotting the U.S., holding its annual conference in other countries.
Massachusetts Congressperson Barney Frank told The Out Traveler, “I appreciate the fact that the president is acknowledging that this is a very imperfect policy in his request for some regularized exceptions. But exceptions to a bad policy are not enough. The time has come to abolish it.”
Two months later, The Atlantic would report that people living with HIV/AIDS were still being denied the ability to travel to the U.S. In fact, the travel ban would remain in place throughout the duration of Bush’s term in office. Lifting the ban then fell to newly elected President Barack Obama, who in his first year of office, began working on changing the law. The ban officially ended on January 4, 2010.
August 6, 2008
CDC Corrects Undercount of New HIV Cases
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention release new U.S. HIV data showing a substantially higher infection rate than it previously estimated.
Learn More.
The CDC’s new report adjusts the previous number of new infections per year from 40,000 to 56,300.
The adjusted data did not represent an actual increase in the numbers of HIV infections, explained the CDC; instead, the data reflected a more accurate way of measuring new infections. A separate analysis suggested that the annual number of new infections was never as low as 40,000 and that the rate of new infections was stable since the late 1990s.
September 18, 2008
National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day Observed
September 18 is the first observance of National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day .
September 27, 2008
National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Observed
National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day is first recognized on September 27.
October 6, 2008
Nobel Prize Awarded for 1983 Discovery of HIV
The Nobel Prize in medicine is awarded to two French virologists, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, and Luc A. Montagnier, for their 1983 discovery of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
December 27, 2008
AIDS Denialist Christine Maggiore Dies
Christine Maggiore, an HIV-positive activist who promoted AIDS denialism, dies of AIDS-related illness in her home in Van Nuys, California at the age of 52.
Learn More.
At the time of her death, Maggiore was being treated for what was originally reported as pneumonia. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office stated that Maggiore had been treated for pneumonia in the six months prior to her death as well.
A doctor familiar with the family told the Los Angeles Times that anti-HIV drugs could have prevented her death, but Maggiore’s fellow AIDS denialists argued that her pneumonia was not AIDS-related and suggested instead that she died as a result of a toxic alternative medicine “holistic cleanse,” stress, or the cold and flu.
When Maggiore was diagnosed with HIV in 1992, she initially became the ultimate HIV/AIDS advocate — volunteering at HIV/AIDS service organizations and speaking about the risks of HIV at local schools and health fairs.
But then her views took a 180-degree turn after speaking with University of California Berkeley biology professor Peter Duesberg, who erroneously believed that HIV did not cause AIDS. She embraced Duesberg’s theories (which have been debunked), and in 2000, wrote a book called What if Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?
Maggoire gave birth at home to two children, and her youngest, Eliza Jane, died in 2005 from what the coroner ruled was AIDS-related pneumonia. Maggiore and her husband Robin Scovill, however, hired a pathologist who concluded that the girl died of an allergic reaction to the antibiotic amoxicillin.
Maggiore told ABC News that she refused to take antiviral drugs during her pregnancies despite substantial evidence that they dramatically reduced the risk of the mother transferring the virus to her child, explaining, “I did not want to expose my growing child to toxins during pregnancy.”
Jay Gordon, a Santa Monica paediatrician who treated Eliza Jane, told The Guardian he regretted not testing for HIV when he examined her for an apparent ear infection 11 days before her death.
After Eliza Jane’s death, Los Angeles police investigated whether Maggiore and Scovill were negligent in not testing their child for HIV. In 2006, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined to file criminal charges against Maggiore, explaining that it was too difficult to prove criminal negligence.
Maggiore’s death certificate states that the cause of death was disseminated herpes virus infection and bilateral pneumonia, with oral candidiasis as a contributing cause, all of which can be related to HIV infection. The death certificate also states there was no autopsy performed.
January 2009
President Obama Calls for National HIV/AIDS Strategy
Newly elected President Barack Obama calls for the development of the first National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States.
January 23, 2009
Martin Delaney, Crusader of HIV Treatment, Dies at 63
Martin Delaney, an activist who successfully challenged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to expedite the testing and approval of potentially life-saving HIV drugs, dies of liver cancer at his home in San Rafael, California. He was 63.
Learn More.
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?”
February 2009
Washington DC Reports HIV Rate Higher than West Africa
Washington, DC has a higher rate of HIV (3% prevalence) than West Africa– enough to be a “severe and generalized epidemic.”
Learn More.
According to a report issued by the District of Columbia, the HIV rate in the nation’s capital is the highest in the country with nearly 3% of residents living with HIV or AIDS.
“That’s a little more than 15,000 people with the disease — a total that well exceeds the 1% threshold for what makes up a ‘generalized and severe epidemic,'” stated news coverage from NBC‘s Washington station.
The study found that every form of transmission is on the rise, with minorities and women at an especially high risk. The rate among heterosexual black women was 15 times more than the rate of white women and more than three times that of Latinas.
Patricia Nalls, Founder and Executive Director of The Women’s Collective, told NPR, “Women and girls are at risk for several reasons. Prevention messages are not addressing women’s needs. And you are not seeing women in the face of the campaigns and the messages that’s out there.”
Nalls said that violence against women also needs to be considered when addressing HIV infection among the female population. She urged the local government to declare a state of emergency.
April 7, 2009
White House & CDC Collaborate on HIV Awareness Campaign
The Obama Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launch the Act Against AIDS campaign.
Learn More.
The a multiyear Act Against AIDS campaign is designed to reduce HIV incidence in the U.S. through raising awareness about HIV prevention.
The CDC simultaneously launches the Act Against AIDS Leadership Initiative (AAALI) in an effort to increase HIV-related awareness, knowledge, and action within Black communities across the U.S.
May 5, 2009
President Obama Launches $63B Global Health Initiative
President Barack Obama’s Global Health Initiative will develop a comprehensive approach to global healthcare in low- and middle-income countries.
Learn More.
A six-year, $63 billion effort, the Global Health Initiative received input and involvement from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
June 8, 2009
Caribbean American HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Observed
June 8 marks the first annual recognition of Caribbean American HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.
August 17, 2009
Veterans Dept Moves to Increase HIV Testing
The Department of Veterans Affairs moves to increase the number of veterans receiving HIV tests by dropping the requirement for written consent.
October 6, 2009
100th Antiretroviral Drug Approved
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the 100th antiretroviral drug.
Learn More.
FDA announces that it has approved the 100th antiretroviral drug under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Of the more than 100 products that have received either full or tentative FDA approval under the program, 29 are branded drugs and 71 are generics.
The FDA process was launched in May 2004, in response to a call from activists, clinicians and members of Congress to use the WHO’s pre-certification drug list to make purchases of generic medications for PEPFAR-funded programs. Instead, a process was devised to allow the FDA to certify generic antiretrovirals (ARVs) for PEPFAR purchase, even if the branded drug was still protected by U.S. patent laws.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement, “This milestone exemplifies the dedication, caring, and hard work of all who strive to better the lives of those infected with or affected by HIV/AIDS.”
October 28, 2009
Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity Added to Hate Crime Law
President Barack Obama signs into law the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, expanding the 1969 federal hate-crime law to include crimes committed because of a victim’s sexual orientation.
Shepard was a gay college student who was tortured and murdered near Laramie, Wyoming by two men. Shepard’s murderers were given life sentences — in large part because his parents sought mercy for his killers. Byrd was a 49-year-old disabled Black man from Jasper, Texas who was tied to a truck by three white supremacists, dragged behind it, and decapitated. Two of Byrd’s murderers were sentenced to death and executed in 2011 and 2019, respectively, while the third was sentenced to life in prison.
“Prosecutors will have new tools to work with states in order to prosecute to the fullest those who would perpetrate such crimes,” President Obama said, “because no one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street, holding the hands of the person they love.”
The audience at the White House included Matthew Shepard’s parents Denis and Judy, and the family of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who championed the legislation but died before the bill was passed.
November 24, 2009
UNAIDS Reports Significant Decline in HIV Infections
UNAIDS reports that there has been a significant decline (-17%) in new HIV infections in the past decade. East Asia, however, has seen a dramatic 25% increase.
December 2009
Rules Eased for Needle Exchange Funding
President Barack Obama signs the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which modifies the ban on the use of federal funds for needle exchange programs.
Learn More.
When applicable, Federal funds may be used for personnel, equipment, syringe disposal services, educational materials, communication and marketing activities and evaluation activities, and evaluation. Some HHS programs may still contain partial or complete bans on the use of funds for needle exchange programs.
January 4, 2010
U.S. Lifts HIV Travel & Immigration Ban
President Barack Obama ends the HIV ban on travel and immigration by removing the remaining regulatory barriers to entry.
Learn More.
The lifting of the travel ban was done in conjunction with the announcement that the International AIDS Conference would return to the U.S for the first time in more than 20 years.
“If we want to be a global leader in combating H.I.V./AIDS, we need to act like it,” Obama said at a White House ceremony to announce the cancellation of the ban. “Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease, yet we’ve treated a visitor living with it as a threat.”
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights organization, hailed the announcement that the ban, first established in 1987 by the Reagan Administration, has been lifted. Regulations officially removed HIV from the list of communicable diseases that barred foreign nationals from entering the U.S.
“The United States of America has moved one step closer to helping combat the stigma and ignorance that still too often guides public policy debates around HIV/AIDS,” said HRC President Joe Solmonese. “Today, a sad chapter in our nation’s response to people with HIV and AIDS has finally come to a close and we are a better nation for it.”
Scientific researchers also applauded the end of the travel ban.
“The removal of the immigration and travel ban on HIV-infected persons was a monumental step in eliminating the exceptionalism of HIV and reducing stigma and social barriers for those living with HIV,” Susanna E. Winston, M.D. and Curt G. Beckwith, M. wrote in their 2011 report in AIDS Patient Care and STDs.
The researchers further called for increased alliances between the U.S. and its immigrant communities as well as additional options for testing.
Not everyone celebrated the end of the HIV travel ban.
“You’re running into a huge public expense because most people simply cannot afford the drugs to treat HIV out of their own pockets,” Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told ABC News. “[HIV-positive immigrants] will require all sorts of assistance from the government to pay for the drugs that they need.”
March 23, 2010
Obama Signs ACA, Protections to Those Living With HIV
President Barack Obama signs the Affordable Care Act, providing historic protections for those living with HIV.
Historically, people living with HIV and AIDS in the U.S. had a difficult time obtaining private health insurance and had been particularly vulnerable to insurance industry abuses. Consistent with the goals of the Obama Administration’s National HIV/AIDS Strategy, the Affordable Care Act made considerable strides in addressing these concerns and advancing equality for people living with HIV and AIDS.
As of this day, insurers were no longer able to deny coverage to children living with HIV or AIDS. The parents of as many as 17.6 million children with pre-existing conditions no longer had to worry that their children would be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition.
Insurers also were prohibited from cancelling or rescinding coverage to adults or children because of a mistake on an application. And insurers could no longer impose lifetime caps on insurance benefits. Because of the law, 105 million Americans no longer had a lifetime dollar limit on essential health benefits.
These changes to healthcare immediately improved access to insurance for people living with HIV/AIDS and helped people with these conditions retain the coverage they had.
July 13, 2010
1st Comprehensive U.S. HIV/AIDS Strategy Released
The Obama Administration releases the first comprehensive National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States.
July 18, 2010
Study of South African Women is Conference Highlight
An important scientific breakthrough for HIV prevention in women garners attention at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria.
Learn More.
At the 18th International AIDS Conference on July 18-23, the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa’s (CAPRISA) presented the results of its 004 study of antiretroviral-based microbicides, a vaginal gel that significantly reduces a woman’s risk of being infected by HIV and genital herpes.
The study shows the microbicides to be safe and effective in reducing risks of new HIV infections among women by 39%. Women who use the microbicides as directed have even higher rates of protection (54%) against HIV infection.
The microbicide containing 1% tenofovir — an antiretroviral drug widely used in the treatment of HIV — was considered to have the potential to prevent over half a million new HIV infections in South Africa alone over the next decade.
The study involved 889 women at high risk of HIV infection at an urban and a rural site in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Overall, 98 women out of the 889 became HIV positive during the trial — with 38 in the tenofovir gel group and 60 in the placebo gel group.
Out of the 434 women who tested negative for herpes at the start of the trial, 29 became infected in the tenofovir group and 58 became infected in the placebo group. The reduced rates of HIV and herpes infections among the women who used the tenofovir gel were considered statistically significant.
2010
iPrEx Study Shows Risk Reduction in HIV-Negative Men
A new study shows that a daily dose of HIV drugs reduced the risk of HIV infection by 44% among HIV-negative men who have sex with men.
Learn More.
The National Institutes of Health announce these results from its iPrEx study, supporting the concept of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in a targeted population.
2010
AIDS United Formed
AIDS Action merges with the National AIDS Fund to form AIDS United
August 27, 2010
Origin of HIV-1 Traceable to Chimpanzees in Africa
Research scientists chart the origin of AIDS to wild-living chimpanzees infected with simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs).
Learn More.
In an article published in the scientific journal Philosophical Transactions B titled “The Evolution of HIV-1 and the Origin of AIDS,” researchers Paul M. Sharp and Beatrice H. Hahn demonstrated that HIV-1 can be traced via evolutionary comparisons to SIV-infected chimps and gorillas in west central Africa.
Sharp and Hahn described in their paper the four lineages of HIV-1 that resulted from cross-species transmissions from chimps (and possibly gorillas) to humans. Their research was supported by grants from National Institutes of Health and the Bristol Myers Freedom to Discover program.
“The conclusion that HIV-1 was derived from a virus infecting chimpanzees is particularly interesting, because chimpanzees and humans are so closely related,” Sharp and Hahn wrote. “This raises a number of questions, such as the origin of the chimpanzee virus, whether adaptation of SIVcpz to infecting chimpanzees rendered the virus more capable of infecting humans and whether SIVcpz infection of chimpanzees is pathogenic.”
In the January 2000 article “AIDS as a Zoonosis: Scientific and Public Health Implications,” Sharp, Hahn and two additional researchers theorized how the virus was able to be transmitted from chimpanzees to humans. Since transmission requires “exposure to infected blood and body fluids,” they propose that it was likely that infection in humans occurred during the practice of hunting and butchering chimps. Even though the opportunity for chimp-to-human transmission existed for hundreds of years, the Congo in the early 20th Century, then under colonization by the Dutch, had a set of circumstances that for the first time allowed the virus to spread from humans to other humans.
Since workers in the bushmeat industry usually operated in a remote area in the southeast corner of Cameroon, Sharp and Hahn were able to identify this region as the likely location of the first notable spread of the disease. Around 1920, HIV infections occurred in humans in “at least a dozen independent transmissions” from chimps. From there, these infected people spread the virus as they travelled by the Sangha River to the largest city to the south, the Congolese capital city of Kinshasa (which was then under Dutch colonization).
“During the early part of that century, the destabilization of social structures by invading colonial powers, the origin and rapid growth of major conurbations, and the widespread use of injections may all have contributed to provide an unprecedented opportunity for dissemination of blood-borne viruses,” Sharp and Hahn wrote.
In October 2018, historian Thomas F. McDow would reference much of Sharp and Hahn’s research in an article for Origins delving into how the spread of HIV was linked to the socio-political impact from Africa’s colonization and the globalization of the economy in the early 20th century.
In “A Century of HIV,” McDow wrote: “The story of HIV is a story of globalization. The expanding connections of the 20th Century spread the disease, yet the limitations and inequalities of global public health allowed the disease to ravage populations even after scientists discovered effective drug treatments.”
McDow credited research scientists with being able to pinpoint the origin of HIV from blood samples and a lymph node dating back to the late 1950s and stored in a Congolese laboratory.
“This virus began its career in humans at a time when the forests and riverine landscapes of Equatorial Africa became increasingly connected to the global economy,” McDow wrote. “While the people who lived in these forests had traded and been connected to wider regional networks for a very long time, the scope and scale of these interactions changed at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.”
In 1884, major European nations convened the Berlin Conference (also known as the Congo Conference), and determined which countries would control the trade routes in Central Africa, according to McDow. Eight of the 14 countries represented at the conference — Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal, and the Ottoman Empire — set about laying claim to various African territories.
Under the control of European companies, the Sangha river basin became the world’s main producer of ivory and rubber. To support their industry, the European colonists modernized the infrastructure of their territories and built links to previously unconnected regions. Two towns on opposite sides of the Congo River, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, attracted Africans from remote parts of the continent with the promise of work and wages.
Meanwhile, Africans continued to live in impoverished conditions and workers were brutally exploited for decades, according to McDow. As indigenous African workers began to rebel and refuse to accept to be treated poorly by the colonists, more wealth and opportunity began to come their way — but just a little.
“In the 1940s and 1950s, the creative energies of these towns produced the lively sounds of rumba, music inspired in part by Latin American sound and driven by the distinctive Congolese guitar playing,” wrote McDow. “But the same venues and impulses that attracted the youth to hear people like Wendo Kolosoy croon ‘Marie Louise’ created conditions for the spread of the virus through heterosexual intercourse.”
During this time, records showing the uptick in sexually transmitted diseases like Hepatitis B suggests that HIV was also likely spreading during this time. Then came the 1960s, a time hailed as “The African Decade” when people in the colonized territories fought for and won their independence.
The United Nations Education, Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Congolese government responded the region’s lack of skilled workers among its indigenous people by recruiting teachers and doctors to work in the Congo, according to McDow. Belgians and Haitians made up the largest groups of expatriate professionals.
“While in Congo, however, some contracted HIV and subsequently returned home with the deadly, unknown virus,” he wrote. “The earliest cases of HIV in the United States are connected to Haiti, and the Haitian-Congo link seems to have helped the disease cross the Atlantic.”
All of these events leading up to the June 1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report by The Centers for Disease Control are the “pre-history of AIDS,” according to McDow.
“Looking back, doctors can see that a small number of unexplained medical cases in the west … were early cases of AIDS,” wrote McDow.
Among these early cases are:
In 1939-1959, cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia were reported in Western Europe in infants born prematurely. Researchers state that the most likely cause was a retrovirus closely related to HIV (or a mild version of HIV) brought to Europe and originating from Cameroon, a former German colony. The epidemic started in 1939 along the German-Polish border in the Free City of Danzig and then spread to nearby countries, like Germany, Switzerland and The Netherlands, in the 1940s and 1950s.
On June 28, 1959, Antonio Ardouin, a 49-year-old Jamaican-American shipping clerk, died in New York City of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Gordon Hennigar, who performed the postmortem examination of the man’s body, found the case to be so unusual, he preserved Ardouin’s lungs for later study. Hennigar has been quoted as saying that he believes Ardouin likely died of AIDS.
On May 15, 1969, Robert Rayford, a 15-year-old Black youth, died at St. Louis City Hospital with no immune system to fight the infection that ravaged his body for more than a year. An autopsy revealed widespread Kaposi’s sarcoma, and a 1988 test of autopsy tissue specimens showed evidence of nine distinct HIV proteins.
In 1976, Arvid Noe, a Norwegian sailor, died; it was later determined that he contracted HIV/AIDS in Africa during the early 1960s. His wife and daughter also died of AIDS-related illnesses.
On June 28, 1978, a Portuguese man known as Senhor José (“Mr. Joseph”) died. Later confirmed as the first known infection of HIV-2, he was believed to have been exposed to the disease in Guinea-Bissau in 1966.
In 1978-79, eight people from New York and San Francisco participated in a Hepatitis B virus study, and about 40 years later, their reconstructed blood samples tested positive for HIV. A 2016 re-testing of samples from the Hep B studies identified five HIV cases from New York and three from San Francisco. From their data, researchers estimate the virus’ entry into the U.S. at about 1970. “You see a very telltale pattern of extensive genetic diversity in New York City, suggesting that New York City was the key hub of diversification for the virus,” researcher Michael Worobey told PBS News Hour in 2016. ““Restricted genetic diversity in San Francisco, suggesting San Francisco was a later dispersal out of this New York City hub.”
In 1979, a five-year-old girl died in New Jersey after suffering from symptoms of AIDS since birth; later her stored tissues tested positive for HIV-1. The girl’s mother was described as an intravenous-drug user who had multiple male sex partners.
On December 24, 1980, Rick Wellikoff, a Brooklyn grade-school teacher, died at the age of 37 of various infections that overwhelmed his immune system. Strong evidence suggests that he died of AIDS.
On January 15, 1981, Nick Rock, a New York City bartender and friend of Rick Wellikoff, died after months of suffering from seizures, heart attacks and Kaposi’s sarcoma.
September 5, 2010
‘Freddie For A Day’ Event Starts in England
The fundraising event “Freddie For A Day” is launched by Mercury Phoenix Trust, a nonprofit created in memory of Freddie Mercury by Queen band members Brian May and Roger Taylor with their manager Jim Beach to support the global fight against HIV/AIDS.
[photo courtesy of MPT/Hard Rock Cafe Piccadilly Circus]
Learn More.
“Freddie For A Day” celebrates the life of music icon Freddie Mercury by encouraging fans to dress as Freddie on his birthday — September 5 — to raise money for the Mercury Phoenix Trust (MPT).
MPT was started in 1992 to raise money to fight HIV/AIDS worldwide, according to The Guardian. The “Freddie For A Day” initiative was started almost 18 years later to encourage people to raise money for MPT and show them how to use the new online donation platform.
From the donations received, the organization issues grants to programs that focus on HIV/AIDS education and awareness in areas around the world. The projects funded range from educating grandparents looking after their grandchildren orphaned by AIDS in Cambodia, to preventing mother-to-child transmission in South Africa, to HIV awareness theater in Papua New Guinea and educating sexually active youth globally.
MPT donates to some large, well-known charities, but dedicates the greater part of its funding to small, grassroots organizations that are often overlooked.
“We are proud of the fact that more that 93 [pence] in each pound we raise goes to funding projects spread across the globe,” states Mercury Phoenix Trust on its website. “In total, the MPT has funded well over 1,500 projects in 57 countries, giving away over UK$17 million in the global battle against AIDS.”
Since its 2010 launch, the “Freddie For A Day” event has been held every year in England and has grown to include the participation of fans in countries all around the world. Hard Rock Cafes in Europe have partnered with MPT to create “Freddie” festivals at many of their locations.
“Young and old, people have donned a moustache and gone out for drinks, gone to class, gone shopping, taken the train, taken the plane, put on a concert or run a mini-marathon dressed as Freddie,” according to Mercury Phoenix Trust. “Some go the whole hog by wearing full costume for the entire day. Some just decide to support the cause by wearing something yellow or putting on a moustache. The main thing is to have fun, raise awareness and try and get sponsored to raise funds.”
September 2010
Record Numbers Worldwide Receiving Antiretroviral Therapy
A new United Nations report shows significant progress in improving access to HIV/AIDS services in 37 developing countries and offers realistic hope for the achievement of universal access.
Learn More.
The report from the World Health Organization (WHO), UNAIDS, and UNICEF also shows an estimated 5.25 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in 2009 and an estimated 1.2 million people were able to start antiretroviral therapy – the largest annual increase yet recorded.
The assessment of HIV/AIDS programs in 144 low- and middle-income countries found that 15 countries were able to provide more than 80% of HIV-positive pregnant women with the services and medicines needed to prevent mother-to-child transmission, while 14 countries provided HIV treatment to more than 80% of their HIV-positive children. An additional eight countries had achieved universal access to antiretroviral treatment for adults.
“Countries in all parts of the world are demonstrating that universal access is achievable,” said Dr. Hiroki Nakatani, WHO Assistant Director-General for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases. “But globally, it remains an unfulfilled commitment. And we must join forces to make it a worldwide reality in the coming years.”
Remarkable progress in Eastern and Southern Africa, the region most severely affected by HIV, offers hope. In this region, HIV treatment coverage has increased from 32% to 41% in one year. And half of the pregnant women were able to access HIV testing and counseling in 2009.
“We’re on the right track,” said Paul De Lay, Deputy Executive Director with UNAIDS. “We’ve shown what works and now we need to do more of it. But we’re $10 billion short. At the Global Fund replenishment conference in New York next week, countries have a chance to put this right – to make a smart investment and secure the future of the AIDS response.”
September 20, 2010
UN Summit on Accelerating 2015 Millennium Development Goals
On September 20-22, the United Nations (UN) convenes a summit to accelerate progress toward the 2015 Millennium Development Goals
September 27, 2010
Activist Brian Bond Discloses HIV+ Status on White House Blog
Brian Bond, who is the deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, discloses his HIV-positive status in a blog for National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.
Learn More.
“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.
October 27, 2010
Actress & Early AIDS Prevention Advocate Zelda Rubinstein Dies at 76
Zelda Rubinstein, the diminutive character actress who used her fame from the 1982 movie Poltergeist to advocate for AIDS awareness, dies of natural causes at Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 76.
Learn More.
“She was one of the very first Hollywood celebrities to speak out on HIV and AIDS,” said Craig E. Thompson, then-executive director of AIDS Project Los Angeles.
“It was the first AIDS education and prevention campaign in Los Angeles and one of the very first in the United States,” added Thompson, who said calls to the HIV/AIDS hotline “skyrocketed after the campaign came out.”
Rubinstein told the Los Angeles Times in 1985 that she was looking for a way to get involved in the fight against AIDS when she was approached to play the mother in the campaign L.A. CARES (Los Angeles Cooperative AIDS Risk-Reduction Education Service), which was launched by the organization now known as the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
In TV spots, she played the mother pleading with an unseen son to “play safely.” In videos that were shown in gay bars, the sons appeared as bare-chested young men. The campaign featuring Rubinstein’s “mother” character also included a series of ads in newspapers and on billboards and buses.
In one ad, Rubinstein is seen wearing an apron and talking to her “son,” who is clad only in shorts and holding an umbrella. At the bottom, it says, “L.A. CARES . . . like a mother.”
In addition to her scene-stealing turns as the psychic Tangina in the Poltergeist horror films, Rubinstein also had roles in the moviesFrances, Sixteen Candles, Teen Witch, Anguish and Southland Tales, and the TV series Picket Fences (1992-1996), on which she was a regular.
March 23, 2011
AIDS Activist Elizabeth Taylor Dies at Age 79
AIDS activist and award-winning actress Elizabeth Taylor dies of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Learn More.
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.
April 11, 2011
Public Debates Transplant Ban of HIV-Infected Organs
Public debate begins on whether the longstanding ban on transplants of HIV-infected organs should be dropped .
May 27, 2011
Gil Scott-Heron — Poet and Pre-cursor to Rap Culture — Dies
Gil Scott-Heron, the poet behind “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” dies of HIV-related illness in New York City at the age of 62.
Learn More.
Scott-Heron called himself a “bluesologist,” and was known worldwide as as a spoken-word performer whose work exemplified the strife of Black life in the 1970s and 1980s. He typically performed his work in a rapping style that came years before hip hop emerged on the music scene, causing many early rap artists to cite Scott-Heron as a key influence on the genre.
“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word,” Chuck D of Public Enemy told The New Yorker in 2010. “He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else.”
Scott-Heron was not a member of The Last Poets, but was inspired by them. When Scott-Heron saw them perform at Lincoln University, he sought out member Abiodun Oyewole to respectfully ask him if he could start a group like theirs.
Scott-Heron’s vocal style was distinctive and included the technique of stretching a single syllable of text over several different pitches. In 1970, he delivered his most famous poem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” over a jazz-soul beat.
In 1980, Scott-Heron joined music icon Stevie Wonder on his “Hotter Than July” tour to advocate for the proposal of the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus to adopt Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday.
In 2001, Scott-Heron was arrested for possession of cocaine and was sentenced to jail.
“For many years, he had preached against the evil of drugs, but he became an abuser himself,” said his longtime friend and music producer Abdul Malik Al Nasir. “When he got into trouble, it reminded me how much he’d helped me. So I flew to New York and visited him in jail – he’d been pumping iron, eating three square meals a day, which he rarely got when we were on the road, and looked more relaxed and fit than I’d seen him in years.”
In spite of experiencing more legal trouble over his drug use, Scott-Heron continued to be revered for his lyrical style and ability to put personal power behind his words.
In 2010, he released his final album, I’m New Here, which led several critics to call him the “godfather of rap,” according to The New York Times.
In his memoir The Last Holiday, which was published posthumously, Scott-Heron wrote:
“I hope this book will remind you that you can succeed, that help can arrive from unexpected quarters at times that are crucial. I believe in ‘the Spirits.’ …I am not and do not have a personal church to promote. I believe, however, to paraphrase Duke Ellington, that at almost every corner of my life there has been someone or something there to show me the way.”
June 8, 2011
HHS Commemorates 30 Years of Leadership in Fighting HIV/AIDS
HHS Secretary Sebelius hosted “Commemorating 30 Years of Leadership in the Fight Against HIV/AIDS”.
June 8, 2011
Over 3,000 Participate in UN’s High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS
Over 3,000 people participate in the United Nation’s (UN) High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS in New York from June 8–10.
Learn More.
The session recognizes critical milestones, including three decades of the pandemic and the 10-year anniversary of the 2001 UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS and the resulting Declaration of Commitment . At the Meeting, the U.S. joined with other partners in launching a global plan to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and keep mothers alive.
July 13, 2011
White House National Strategy Reflects on Year 1 of Program
On the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the White House National HIV/AIDS Strategy, President Obama announces plans to increase efforts to reduce HIV transmission and boost public awareness.
Learn More.
In a video presentation, President Obama, doctors, researchers, policy makers, community leaders and advocates speak about the one-year-old comprehensive National HIV/AIDS Strategy on the 30th anniversary of the disease.
July 13, 2011
CDC Study Supports Use of PrEP As Preventative Therapy
A new CDC study and a separate clinical trial (the Partners PrEP study) provide the first evidence that adaily oral dose of antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV infection can also prevent new infections in individuals exposed to HIV through heterosexual sex.
July 17, 2011
Studies Confirm Efficacy of Antiretroviral Therapies
Scientists announce that two studies have confirmed that daily antiretroviral drugs can significantly lower the rates of HIV-related infection.
Learn More.
The announcement is made at the International AIDS Society’s Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment, and Prevention in Rome on July 17-20. The studies show that individuals taking daily antiretroviral drugs experienced infection rates more than 60% lower than those on a placebo.
2011
Federal Agencies Support U.S. National HIV/AIDS Strategy
Lead Federal agencies release implementation plans in support of the U.S. National HIV/AIDS Strategy.
August 7, 2011
U.S. Launches 12 Cities Project to Target High-Infection Areas
The U.S. launches the 12 Cities Project, an initiative to accelerate planning and cross-agency response in areas with high rates of HIV infection.
Learn More.
Focusing on twelve jurisdictions in the U.S. that bear the highest AIDS burden, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services rolls out components of the project to cover comprehensive care, treatment and prevention.
Based on an estimate of total AIDS cases reported in December 2007 in cities across the country, HHS selected twelve cities to be included in the initial project. These cities represent 44% of the total cases in the U.S. in December 2007:
New York City, NY (66,426 cases)
Los Angeles, CA (24,727 cases)
Washington, DC (15,696 cases)
Chicago, IL (14,175 cases)
Atlanta, GA (13,105 cases)
Miami, FL (12,732 cases)
Philadelphia, PA (12,469 cases)
Houston, TX (11,277 cases)
San Francisco, CA (11,026 cases)
Baltimore, MD (10,301 cases)
Dallas, TX (7,993 cases)
San Juan, PR (7,858 cases)
Phase I of this project, from October 2010 to April 2011, focused on data collection and planning, with an explicit focus on identifying gaps in coverage in terms of populations, interventions, and services. Phase II, from May to September 2011 “and beyond,” focused on responding to the results of the enhanced planning process, including making recommendations about redirecting resources in order to optimize outcomes.
2011
Regional Dialogues Begin on National HIV/AIDS Strategy
In September, the Office of National AIDS Policy begins to convene a series of five regional dialogues to focus attention on critical implementation issues for the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.
August 15, 2011
Vogue Inventor Paris Dupree Dies
Paris Dupree, the Grand Dame of the Harlem Ballroom scene, dies of unreported causes at the age of 61.
Learn More.
Dupree was the last surviving member of the Big Five founding house mothers, which included Dupree, Angie Xtravaganza, Dorian Corey, Avis Pendavis and Pepper LaBeijia. She was also one of the stars of the legendary documentary, Paris Is Burning.
As mother of the House of Dupree, she was an iconic figure who mobilized young, urban gays to express themselves in ways that were beyond the grasp of mainstream America in the 1980s. In 1981, the House of Dupree hosted its first ball, establishing set categories which have been continued for generations. Dupree originated of many well-known categories that are still used today, and she is credited with inventing the style of dance known as voguing.
Her 1986 ball, titled — yes — Paris is Burning, was the main event featured in the 1990 documentary of the same name. Dupree is not interviewed in the film, but she is seen emceeing categories, commentating on performances, and walking the runway. Her most famous moment in the film is when she removes a hairpiece to illustrate the next category, Butch Queen.
“That’s right! I said it! Butch Queen!” she says. “Boy in the day, girl at night!”
When the film was released in 1990 with the same name as Dupree’s 1986 ball, Dupree filed a lawsuit against filmmaker Jennie Livingston and the film’s distributor, Miramax, seeking $40 million for unauthorized and fraudulent use of her services. She reportedly received a settlement amount of $5,000.
When Dupree dies, social media posts announce her passing, although the exact date and cause of her death is unclear.
“The ballroom runway ‘Grand Prize Competition’ in heaven got a bit thicker with the passing of Mother Paris Dupree,” performer Karl Xtravaganza posted. “Her death signals the end of an era.”
September 17, 2011
Robert Frascino — Doctor and HIV/AIDS Activist — Dies
Robert Frascino, M.D., one of the first physicians to specialize in HIV in the early 1980s, dies of AIDS-related illness at a hospital in Mountain View, California. He was 59.
Learn More.
A longtime HIV/AIDS advocate known as “Dr. Bob,” Frascino tested positive for HIV due to an occupational exposure. In January 1991, Dr. Frascino was performing a medical procedure on a patient with advanced stage AIDS when he sustained a needle stick injury.
“I subsequently seroconverted a number of weeks thereafter, in spite of the fact that I did take AZT [zidovudine, Retrovir] as a type of early PEP [post-exposure prophylaxis],” Dr. Frascino wrote in POZ magazine in 2005. “We didn’t know a lot about PEP back then.”
In 1996, when his health began to fail, he gave up his medical practice and turned his efforts to HIV education and fundraising.
As a physician expert at The Body, an HIV/AIDS website, Dr. Frascino touched the lives of millions of people through his columns, forums and blog, according to the New York Times. From the year 2000 until his death, he answered the questions of nearly 30,000 readers of The Body.
“Any other person would have burnt out years ago, but Bob was going just as strong last week as the day he started,” said Ken Stockwell, web producer of The Body. “No matter how inane or serious the question, Bob always found a way to bring humor to every response. He never sugar-coated anything, never shied away from his political inclinations and never met a pun he didn’t like. His singular wit made his forums a must read for HIV-positive and HIV-negative people alike.”
Born in Rochester, New York, Frascino trained as an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and was associate clinical professor of medicine in the division of immunology at Stanford University Medical Center. He was also founder and president of the Robert J. Frascino AIDS Foundation, which raised funds and awarded grants to HIV/AIDS healthcare providers and education programs.
‘Origins of AIDS’ Traces Disease Back to Early 1900s Africa
The book The Origin of AIDS by Canadian researcher Jacques Pépin chronicles the emergence of HIV/AIDs in Africa in the early part of the 20th Century and its evolution into a global pandemic.
Learn More.
Dr. Pépin, an epidemiologist and HIV/AIDS expert based in Quebec, traced the AIDS virus back to a single bush hunter in Central Africa in 1921. He used medical reports and technical data dating back to France’s colonization of African territories to piece together the beginnings of a disease that would eventually leap from continent to continent and kill more than 40 million people worldwide.
“Either a hunter got injured with his knife when he cut out the ape to bring the carcass back to the village so that the chimp’s blood became in contact with his own blood, or the same type of accident occurred during the actual cooking of chimpanzee meat,” he said in an interview with Cambridge University Press, the publisher of his book.
“Three other potential modes of transmission from chimp to man, which have been proposed over the years, can now be rejected,” he added, “since there is nothing to sustain these other hypotheses.”
“On my first day there, to my amazement, I suddenly understood, while looking at the health systems annual reports, the scope of the colonial-era public health interventions that required the administration of massive amounts of IV drugs over the whole of central Africa and throughout several decades,” he said.
Dr. Pépin told Cardwell it took four years to research and write The Origin of AIDS, and an additional year to edit the manuscript with the publisher.
“The book sheds new light on the pivotal role French colonialism played in spreading HIV from likely a single bush hunter infected with a simian immunodeficiency virus in central Africa in the early 1920s to large swaths of Africa and beyond,” Cardwell wrote in his 2012 article “The Story of the Origins of AIDS.”
Dr. Pépin’s book describes the conditions in turn-of-the-century French West Africa that created the ideal petri dish for a new disease.
At the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, France was one of several European countries to lay claim to colonial territories in Africa. In the decades to come, the urbanization of central Africa, inferior health policies, and the rise of prostitution all led first to the persistence of HIV in the population in the 1930s-1950s, and then eventually to its spread.
After about 50 years of managing an enterprise that involved extracting the area’s natural resources while ruling over its indigenous peoples, the French introduced a medical program in the 1930s that routinely used unsterilized syringes and employed other shoddy practices in the treatment of tropical diseases. Dr. Pépin contended that these were the conditions in which HIV was able to take hold and then propagate.
In The Origins of AIDS, Dr. Pépin also explained how the construction of a railroad line across the African jungle resulted in the creation of sprawling government-run camps that were unsanitary and dangerous. Among the camp residents, according to Dr. Pépin, were health-compromised workers and prostitutes from across the colonial territories.
Dr. Pépin said he took research results from molecular biologists working under Beatrice H. Hahn, M.D. and scientists led by Michael Worobey, M.D., and used this to inform his own research drawn from colonial archives and European libraries.
“I conducted epidemiological studies which documented that several blood-borne viruses were indeed transmitted during several medical interventions in different parts of Africa,” Dr. Pépin said.
Dr. Pépin started his career in the early 1980s as a medical officer in a Zaire bush hospital. After returning to Canada to complete his education in medicine, he returned to Africa as a clinical researcher at the Medical Research Council Laboratories in a tiny West African country called The Gambia. This is where he began researching HIV and its interaction with sexually transmitted diseases.
“In the course of my investigations, I met most of the few hundred Senegalese prostitutes who charged their Gambian brothers rock-bottom prices for a few moments of pleasure,” Dr. Pépin wrote in the forward of the 2021 edition of The Origins of AIDS.
September 30, 2011
Town Halls Kick Off in Build-up to ‘AIDS 2012’
The “Road to AIDS” town hall comes to San Francisco, the first in a nationwide event series building up to the International AIDS Conference.
Learn More.
The San Francisco Town Hall brought together diverse community members to talk about where we are with the HIV epidemic 30 years in, and where we’re going.
Across the panelists’ responses, several themes emerged including the need to:
Put patients and communities first
Enhance collaboration and breaking down of silos
Align resources (especially when they are limited) with the goals of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy by looking at the data
Strengthen stakeholder engagement
Provide a comprehensive and coordinated system of HIV prevention and care
Work across cultural lines
Each of the fifteen “Road to AIDS” town halls was free and open to the public, and took place over the 11 months leading up to “AIDS 2012,” the XIX International AIDS Conference, on July 22-27, 2012 in Washington, DC.
“AIDS 2012” would be the largest gathering of people working in HIV to date.
November 8, 2011
Secretary Clinton Calls for ‘AIDS-Free Generation’
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton shares the U.S. Government’s new vision of creating an AIDS-free generation.
Learn More.
Speaking before the National Institutes of Health, Clinton delivered remarks on the future of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, reflected on the past 30 years of the epidemic, and outlined a vision for turning the tide on HIV/AIDS.
“Our efforts have helped set the stage for a historic opportunity, one that the world has today: to change the course of this pandemic and usher in an AIDS-free generation,” Clinton said.
“Now, by an AIDS-free generation, I mean one where, first, virtually no children are born with the virus; second, as these children become teenagers and adults, they are at far lower risk of becoming infected than they would be today thanks to a wide range of prevention tools; and third, if they do acquire HIV, they have access to treatment that helps prevent them from developing AIDS and passing the virus on to others.”
Clinton’s speech was considered to be the Obama’s administration’s first effort to publicly set an ambitious goal to eradicate the disease. Following her remarks, administration officials scrambled to suggest ways that the initiative could be funded, including diplomatic pressure on governments in developing countries to spend more of their own money and political pressure on wealthy nations to contribute more.
Dr. Eric Goosby, the Obama administration’s global AIDS coordinator, said this was only the first of several speeches that administration officials planned to make on AIDS in the next few months.
November 20, 2011
Rate of Global Infections & Deaths Level Off
New data shows global HIV prevalence is much lower than previously believed (33 million cases instead of 40 million).
The data also indicates a decline in the numbers of new infections and people dying from AIDS-related illnesses, due in part to HIV-prevention programs and antiretroviral therapy.
The report also announces that, for the first time, the prospect of a microbicide that contains antiretroviral medicine is providing additional hope to the women in sub-Saharan Africa, who continue to bear a disproportionate burden of the HIV epidemic in this region.
Days later, the Obama administration announces new goals for PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), saying it is “the beginning of the end of AIDS.”
“Today is a remarkable day,” President Barack Obama says in a White House statement. “Today, we come together, as a global community, across continents, faiths and cultures, to renew our commitment to ending the AIDS pandemic – once and for all.”
December 1, 2011
Obama Launches Plan to Increase Global Fund Commitments
On December 1 (World AIDS Day), at the ONE Campaign and (RED) event in Washington, DC, President Obama announces accelerated efforts to increase the availability of treatment to people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States.
Learn More.
He challenges the global community to deliver funds to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria , and calls on Congress to keep its past commitments intact. He calls on all Americans to keep fighting to end the epidemic.
December 23, 2011
Science Journal Announces ‘Breakthrough of the Year’
The journal Science announces that it has chosen the HPTN 052 study as its 2011 Breakthrough of the Year.
January 24, 2012
Josh Robbins Invites World to Witness His HIV Test Results
Josh Robbins receives nationwide attention, raising awareness about HIV, when he records the interaction with his doctor as he receives the results of his HIV test (he tested positive).
Learn More.
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.
March 13, 2012
Researchers Link ART Therapy to Cardiovascular Disease
A new study suggests that people living with HIV and taking antiretroviral therapy (ART) have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Learn More.
Researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia release the results of a study that show that people living with HIV who are taking antiretroviral therapy (ART) have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
“Although the health and survival of PLHIV have improved with effective ARTs, people living with HIV are at substantially greater risk of developing other comorbidities, such as cardiovascular disease, compared with uninfected people,” the researchers conclude.
Due to the prevelance of cardiovascular disease and its cause of deaths worldwide, this poses a significant issue for people living with HIV, particularly as they get older, according to the researchers.
March 27, 2012
HHS Recommends New Treatment For All HIV+ People
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issues new HIV treatment guidelines recommending treatment for all HIV-infected adults and adolescents, regardless of CD4 count or viral load.
July 1, 2012
Survey Indicates Public Ignorance About HIV and AIDS
The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post release a joint survey of the American public’s attitudes, awareness, and experiences related to HIV and AIDS.
Learn More.
The survey finds that roughly a quarter of Americans do not know that HIV cannot be transmitted by sharing a drinking glass—almost exactly the same share as in 1987.
July 3, 2012
FDA Approves First At-Home Test
The FDA approves the first at-home HIV test that will let users learn their HIV status right away.
July 16, 2012
Truvada for PrEP Approved
The FDA approves the use of Truvada® for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Adults who do not have HIV, but who are at risk for infection, can now take this medication to reduce their risk of getting the virus through sexual activity.
July 21, 2012
AIDS Memorial Quilt Displayed in its Entirety
During AIDS 2012, the AIDS Memorial Quilt is displayed in its entirety in Washington, DC, for the first time since 1996.
Learn More.
Volunteers have to rotate nearly 50,000 panels to ensure that the entire work is displayed. Microsoft Research, the University of Southern California, the NAMES Project Foundation, and a handful of other institutions collaborate to create a zoomable “map” of the Quilt
July 22, 2012
International AIDS Conference Returns to the U.S.
The XIX International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012 ) is held in Washington, DC—the first time since 1990 that the conference has been held in the United States.
Learn More.
Conference organizers had refused to convene the event in the U.S. until the Federal government lifted the ban on HIV-positive travelers entering the country.
August 6, 2012
John Grant Discloses HIV+ Status at UK’s Meltdown Festival
Musician John Grant takes the stage to sing as a part of the Hercules and Love Affair collective as a part of the Meltdown Festival in the U.K. and announces that he is HIV positive.
Learn More.
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.
September 21, 2012
‘How to Survive a Plague’ Hits Theaters
How to Survive a Plague, a documentary film about the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the efforts of the activist group ACT UP, opens in select theaters across the U.S.
Learn More.
Directed by David France, How to Survive a Plague shows the founding of ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), and the rise of an underground drug market in opposition to the prohibitively expensive (and sometimes toxic) medication AZT.
France is able to immerse his film crew behind the scenes of the activist community and document members as they learn to become their own researchers, lobbyists, drug smugglers, and clinicians. A journalist who covered AIDS from its beginnings, France dedicated the film (his first) to his partner Doug Gould, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992.
The documentary was produced using more than 700 hours of archived footage which included news coverage, interviews as well as film of demonstrations, meetings and conferences taken by ACT UP members themselves. France says they knew what they were doing was historic, and that many of them would die.
Following its 2012 theatrical release, PBS would broadcast the documentary in December 2013, expanding its viewership to millions.
“I had public television in mind as we were making How to Survive a Plague,” France told PBS’s Independent Lens. “It is exactly the audience I was hoping to reach with the film: sophisticated, caring, motivated, and vast.”
How to Survive a Plague received awards for best documentary of 2012 from the Gotham Independent Film Awards, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and from the Boston Society of Film Critics. The film also won a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary and a Peabody Award.
The Independent Spirit Awards nominated it for Best Documentary, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, a Directors Guild Award and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
New York Times critic A.O. Scott named How to Survive a Plague one of the best five documentaries of 2012. It also won Documentary of the Year at Attitude magazine’s 2013 Attitude Awards.
France’s book of the same title, expanding on the material, events, and people covered in the film, was published in 2016 to critical acclaim. It was described as “the definitive book on AIDS activism” and was named to numerous best-of and top-ten lists, including the New York Times 100 Notable Books for 2016.
November 26, 2012
AIDS Activists Protest in Nude in U.S. House Speaker Boehner’s Office
Three female AIDS activists are arrested after taking off their clothes in the office lobby of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner.
Learn More.
The women had the words “AIDS cuts kill” painted on their bodies and had linked arms with four men, who also removed their clothes. They were joined in Speaker Boehner’s office by dozens of other clothed demonstrators chanting: “People with AIDS are under attack! What do we do? Fight back!”
The protesters were demonstrating against Republican-led budget cuts to federal funding for HIV/AIDS treatment and care, according to Business Insider.
Capitol Police arrested the three women, including two organizers for Queerocracy, according to NBC News. The four men that had also disrobed left the scene without being detained. The protest was coordinated by a coalition of AIDS activist groups gathering in Washington for Saturday’s World AIDS Day protest, according to The Guardian.
“People with AIDS are sick and tired of being pushed over the cliff,” said Jennifer Flynn, 40, of New York City, who was among those arrested. “We need to make sure they stop going after people with AIDS.”
Michael Tikili, 26, of New York City, told the New York Daily News that he was HIV-positive and depended on Medicaid for treatment.
“Just the idea of these programs being cut is horrible,” Tikili said.
The protest occurred as congressional leaders and President Barack Obama sought to come to a deal on spending cuts scheduled to go into effect in January 2013.
December 18, 2012
NYC Activist Spencer Cox Dies
Treatment Action Group founder Spencer Cox died in New York of AIDS-related illness at the age of 44 after he stopped taking his HIV medications.
Learn More.
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.
December 21, 2012
Federal Judge Bans Segregation of HIV+ Inmates in Alabama
A federal judge orders Alabama to stop segregating inmates living with HIV, ruling that the practice violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Learn More.
In a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Alabama prisoners with HIV, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) accused the Alabama Department of Corrections of long-held discriminatory practices against HIV+ inmates.
U.S. District Court Judge Myron H. Thompson ruled the ADA prohibits blanket disability-based exclusions and mandated that prisoners with disabilities must be housed in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of the individuals. In his ruling, Thompson said exceptions could be made only on an individualized, case-by-case basis if the specific situation warranted different treatment.
“It is evident that, while [Alabama’s] categorical segregation policy has been an unnecessary tool for preventing the transmission of HIV, it has been an effective one for humiliating and isolating prisoners living with the disease,” Thompson said in his decision.
Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project and lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said the ruling was important and a long time coming.
“Today’s decision is historic,” said Winter. “It spells an end to a segregation policy that has inflicted needless misery on Alabama prisoners with HIV and their families.”
The court’s decision also ended Alabama’s policy of requiring all male prisoners with HIV to wear white armbands to alert others of their status, which Winter characterized as “a latter-day yellow star.”
The suit, Henderson et al. v. Thomas et al, was filed in 2011. The legal win had immediate impact on the housing and treatment of 240 male and 10 female inmates living with HIV in the Alabama prison system.
One inmate was Dana Harley, who testified as a plaintiff. She gave the court a shocking picture of life inside the HIV dorm at the Julia Tutwiler facility for women. In the process of serving a 20-year sentence for check forgery, Harley said she became an advocate for HIV-infected women in the prison and was sometimes asked to act as an unofficial comforter of other prisoners when they were informed of their HIV diagnosis.
In her court testimony, Harley described how female inmates would be given a rapid test for HIV and then immediately put into solitary confinement to await the results of a more comprehensive test.
“[They would be] hysterical, crying,” she testified. “I mean, like they’re going to pass out, thinking they’re going to die. I mean, just going absolutely crazy.”
Once they received confirmation of their diagnosis, the women were transferred to Dorm E, where they were confronted with both institutionalized and casual discrimination, according to Harley.
Prison guards would feel free to make derogatory remarks to them, said Harley, and she and her fellow inmates were not allowed to eat, have family visits, or attend religious services. They were also not allowed to participate in most educational programming, trade programs, self-help classes or work-release programs.
Harley contacted the ACLU in 2007, after she brought discriminatory policies to the attention of Frank Albright, the warden, and he told her: “Y’all will not walk my halls and spread HIV.”
December 31, 2012
2.3 Million Newly Infected, 1.6 Million Die of AIDS in 2012
At the end of 2012, UNAIDS estimates that, worldwide, 2.3 million people were newly infected with HIV during the year, and 1.6 million people died of AIDS. Approximately 35.3 million people around the world are now living with HIV, including more than 1.2 million Americans
December 31, 2012
UNAIDS Estimates Over 35M People Living With HIV
At the end of 2012, UNAIDS estimates that, worldwide, 2.3 million people were newly infected with HIV during the year, and 1.6 million people died of AIDS. Approximately 35.3 million people around the world are now living with HIV, including more than 1.2 million Americans.
January 1, 2013
PEPFAR Commemorates 10th Anniversary
The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Learn More.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the U.S. program to combat HIV and AIDS, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced additional PEPFAR funding for Cambodia, Ghana, Nepal, Senegal, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.
Kerry told Voice of America that 10 years ago, almost 30-million people were infected with HIV and things looked bleak.
“When this disease appeared to be unstoppable, history will show that humanity and individual humans rose to the challenge,” he said.” Action was taken. Innovations were discovered. Hope was kindled. And generations were saved.”
Kerry said PEPFAR’s success is an example of what can happen when people overcome ideologies and politics. Signed into law by George W. Bush, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, was the world’s largest and one of the most successful foreign assistance programs.
Since the start of PEPFAR in 2003, new HIV infections are down nearly 20%. According to U.S. officials, the number of new infections and AIDS-related deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa have dramatically decreased to about one-third.
The State Department ceremony marking the PEPFAR anniversary was attended by Dr. Richard Kamwi, Namibia’s Minister of Health and Social Services. Dr. Kamwi said that the funding has helped his country develop and implement programs that have slowed down the spread of HIV. PEPFAR funding is also used to provide treatment and care for those who are infected.
Also present at the ceremony was Tatu Msangi, a nurse from Tanzania who eight years ago gave birth to an HIV-negative daughter.
“When the first HIV test is carried out on a baby and it is negative, it is amazing to see the relief and joy on a mother’s face,” said Msangi. “I remember that feeling so many years ago, fighting so hard to keep my daughter healthy and free of HIV. Today Faith and I have a bright future ahead of us.”
Kerry said this month the one-millionth baby will be born HIV-free because of PEPFAR’s support.
“Where we once saw a situation spiraling out of control, today we see a virtuous cycle beginning to form: more people receiving treatment and fewer people passing on the virus,” he said. “Fewer infections means it is now easier to actually focus treatment efforts. And with fewer people sick and dying we are seeing healthier, more productive populations.”
March 4, 2013
Case Reported of HIV-Infected Child ‘Functionally Cured’
NIH-funded scientists announce the first well-documented case of an HIV-infected child, designated as “the Mississippi Baby,” who appears to have been functionally cured of HIV infection (i.e., no detectable levels of virus or signs of disease, even without antiretroviral therapy.
June 2, 2013
NY Times Addresses Middle-Aged People Living With HIV
The New York Times runs two articles which focus on middle-aged people living with HIV: The Faces of H.I.V. in New York in 2013 and ‘People Think It’s Over’: Spared Death, Aging People With H.I.V. Struggle to Live
June 5, 2013
NMAC Issues Plan on Mitigating the Impact of HIV on Black Men
The National Minority AIDS Council (NMAC) releases RISE Proud: Combating HIV Among Black Gay and Bisexual Men, an action plan to mitigate the impact of HIV on black gay and bisexual men.
June 18, 2013
More Than 1 Million Infants Born HIV-Free Due to PEPFAR
Secretary of State John Kerry announces that, thanks to direct PEPFAR support, more than 1 million infants have been born HIV-free since 2003.
July 2, 2013
Bone Marrow Transplant Recipients Reportedly Cured of HIV
Researchers report that two HIV-positive patients in Boston who had bone-marrow transplants for blood cancers have apparently been virus-free for weeks since their antiretroviral drugs were stopped
July 13, 2013
Obama Executive Order Promotes HIV Care Continuum
President Obama issues an Executive Order directing Federal agencies to prioritize supporting the HIV care continuum as a means of implementing the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.
Learn More.
The HIV Care Continuum Initiative aims to accelerate efforts to improve the percentage of people living with HIV who move from testing to treatment and—ultimately—to viral suppression.
August 10, 2013
Sean Sasser, Former Partner of MTV’s Pedro Zamora, Dies
Best known for his appearances on MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco with his partner and fellow AIDS activist Pedro Zamora, Sean Sasser dies at his home in Washington. He was 44.
Learn More.
Sasser was a pastry chef who became an AIDS activist after appearing on The Real World. Although not one of the original cast members himself, Sasser’s relationship with Zamora was one of the focal points of the reality TV show.
The episode that featured Sasser and Zamora’s commitment ceremony was the first to present such ceremony for a same sex couple on television, and was considered a landmark event. Sasser, who had been HIV-positive for 25 years, was also diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the lungs, just one month before his death, according to CNN News.
The couple began dating during the taping of the series. Their relationship and Zamora’s battle with AIDS while living in “The Real World” house with seven strangers became must-see-TV for teens and young adults, many of whom had never been exposed to a gay couple, much less someone living with HIV.
Zamora, who had been diagnosed with AIDS at age 17, was a well-known AIDS activist. Sasser, who was also working as an activist and educator, also revealed on the show that he was HIV positive.
During the taping of the series, Zamora’s health took a turn. Zamora died on Nov. 11, 1994, with Sasser at his side just hours after the airing of the final episode of the season.
October 13, 2013
National Latino/Hispanic HIV/AIDS Action Agenda Published
The National Latino AIDS Action Network (NLAAN)—a diverse coalition of community-based organizations, national organizations, state and local health departments, researchers and concerned individuals—publishes the National Latino/Hispanic HIV/AIDS Action Agenda to raise awareness, identify priorities, and issue specific recommendations to address the impact of the epidemic in Hispanic/Latino communities.
November 12, 2013
HOPE Act Signed, Allowing Organ Transplants Among HIV-Positive Individuals
President Obama signs the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act, which will allow people living with HIV to receive organs from other infected donors. The HOPE Act has the potential to save the lives of about 1,000 HIV-infected patients with liver and kidney failure annually.
December 31, 2013
UNAIDS: Steep Drop in HIV in Low-to-Middle Income Countries
UNAIDS announces that new HIV infections have dropped more than 50% in 25 low- and middle-income countries, and the number of people getting antiretroviral treatment has increased 63% in the past two years.
January 1, 2014
ACA Grants Protections Against Pre-Existing Conditions
January 1: Major provisions of the Affordable Care Act designed to protect consumers go into effect. Insurers are now barred from discriminating against customers with pre-existing conditions, and they can no longer impose annual limits on coverage—both key advances for people living with HIV/AIDS.
January 2, 2014
‘Cured’ HIV Cancer Patients Relapse
News sources report that the two Boston patients believed to have been cured of HIV after undergoing treatment for cancer have relapsed
February 3, 2014
amfAR Launches $100 Million Research Initiative
amfAR announces the launch of Countdown to a Cure for AIDS, a $100 million research initiative aimed at finding a broadly applicable cure for HIV by 2020.
March 1, 2014
UN Commission Reports Challenges of Implementing MDGs
The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women releases a report on the challenges and achievements of implementing the MDGs for women and girls.
Learn More.
The Commission concludes that progress on MDG6 (Combating HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Other Diseases) has been limited, given that the number of women living with HIV globally continues to increase. The report notes several key challenges: adolescent/young women’s particular vulnerability to HIV; the need to increase access to healthcare services; and the challenges of structural gender inequalities, stigma, discrimination, and violence.
March 4, 2014
Initial Research Supports ‘Undetectable = Untransmittable’ Concept
European researchers announce the results of the first phase of the PARTNER Study, an observational study focusing on the risk of sexual HIV transmission when an HIV-positive person is on treatment.
Learn More.
The study found that no HIV-positive partner who was undergoing antiretroviral therapy and had an undetectable viral load had transmitted HIV.
March 4, 2014
Dr. Deborah Birx Becomes U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator
Dr. Deborah Birx is sworn in as Ambassador at Large and U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator to oversee the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). She replaces Dr. Eric Goosby.
March 24, 2014
1st African American & HIV-Positive Person Heads ONAP
Douglas Brooks is appointed as the new Director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP). He is the first African American and the first HIV-positive person to hold the position.
May 24, 2014
‘Drop Dead Gorgeous’ Steve Moore Dies
Comedian Steve Moore, best known for his 1997 HBO comedy special Drop Dead Gorgeous (A Tragi-Comedy): The Power of HIV-Positive Thinking, dies of AIDS-related illness two weeks shy of his 60th birthday.
Learn More.
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.”
“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.
July 10, 2014
‘Mississippi Baby’ No Longer Undetectable
The National Institutes of Health announce that the “Mississippi baby” now has detectable levels of HIV after more than two years of showing no evidence of the virus.
July 20, 2014
AIDS 2014 Draws 14,000 Delegates
Nearly 14,000 delegates attend the 20th International AIDS Conference, travelling to Melbourne, Australia from over 200 nations.
Learn More.
One key message of the conference is that a one-size-fits-all approach may not be suitable for all settings, especially given the diversity of the epidemic’s geographical hotspots and key populations.
Interventions and policies will require target-based strategies and greater support of key populations, especially in countries where discriminatory policies and legislation are hindering prevention and treatment efforts.
September 9, 2014
Southern States Become New U.S. Epicenter of HIV
The Pew Charitable Trust publishes Southern States Are Now Epicenter of HIV/AIDS in the U.S.
October 3, 2014
Pre-History of HIV Traced to Congo in Science Magazine Report
Researchers publish an article in Science that charts the spread of HIV from its origins in early 20th Century chimpanzee hunters in the Cameroon to its eventual transmission to residents of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Learn More.
Using statistical approaches applied to HIV-1 sequence data from central Africa, the international team of researchers showed that from the 1920s, Kinshasa (formerly known as the Dutch-colonized city Leopoldstad) was the site of early HIV transmission. The researchers validated their location and dating estimates by using the earliest HIV-1 archival sample, also from Kinshasa.
From Kinshasa, the virus spread in the early 1960s to other areas of the Congo via rail links, according to the report titled “The early spread and epidemic ignition of HIV-1 in human populations.” HIV then spread from Africa to Haiti when Haitian teachers, brought to the Congo in the 1960s and 1970s to assist with Congolese independence, returned home.
An estimated 4,500 Haitians were in the Congo in the 1960s, and that number grew in the 1970s, according to Thomas F. McDow, a historian of Africa and the Indian World at the Ohio State University. .
CDC releases a new report that finds gaps in care and treatment among Latinos diagnosed with HIV.
November 25, 2014
Only 30% of HIV-Positive People Have ‘Virus Under Control’
CDC announces that only 30% of Americans with HIV had the virus under control in 2011, and approximately two-thirds of those whose virus was out of control had been diagnosed but were no longer in care.
December 2, 2014
AIDS Activist Gregg Gonsalves Co-Founds Yale Program
Gregg Gonsalves, co-founder of the Treatment Action Group for AIDS research, becomes a founding co-director of the Yale Law School/Yale School of Public Health Global Health Justice Partnership.
Learn More.
Yale names Gonsalves as a co-director of its new Global Health Justice Partnership (GHJP), which focuses on social medicine at the School of Public Health. He served in this position concurrently with pursuing his PhD in the study the epidemiology of microbial diseases, according to Yale University.
In 2008, Gonsalves was accepted into Yale’s Eli Whitney Program for Nontraditional Students with a $100,000 grant honoring his two decades of advocating for people with AIDS.
Gonsalves joined ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in Boston after a friend tested positive for HIV. After moving to New York, he joined the ACT UP chapter there and in 1993 co-founded the Treatment Action Group, a non-profit organization that fought to reform the U.S. government’s inadequate HIV/AIDS research and treatment program.
“Remember, our government didn’t respond to the epidemic at the requisite scale for many years, so the response to the AIDS crisis had to come from the communities themselves,” Gonsalves told Yale. “We also had to take to the streets, to the NIH, the FDA, to the White House to force them to act. The AIDS epidemic in the U.S. is still terrible — 50,000 new infections each year and 15,000 deaths — but it would be a lot worse without the efforts of ordinary people living with the disease and their friends and families who stepped up when our leaders failed to do so.”
In 2000, Gonsalves became policy director for AIDS research, treatment, and prevention at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the world’s largest and oldest AIDS service organization. In 2003, he founded the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, which advocated for AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) treatment on a global scale. In 2006, he coordinated regional programs for the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa in Cape Town, educating communities about AIDS and TB.
In 2018, Gonsalves would go on to receive the MacArthur grant for his activism and advocacy in the area of epidemic diseases. After Mark Harrington, Gonsalves would be the second HIV/AIDS activist to receive the “Genius Award.”
His articles have appeared in such journals as Health Affairs, the New England Journal of Medicine, PLoS One, and Lancet, among others.
December 23, 2014
FDA Relaxes Ban on Blood Donations From MSM
FDA announces it will recommend changing the blood donor deferral guidelines for men who have sex with men from permanent deferral to one year since the last sexual contact.
Learn More.
In 1983, the agency imposed a lifetime ban on donating blood for all men who have ever had sex with another man.
January 8, 2015
Injectable Contraceptive May Increase Women’s Risk of HIV
A review of multiple studies of South African women indicates that using Depo Provera, an injectable contraceptive, may increase women’s chances of contracting HIV by 40 percent.
February 5, 2015
HHS Project Address HIV Disparities Among MSM of Color
HHS announces the launch of a new, 4-year demonstration project to address HIV disparities among MSM of color. The cross-agency project, “Developing Comprehensive Models of HIV Prevention and Care Services for MSM of Color,” will support community-based models for HIV prevention and treatment.
February 23, 2015
CDC Report Identifies Groups with Disproportionate Levels of HIV
HIV diagnosis rates in the U.S. remain stable between 2009-2013, but men who have sex with men (MSM), young adults, racial/ethnic minorities, and individuals living in the South continue to bear a disproportionate burden of HIV, according to the Center for Disease Control’s 2015 DC’s annual HIV Surveillance Report.
February 23, 2015
CDC: More Than 90% of New Infections Preventable
CDC announces that more than 90% of new HIV infections in the U.S could be prevented by diagnosing people living with HIV and ensuring they receive prompt, ongoing care and treatment.
Learn More.
Published by the CDC and subsequently in JAMA, the American Medical Association’s journal, a report by Jacek Skarbinski, M.D., and Eli Rosenberg, M.D. announces that persons living with HIV who are retained in care and have achieved viral suppression are 94.0% less likely to transmit HIV than HIV-infected undiagnosed persons.
“Unfortunately, too few persons living with HIV have achieved viral suppression,” the report concludes. “These estimates of the relative number of transmissions from persons along the HIV care continuum highlight the community-wide prevention benefits of expanding HIV diagnosis and treatment in the United States.”
The report recommends the implementation of improvements at each step of the continuum to reduce HIV transmission.
“Through stronger coordination of efforts among individuals, HIV care providers, health departments, and government agencies, the United States can realize meaningful gains in the number of persons living with HIV who are aware of their status, linked to and retained in care, receiving ART, and adherent to treatment,” state the researchers.
February 25, 2015
HIV Outbreak in Indiana Tied to Injection Drug Use
Indiana state health officials announce an HIV outbreak linked to injection drug use in the southeastern portion of the state. By the end of the year, Indiana will confirm 184 new cases of HIV linked to the outbreak.
April 15, 2015
NIH Launches Study of Heart Disease Among HIV+
NIH launches a large, multicenter, international clinical trial to study heart disease in people living with HIV, who are up to twice as likely as HIV-negative individuals to have heart attacks and other forms of cardiovascular disease.
May 8, 2015
HHS Further Loosens Restrictions on Organ Transplants
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announces on May 8 that it will amend the Federal rules covering organ transplants to allow the recovery of transplantable organs from HIV-positive donors.
Learn More.
The new regulations will provide a framework for clinical studies on transplanting organs from HIV-positive donors to HIV-positive recipients.
May 27, 2015
START Study Shows Reduced Risk of AIDS
Results from the Strategic Timing of AntiRetroviral Treatment (START) study indicate that HIV-positive individuals who start taking antiretroviral drugs before their CD4+ cell counts decrease have a considerably lower risk of developing AIDS or other serious illnesses.
Learn More.
Subsequent data releases show that early therapy for people living with HIV also prevents the onset of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other non-AIDS-related diseases.
June 30, 2015
Cuba Eliminates Mother-to-Child HIV Transmission
The World Health Organization certifies that Cuba is the first nation to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of both HIV and syphilis.
July 14, 2015
UNAIDS Announce Millennium Development Goal Achieved Early
UNAIDS announces that the targets for Millennium Development Goal #6 —halting and reversing the spread of HIV—have been achieved and exceeded 9 months ahead of the schedule set in 2000.
July 18, 2015
U.S. Agencies Collaborate on Housing Assistance Programs
The U.S. Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Justice announce they will collaborate on a demonstration project to provide housing assistance and supportive services to low-income persons living with HIV/AIDS who are victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, or stalking.
July 20, 2015
Study Shows Effectiveness of Antiretrovirals in Preventing Transmission
Researchers report that antiretroviral therapy is highly effective at preventing sexual transmission of HIV from a person living with HIV to an uninfected heterosexual partner, when the HIV-positive partner is virally suppressed. The finding comes from the decade-long HPTN 052 clinical trial.
July 23, 2015
FDA Approves Test Differentiating Between HIV-1 & HIV-2
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the first diagnostic test that differentiates between different types of HIV infections (HIV-1 and HIV-2). The test can also differentiate between acute and established HIV infections.
July 30, 2015
White House Announces National HIV/AIDS Strategy Update
The White House launches the National HIV/AIDS Strategy: Updated to 2020.
Learn More.
The updated Strategy retains the vision and goals of the original, but reflects scientific advances, transformations in healthcare access as a result of the Affordable Care Act, and a renewed emphasis on key populations, geographic areas, and practices necessary to end the domestic HIV epidemic.
September 26, 2015
New PEPFAR Targets Released at UN Summit
At a United Nations summit on the Sustainable Development Goals, the United States announces new PEPFAR prevention and treatment targets for 2016–2017.
Learn More.
By the end of 2017, the U.S. will commit sufficient resources to support antiretroviral therapy for 12.9 million people, provide 13 million male circumcisions for HIV prevention, and reduce HIV incidence by 40% among adolescent girls and young women within the highest burdened areas of 10 sub-Saharan African countries.
September 30, 2015
WHO Announces New Treatment Recommendations
The World Health Organization announces new treatment recommendations that call for all people living with HIV to begin antiretroviral therapy as soon after diagnosis as possible.
Learn More.
WHO also recommends daily oral PrEP as an additional prevention choice for those at substantial risk for contracting HIV. WHO estimates the new policies could help avert more than 21 million deaths and 28 million new infections by 2030.
October 20, 2015
New Campaign Targets Women at Risk of Violence and HIV
Greater Than AIDS launches a new campaign, Empowered: Women, HIV and Intimate Partner Violence, to bring more attention to issues of relationship violence and provide resources for women who may be at risk of, or dealing with, abuse and HIV.
November 15, 2015
amfAR Institute for HIV Cure Research Established at UCSF
amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, announces its plan to establish the amfAR Institute for HIV Cure Research at the University of California, San Francisco. As the cornerstone of amfAR’s $100 million investment in cure research, the Institute will work to develop the scientific basis for an HIV cure by the end of 2020.
November 17, 2015
Actor Charlie Sheen Announces HIV-Positive Status
Actor Charlie Sheen announces his HIV-positive status in a nationally televised interview.
Learn More.
“It’s a hard three letters to absorb. It’s a turning point in one’s life,” the 50-year-old actor said on the TODAY Show.
Sheen said he was motivated to go public about his HIV status in order to put an end to threats from extortionists who wanted “millions of dollars” to keep his diagnosis a secret.
“The personal disbelief, karmic confusion, shame and anger lead to a temporary yet abysmal descent into profound substance abuse and fathomless drinking. It was a suicide run,” Sheen wrote.
With his public announcement, Sheen committed to managing his virus and serving as a good example for others who were HIV-positive.
“I accept this condition not as a curse or scourge, but rather as an opportunity and a challenge: an opportunity to help others, a challenge to better myself,” Sheen wrote.
Significant public conversation about HIV followed his disclosure.
November 24, 2015
UNAIDS: Nearly 16 Million Accessing Retroviral Treatment
UNAIDS releases its 2015 World AIDS Day report which finds that 15.8 million people were accessing antiretroviral treatment as of June 2015—more than doubling the number of people who were on treatment in 2010.
December 1, 2015
White House Releases Federal Action Plan on HIV/AIDS
The White House releases a Federal Action Plan to accompany the updated National HIV/AIDS Strategy. The plan was developed by 10 Federal agencies and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and contains 170 action items that the agencies will undertake to achieve the goals of the Strategy.
December 6, 2015
HIV Diagnoses Drop 19% from 2005 to 2014
CDC announces that annual HIV diagnoses in the U.S. fell by 19% from 2005 to 2014. There were steep declines among heterosexuals, people who inject drugs, and African Americans (especially black women), but trends for gay/bisexual men varied by race/ethnicity.
Learn More.
Diagnoses among white gay/bisexual men decreased by 18%, but they continued to rise among Latino gay/bisexual men and were up 24%. Diagnoses among black gay/bisexual men also increased (22%), but the increase has leveled off since 2010.
December 19, 2015
Congress Lifts Restrictions on Needle Exchange Programs
Partly in response to the HIV outbreak in Indiana, which is linked to people injecting drugs, Congress lifts restrictions that prevented states and localities from spending Federal funds for needle exchange programs.
December 21, 2015
FDA Lifts Ban on Blood Donations From MSM
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announces it will lift its 30-year-old ban on all blood donations by men who have sex with men and institute a policy that allows them to donate blood if they have not had sexual contact with another man in the previous 12 months.
January 18, 2016
Glendale Activist Marilyn Gunnell Dies at 73
Marilyn Gunnell, a community leader who founded Glendale Leaders for AIDS Awareness in 1993, dies at Glendale Adventist Medical Center at the age of 73.
Learn More.
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.”
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.
January 19, 2016
Only 20% of Sexually Active High School Students Test for HIV
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that only 1 in 5 sexually active high school students has been tested for HIV. An estimated 50% of young Americans who are living with HIV do not know they are infected.
January 28, 2016
Researchers Report Increasing Resistance to Tenofovir
Researchers announce that an international study of over 1,900 patients with HIV who failed to respond to the antiretroviral drug tenofovir—a key HIV treatment medication—indicates that HIV resistance to the medication is becoming increasingly common.
February 25, 2016
First Report of HIV Infection Despite Truvada
At the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), researchers report that a man taking the HIV-prevention pill Truvada® has contracted HIV—marking the first reported infection of someone regularly taking the drug.
March 2, 2016
Lawmakers Approve Needle-Exchange Program In Miami Amid Rising HIV Rate
Responding to a surge in HIV cases in South Florida, state legislators approve a bill to create a pilot needle-exchange program in Miami-Dade County.
This was the culmination of a years-long campaign by the Florida Medical Association and HIV/AIDS activists to reverse a Republican-led ban on using federal money for needle-exchange programs. For many years, Republican members of the state legislature refused to support such a program, but soaring rates of IV drug use, related deaths, and HIV and Hepatitis C infections have slowly convinced them that it would be a good idea to provide clean needles to addicts.
The HIV epidemic was most severe in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, which had the highest rates of new infections per 100,000 residents of any area in the U.S., according to state and federal data reviewed by the Tampa Bay Times. A study done at Jackson Memorial found that the cost of treating patients with bacterial infections as a result of dirty needles was about $11.4 million a year.
The legislation was spearheaded by Democrats Rep. Katie Edwards of Plantation and Sen. Oscar Braynon of Miami Gardens, and would be funded through donations to the University of Miami, which would oversee the program. No taxpayer funds would be used.
The university would be allowed to circumvent the state’s drug paraphernalia laws to use a mobile unit to serve addicts in areas where they are commonly found, providing them with clean needles in exchange for used needles.
Still, 20 Republican members of the Florida House continued to withhold their support, including Michael Bileca of Miami, who for years refused to allow the legislation before his committee for a vote, according to The Gainesville Sun.
Rep. Bileca claimed he had read many studies about effective needle exchange programs and objected to the provision that allowed the needle exchange to occur through a mobile unit, and not at a fixed site.
March 3, 2016
White House and NIH Meet to Address HIV Stigma
The White House Office of National AIDS Policy, the NIH Office of AIDS Research, and the National Institute of Mental Health cohost a meeting to address the issue of HIV stigma: Translating Research to Action: Reducing HIV Stigma to Optimize HIV Outcomes.
Learn More.
Participants include researchers, policymakers, legal scholars, faith leaders, advocates, and people living with HIV.
March 3, 2016
Researchers Report Gender Differences in Truvada Dosage
Pharmacy researchers report finding that women need daily doses of the antiviral medication Truvada® to prevent HIV infection, while men only need two doses per week due to differences in the way the drug accumulates in vaginal, cervical and rectal tissue.
March 11, 2016
Candidate Hillary Clinton Chided for Crediting Nancy Reagan for AIDS Work
Following the death of Nancy Reagan at the age of 94, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton credited the former First Lady with “starting a national conversation about AIDS,” unleashing a torrent of criticism from LGBTQ+ activists.
Clinton apologized hours later on Twitter, saying she “misspoke” — but she had already re-ignited an antipathy toward the Reagans long held by those who witnessed the neglect and demise of so many people from HIV/AIDS during the Ronald Reagan presidency from 1981 to 1989.
Longtime activist Cleve Jones wrote on Facebook: “Hillary Clinton is praising Ronald and Nancy Reagan for ‘starting a national conversation’ about HIV/AIDS. Utter bullshit. Disgusting. Really, just stop it.”
Chad Griffin, president of LGBT nonprofit Human Rights Campaign, tweeted, “While I respect her advocacy on issues like stem cell & Parkinson’s research, Nancy Reagan was, sadly, no hero in the fight against HIV/AIDS.”
March 2016
‘Julio of Jackson Heights’ Premieres at Film Festival
Julio of Jackson Heights, a documentary by Richard Shpuntoff about the 1990 hate-crime murder of Julio Rivera, premieres at the Queens World Film Festival.
Learn More.
“The decision to make a film about the murder of Julio Rivera … was slow in coming,” said director Shpuntoff. “Though I wasn’t living in New York in 1990, I was aware of the murder, having read some articles at the time and having heard about it from my parents who lived six blocks away from the site of the murder.”
Shpuntoff volunteered to photograph Jackson Heights’ first pride parade in 1993, something he would continue to do for the next 20 years. He decided to make the documentary as a way to highlight the changes in the neighborhood since Rivera’s murder.
“Around 2004, I began the first of various attempts at creating a film portrait of the Parade, but was never satisfied with the results. I felt heavily the absence of a person I would never be able to portray: Julio Rivera,” Shpuntoff told The New York Times shortly at the premiere of his film.
Rivera was beaten to death in a schoolyard in 1990 and received national media attention when one defendant said he killed Rivera ”because he was gay.”
March 29, 2016
HHS Releases Guidelines for Funding Syringe Programs
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services releases new guidance for state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments that will allow them to request permission to use federal funds to support syringe-services programs (SSPs).
Learn More.
The funds can now be used to support a comprehensive set of services, but they cannot be used to purchase sterile needles or syringes for illegal drug injection.
April 7, 2016
AIDS Activist Wins Suit Against NYC Realtor
The New York City Commission on Human Rights orders a real estate brokerage firm to pay $5,000 in damages to David Goode, 28, an AIDS activist who was illegally denied housing.
Learn More.
In early 2015, Goode was staying on a friend’s couch while looking for a place to live in New York City, according to TheNew 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.”
May 12, 2016
NIH Announces HIV Vaccine Trial in South Africa
The National Institutes of Health and partners announce they will launch a large HIV vaccine trial in South Africa in November 2016, pending regulatory approval. This represents the first time since 2009 that the scientific community has embarked on an HIV vaccine clinical trial of this size.
June 8, 2016
LGBT Groups Blocked from UN Meeting on AIDS
UN member states convene to adopt a declaration to end AIDS, but activists walk out of the meeting and take to the streets to protest the discrimination against LGBTQ people by 51 Muslim states.
Learn More.
As member states gather at the three-day UN High-Level Meeting on Ending AIDS, the event is marked by controversy after more than 50 nations block the participation of groups representing LGBT people from the meeting.
One goal of the meeting is to adopt the 2016 U.N. Political Declaration on Ending AIDS — a document that lists steps to end the global epidemic by 2030. However, the political declaration is viewed as exclusionary, discriminatory and inadequate.
“This political declaration has fatal flaws,” said Maureen Milanga of Health GAP, which protested outside UN Headquarters in New York. “We welcome the new target of reaching 30 million people by 2020 with lifesaving treatment and the pledge to achieve viral suppression for 90% of people on treatment through scaling up differentiated models of quality care. But unless dangerous donor funding cuts are reversed, millions will be denied access to medicine.”
The final resolution barely mentions those most at risk for contracting HIV/AIDS: men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender people and people who inject drugs.
The groups excluded from the meeting are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Egypt wrote a letter on behalf of 51 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, objecting to the participation of 11 groups. The letter did not give any reasons, but it was noted that the excluded groups appear to focus on gay and transgender advocacy.
“Given that transgender people are 49 times more likely to be living with HIV than the general population, their exclusion from the high-level meeting will only impede global progress in combating the HIV/AIDS pandemic,” wrote Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the UN, in a letter to General Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft.
June 12, 2016
Gunman Kills 49, Injures 68 at Pulse Nighclub in Orlando
A gunman forces his way inside Pulse, one of Orlando’s biggest nightclubs, and opens fire on the predominantly gay crowd. In the weeks that followed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation would release statements saying that the gunman, who died at the scene, was found to be HIV-negative, to counter rumors that he was an HIV-positive closeted gay man out for revenge.
(Photo courtesy of Orange County Regional History Center]
Learn More.
Just days after the Pulse shooting, the second worst mass shooting in the U.S. to date in which 49 people died and 68 people sustained injuries, the Spanish-language television network Univision aired a report in which “Miguel” alleged that he had sex with Mateen after meeting him on a gay dating app. Miguel, who wore a disguise during the interview to maintain anonymity, said Mateen disclosed to him that he had unprotected sex with a man who afterward told Mateen he was HIV-positive.
“I believe this crazy horrible thing he did — that was revenge,” Miguel had theorized.
The FBI said that its investigation into Mateen’s background failed to prove that the Port St. Lucie man — who was twice married to women and had a young son — had a secret gay life, according to the Los Angeles Times. In statements to the media, FBI officials also said that Mateen’s autopsy report indicated that he was negative for HIV.
Mateen worked for a private security company, where he told co-workers he supported Islamist extremist groups and also expressed his hatred of gay people, according to The New York Times.
Two weeks before the shooting, Mateen went to a Jensen Beach, Florida gun store and legally purchased a Sig Sauer SIG MCX semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm Glock 17 handgun, both of which he used to shoot people in the Pulse nightclub, according to a CNN timeline of the shooting.
Barbara Poma, who cofounded Pulse, named the club in memory of her older brother, John, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1991, according to POZ magazine. Saturday, June 16 was Latin Night at Pulse, and the place was packed — some say over capacity — with patrons both gay and straight, young and not-so-young, from the U.S., Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and elsewhere. It was about 2:00 p.m. when Mateen arrived at the club and began shooting. An off-duty officer who was working at the club “engaged in a gun battle” with him, Orlando Police Chief John Mina told NPR.
Orlando police officers arrived on the scene minutes later and also exchanged gunfire with the gunman. Mateen then took a group of people into a bathroom and held them as hostages while he entered into an hours-long negotiation with Orlando police. At about 5:00 a.m., police began to break down the wall to the bathroom, and Mateen started shooting hostages, whom he had ordered to lay down on the floor. He then emerged from the breached wall and began exchanging gunfire with police. He was pronounced dead at 5:53 a.m.
The deadly shooting occurred as 2016 Pride celebrations were underway across the country, and many events included moments of silence to honor the dead.
Killed in the shooting were Stanley Almodovar III, Amanda Lizzette Alvear, Oscar A. Aracena Montero, Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, Antonio “Tony” Brown, Darryl Roman Burt II, Angel Candelario-Padro, Juan Chavez Martinez, Luis D. Conde, Cory James Connell, Tevin Eugene Crosby, Deonka “Dee Dee” Drayton, Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, Leroy Valentin Fernandez, Mercedez Marisol Flores, Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, Juan Ramon Guerrero, Paul Terrell Henry, Frank Hernandez, Miguel Angel Honorato, Javier Jorge Reyes, Jason Benjamin Josaphat, Eddie Jamal Droy Justice, Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, Christopher Andrew Leinonen, Alejandro Barrios Martinez, Brenda Marquez McCool, Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, Kimberly Jean Morris, Akyra Monet Murray, Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, Gerardo A. Ortiz Jimenez, Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, Joel Rayon Paniagua, Jean C. Mendez Perez, Enrique L. Rios Jr., Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, Eddie Sotomayor Jr., Shane Evan Tomlinson, Martin Benitez Torres, Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, Luis Sergio Vielma, Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, and Jerry Wright.
“We stand with you to say that the good in this world far outweighs the evil, that our common humanity transcends our differences, and that our most effective response to terror and to hatred is compassion, it’s unity, and it’s love,” said Florida Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “We stand with you today as we grieve together, and long after the cameras are gone, we will continue to stand with you as we grow together in commitment, in solidarity, and in equality.”
Following the shooting, the OnePulse Foundation was formed to raise $45 million for the creation of the National Pulse Memorial & Museum in Orlando in honor of the 49 dead, the 68 injured, and the first responders and healthcare professionals who treated them.
September 11, 2016
Actress Alexis Arquette Dies
Transgender trailblazer Alexis Arquette dies at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles of AIDS-related illness at the age of 47.
Learn More.
Arquette was born into an acting family that includes siblings David, Rosanna, and Patricia, the latter who would famously memorialize her sister in a speech at the 2019 Emmy Awards.
In the earlier years of her career, Arquette primarily performed as a female impersonator, frequently under the name “Eva Destruction.” She debuted on the big screen in 1986 in an uncredited role as Alexis, the androgynous bandmate of Max Whiteman (Evan Richards) inDown and Out in Beverly Hills. Arquette would go on to star in more than 40 movies, the majority of them low-budget or independent films.
Diagnosed with HIV in 1989, Arquette chronicled her gender affirmation surgery in a 2007 documentary, Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother, but returned to presenting as a man in 2013 as her health failed.
And when the final breath passed her lips, she asked that everyone cheer “the moment that [s]he transitioned to another dimension,” reports The Hollywood Reporter.
Her family would go on to found the Alexis Arquette Family Foundation, which works with the LA County / USC Medical Center to provide medical and mental health support to LGBTQ residents in the county.
December 27, 2016
APLA Founder Matt Redman Dies
Matt Redman, one of the cofounders of AIDS Project Los Angeles, dies at the age of 66. Instrumental in spurring the LA community to action during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Redman dedicated his life to the fight against HIV.
Learn More.
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.
January 14, 2017
Gates Foundation Invests in HIV-Prevention Implants
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announces the investment of $140 million in a new HIV-prevention tool, implants that can deliver HIV-prevention medication continuously over a long period of time.
Learn More.
Eliminating the need for people to take preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medication on a daily basis, the HIV-preventing drug implants could be used to deliver a consistent supply of drugs, aiding people vulnerable to HIV.
“There’s a vital need for an HIV/AIDS intervention that allows those at risk to incorporate prevention more easily into their daily lives,” said Sue Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
March 31, 2017
Gilbert Baker — Creator of Pride Flag — Dies
Gilbert Baker, the artist who in 1978 created the iconic rainbow flag symbolizing LGBTQ pride, dies in his sleep in New York at the age of 65.
Learn More.
In the early years of the AIDS crisis, the rainbow flag would emerge as a symbol for LGBTQ rights around the world. Baker initially designed an eight-color flag for San Francisco’s gay freedom day in 1978, the precursor to the modern pride parade. Each of the eight colors represented a different aspect of humanity:
Pink – sexuality
Red – life
Orange – healing
Yellow- sunlight
Green – nature
Turquoise – art
Indigo – harmony
Violet – human spirit
LGBT icon Harvey Milk, who was a friend of Baker’s, marched under the first rainbow flag in the June 1978 Gay Freedom parade, just months before he was assassinated.
By 1979, Baker dropped two colors — pink and turquoise — largely because fabrics and dyes in those shades weren’t always readily available, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. The six-color flag — red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple — is what became globally recognized.
Baker was born in Kansas in 1951 and served in the U.S. Army from 1970 to 1972, which stationed him in San Francisco in the early days of the gay liberation movement. His story as a soldier is told in the book Conduct Unbecoming by Randy Shilts.
After Baker was honorably discharged from the Army, he taught himself to sew and began a career in flag-making which would include creating designs and displays for several world leaders including the presidents of France, Venezuela and the Philippines.
In June of 1994, Gilbert achieved a world’s record when he created a mile-long Rainbow Flag to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riot 1969 in New York City. The banner measured 30 x 5,280 ft. and was carried by 5,000 people. The project was underwritten by Stadtlander’s Pharmacy, a California pharmacy which was a principal distributor of a variety of HIV/AIDS medications.
Former San Francisco Supervisor Jeff Sheehy wrote about his recollection for the Bay Area Reporter of how the Rainbow Flag came to be installed at Harvey Milk Plaza in San Francisco:
“In 1997, at the Castro Street Fair, I was standing with Baker in Jane Warner Plaza and then-mayor Willie Brown was approaching with his entourage. Baker was keenly aware that the mayor was promoting public art … Baker and I approached the mayor and Baker, with all of his glorious and passionate energy, pitched the idea for his work of art, the installation of a giant flagpole flying the rainbow flag — an idea he had spent 10 years developing.”
Baker never made money on the Rainbow Flag. With the help of a young lawyer named Matt Coles, he blocked the Pride Foundation’s attempt to trademark the flag, insisting that the flag belonged to everyone.
“Gilbert was our own Betsy Ross,” said Sheehy, who worked with Baker in the 1990s on political causes. “He was a genius at political theater, at political art. He’s one of these heroes who never sought attention for himself. But he was relentless.”
One of his last works shortly before he died was the creation of concentration camp uniforms with pink triangles foreshadowing then-President Donald Trump’s march toward a fascist regime. Baker presented these in a gallery in the Castro, and they were also included in the Pink Triangle installation during San Francisco Pride in 2017.
After Baker’s death, the rainbow flag was raised in his honor near Harvey Milk Plaza in San Francisco. A candlelight vigil was held for him at Castro and Market streets, beneath his flag.
In 2021, a segment of Baker’s original Rainbow Flag, which was thought to be lost since 1978, was recently rediscovered and donated to the San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society Museum and Archives. The hand-stitched and dyed 28-foot-long banner was been permanently installed in the museum.
May 2, 2017
CDC Reports Significant Decline in Death Rates in African Americans
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports significant declines in HIV/AIDS death rates for black/African Americans between 1999-2015. Among those aged 18-34, HIV-related deaths drop 80%, and among those aged 35, deaths drop by 79%.
June 5, 2017
U.S. Website Updates Name to HIV.gov
The federal government’s website on HIV/AIDS changes its name from AIDS.gov to HIV.gov, reflecting a new focus on HIV management.
Learn More.
The announcement coincides with the 36th anniversary of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s first report of the initial cases of what would become known as AIDS.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services made the website name change to reflect major scientific advances transforming a nearly always fatal disease to a condition that can be controlled and prevented from progressing to AIDS.
In its announcement to the public, HHS points out the fact that there were more people living with HIV in the U.S. than people living with AIDS.
“NMAC (National Minority AIDS Council) applauds the name change from AIDS.gov to HIV.gov, which honors the past while recognizing the power of words and acknowledging that their meanings change over time… The name change reflects the program’s longstanding and ongoing commitment to listen to the HIV community.”
“Changing its name from AIDS.gov to HIV.gov is a reflection of AIDS.gov’s commitment to respond to the changing dynamics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and an acknowledgement of the many scientific and treatment advances we’ve made in recent years. This name change is consistent with the forward thinking we’ve come to expect and depend on from this site.”
— Phill Wilson, President and CEO, Black AIDS Institute
“The Latino Commission on AIDS welcomes renaming AIDS.gov to HIV.gov to focus on preventing the spread of HIV and reaching people at risk for, and living with, HIV with love and compassion.”
— Guillermo Chacón, President, Latino Commission on AIDS, and Founder of the Hispanic Health Network
HHS also collected input from its federal partners:
Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: “Much progress has been made in HIV/AIDS research since the disease was first recognized in 1981. The website AIDS.gov has been a valuable resource for those seeking information about HIV/AIDS, and its name change to HIV.gov appropriately reflects our evolution in transforming the pandemic, even as work remains to bring about an end to HIV.”
Laura Cheever, M.D., Sc.M., Associate Administrator of HRSA’s HIV/AIDS Bureau:
“The shift to HIV.gov is important because the face of the epidemic is changing. What was once a deadly disease is now a manageable, chronic condition, if there is access to testing, high-quality HIV primary medical care, medication, and essential support services, such as those provided by the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program.”
Jonathan Mermin, M.D., M.P.H., Director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention:
“The shift to HIV.gov is proactive and inclusive, and it sends a strong, supportive message to the 1.1 million people across America who are living with HIV. The number of annual HIV infections in the U.S. fell 18% between 2008 and 2014, but progress has not been the same for all communities. HIV.gov will deliver current science, accurate information, and links to effective resources for the people who need them most.”
June 6, 2017
America’s Black MSM Show Higher HIV Prevalence of Any Nation
The New York Times reports that, as a group, America’s black gay and bisexual men have a higher HIV prevalence rate than any nation in the world.
August 27, 2017
Muslim American Faith Organizations Take Stand Against Stigma
Muslim-American organization RAHMA (Arabic for “mercy”) launches the first national Faith HIV & AIDS Awareness Day.
Learn More.
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.
September 8, 2017
AIDS Survivor Fred Hersch Releases ‘Open Book’
Jazz pianist and HIV-positive activist Fred Hersch releases his award-winning solo record, Open Book.
Learn More.
Hersch announced publicly in 1993 that he was gay and he had been receiving HIV treatment since 1984. Since revealing his HIV status, he has been the keynote speaker and performer at international medical conferences in the U.S. and Europe.
He also has been a passionate fundraiser for HIV/AIDS services and education agencies, producing and performing on four benefit recordings. Charity concerts at which he’s performed include “Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS” and “Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS,” according to his website.
In an interview with NPR, Hersch told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that when his 2007 tour schedule became demanding and he began losing weight, his doctors tried to “give his body a break” by stopping his regimen of antiviral medication. This turned out to be a near-fatal decision. Hersch’s health quickly deteriorated, and by early 2008, he had developed AIDS-related dementia.
Hersch was put on new antiviral medications, and for several months, his health appeared to be on the rebound. But in June 2008, his blood oxygen levels dipped dangerously low and Hersch went into septic shock, his organs failing one by one. He lapsed into a coma, which lasted more than two months.
When he regained consciousness, he could no longer play piano as a result of musculature deterioration.
“I realized when I was that far down, that I really wasn’t done yet,” he said in the 2010 NPR interview. “There was more that I had to do as a musician, as a partner. And whether it was just stubbornness or just crankiness or whatever, I felt like I [wasn’t] ready to check out.”
With months of diligent rehabilitation, Hersch was able to play again. In 2011, he performed My Coma Dreams, a stage show written and directed by Herschel Garfein about the contrast between dreams and reality.
In 2017, upon the release of Open Book, Hersch was honored with the Prix in Honorem Jazz as well as the Coup de cœur jazz from l’Académie Charles Cros. The same year, his autobiography, Good Things Happen Slowy: A Life in and Out of Jazz, was published by Crown Books.
Hersch has recorded more than 70 of his jazz compositions, and he was the first person to play weeklong engagements as a solo pianist at the Village Vanguard in New York City. He has been nominated for several Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance (1992, 1995) and Best Jazz Instrumental Album (2011, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018).
He has been proclaimed “the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade” by Vanity Fair, “an elegant force of musical invention” by The L.A. Times, and “a living legend” by The New Yorker.
[photo: Erika Kapin Photography]
September 9, 2017
Broadway Composer-Lyricist Michael Friedman Dies
Broadway composer and lyricist Michael Friedman, known for the play Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, dies of AIDS-related illness at age 41.
Learn More.
An Obie Award winning composer/lyricist, Friedman was most well-known as the co-creator of the critically-acclaimed musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which premiered in New York at the Public Theater and subsequently transferred to Broadway.
Other credits include the musical The Fortress of Solitude, based on the book of the same name by Jonathan Lethem; Unknown Soldier, which premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival; and Love’s Labour’s Lost, which premiered at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis in a statement said, “Michael Friedman was one of the most brilliant, multi-talented theater artists of our time. He was also a miracle of a human being: loving, kind, generous, hilarious, thrilling. His loss leaves a hole in the theater world that cannot be filled, and a hole in the hearts of those who loved him that will last forever.”
Michael Paulson of the New York Timesdescribted Friedman as “a versatile, cerebral and witty composer and lyricist who brought a historian’s eye and a journalistic sensibility to pathbreaking work off and on Broadway.”
Michael was a founding Associate Artist of The Civilians, the acclaimed investigative theater company. His work with company includes Gone Missing, In the Footprint, The Great Immensity, Paris Commune, (co-written with Civilians’ Artistic Director Steve Cosson) (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch, and This Beautiful City as well as the score for Anne Washburn’s critically-acclaimed Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play.
His final collaboration with Cosson, The Abominables, opened at Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis in September 2017.
A cornerstone of The Civilians’ investigative method was to interview people and then turn the interviews into songs.
Sarah Larson wrote in The New Yorker that Friedman had “an incredible gift” for creating theater from interviews.
“He was an almost forensic listener, re-creating the exacting speech of all kinds of people and setting it to music as if finding its true form,” Larson wrote.
Friedman’s death was a shocking reminder to many that HIV continued to be deadly — even for well-to-do, white men with good health insurance.
“Aching with gratitude for the music & joy he gave us,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton,wrote on Twitter. “Mourning all the music we’ll never hear.”
Shortly following Friedman’s death, the New York Times published an update, stating that Friedman had tested positive for HIV just nine weeks before his death.
October 6, 2017
California Reforms HIV Laws
Gov. Jerry Brown signs into law legislation that decreases the penalty from a felony to a misdemeanor for knowingly exposing a sexual partner to HIV or donating blood without disclosing the infection.
Learn More.
Senate Bill 239 was authored by Senator Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Todd Gloria, and cosponsored by Equality California, the ACLU of California, APLA Health, Black AIDS Institute, Lambda Legal and Positive Women’s Network-USA.
The co-sponsors were part of Californians for HIV Criminalization Reform, a coalition of HIV and health service providers, civil rights organizations, public health professionals and people living with HIV. The legislation represented a long-awaited achievement in the movement to end the criminalization of people living with HIV in California.
The public health community lobbied the governor to support the legislation, because it helped to put an end to laws that discouraged people from getting tested and into treatment. The new law took a public health approach and recognized the current understanding that with treatment, people with HIV effectively have no risk of sexually transmitting HIV to others.
Prior to this, knowingly exposing a sexual partner to HIV was a felony offense punishable by three to eight years in prison. The new law, which took effect in 2018, changed this to a misdemeanor, carrying a six-month prison term — the same punishment as knowingly exposing someone to other communicable diseases.
“HIV is a public health issue, not a criminal issue,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, co-author of the legislation. “These felonies, which treat HIV differently than all other serious communicable diseases, stigmatize people living with HIV and discourage people from getting tested and into treatment.”
According to Lambda Legal, “If you are living with HIV, you no longer have to live with the threat of felony prosecution as a result of other people’s ignorance or someone’s attempt to harm you through a vindictive prosecution. If you are not living with HIV, you should continue taking responsibility for your sexual health and make appropriate choices regarding the sexual risks you are willing to take. And you can expect that more people living with HIV will be willing to have frank conversations about HIV and other sexual health risks, because they no longer have to fear retribution through the criminal justice system.”
October 17, 2017
Georgia Legislator Asks Whether HIV Quarantine is Legal
Georgia State Rep. Betty Price asks about the “legalities” of quarantining people who test positive for HIV, and incites a firestorm of criticism from activists and advocates across the country.
Learn More.
Rep. Price was in a House healthcare committee meeting when she asked a state health official whether people with HIV could legally be quarantined.
“I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it,” she said during the meeting, which was recorded on video, according to NBC News.
During the meeting, Rep. Price also expressed fear at the high number of people living with HIV, suggesting that the public health risk has intensified because people testing positive for HIV are living longer.
“It’s almost frightening the number of people who are living that are … carriers with the potential to spread,” she said during the hearing. “Whereas in the past, they died more readily, and then at that point, they’re not posing a risk.”
Health advocates and LGBTQ activists responded to Rep. Price’s comments with accusations of feeding fear and stigma around the virus.
“It’s very troubling to hear comments like that,” Jeff Graham, executive director of the LGBT advocacy group Georgia Equality, told NBC News. “It shows the amount of work that still needs to happen to educate elected officials on the reality of the lives of people living with HIV.”
In a statement shared with the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Rep. Price claimed her comments at the meeting were “taken completely out of context” and that she was merely being “provocative.”
Rep. Price, a Republican elected in 2015 to represent the northern Atlanta suburbs of Roswell and Alpharetta, did not win her re-election bid in 2018. She lost in a tight race to Mary C. Robichaux, a Democrat who previously worked with hospitals, physicians and other providers to improve patient outcomes.
November 6, 2017
Harvard Honors Elton John as Humanitarian of the Year
Harvard University honors singer and HIV activist Elton John as Humanitarian of the Year.
[photo by Lauren A. Sierra, courtesy of The Harvard Crimson]
Learn More.
Elton John was recognized with the university’s Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian Award for his decades of work in support of HIV/AIDS research and awareness. Since founding the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992, he has raised more than $385 million to support HIV/AIDS-related programming around the world.
In his speech to the crowd, John said dedicated the award to the people working at the front lines of tackling the HIV/AIDS epidemic, calling them “the bravest and most compassionate people I have ever met.”
November 12, 2017
Performance Artist & HIV Educator Antron-Reshaud Olukayode Dies
Atlanta performance artist, writer, and HIV educator Antron-Reshaud Olukayode dies of AIDS-related illness at age 33.
[photo from Olukayode’s blog]
Learn More.
Olukayode was an accomplished poet, author, HIV/AIDS activist, blogger, self-taught multidisciplinary artist, vocalist, music producer, creative director of BOS+AROS, and Buddhist practitioner.
Born on April 26, 1984 in Gainesville, Florida as Antron Reshaud Brown (he later changed his surname to Olukayode, which is Yoruba for “God brings happiness”), he didn’t speak until the age of four, according to the National Black Justice Coalition in its tribute to Olukayode.
He showed an early interest in the arts, and his grandmother and mother encouraged his artistic expression, supplying him with craft supplies. He learned to play the piano as a child from his grandmother, and in the second grade, he won a local writing contest based on a story about going to the grocery store with his mother. When he was 15, Olukayode started working with children at his local Boys and Girls Club, leading them in arts and crafts projects.
During his teen years, Olukayode was constantly teased, bullied and physically abused due to his effeminate appearance and mannerisms. At the age of 17, he was raped and assaulted in a field near his neighborhood by two young men. Afterward, Olukayode considered suicide, but heard a voice telling him to write. He began writing in his journal to keep himself sane.
Olukayode was infected with HIV while in an abusive relationship with a basketball player at his college. When he learned of his diagnosis, he was overwhelmed with shame and dropped out of college. He worked in a series of meaningless jobs, continuing to live with his mother until he decided to leave Gainesville to seek a better life.
In 2006, Olukayode boarded a Greyhound bus to Atlanta with with four boxes of belongings and $200 in cash, A new friend, Kelvin Barlow, read some of Olukayode’s written work and introduced him to AID Atlanta’s program manager Craig Washington, who invited Olukayode to recite poetry at a Black Gay Pride event called Phyre!
Olukayode said that it was at this event that he knew he had found his calling as a poet. He also became involved with AID Atlanta, which led to his first HIV/AIDS prevention job at National AIDS Education & Services for Minorities (NAESM), under the supervision and guidance of executive director Adolph St. Arromand.
In 2007, Olukayode released his first collection of poetry, “Bohemian Rebel: Naked and Exposed Vol. 1.” A week later, he became homeless and began spending his nights couch surfing or sleeping in Piedmont Park.
Over the next three years, Olukayode wrote while experiencing homelessness, producing The Rising Vol. 2, a collection of poems and prose about his years being homeless. He also wrote his first stage play, TRANS-ition, the story of a teenager transitioning from male to female, and his first one man show, Evicted, about enduring homelessness while HIV positive.
Olukayode’s third collection of poems and prose, Fearless Revolution, Vol. 3, drew on his experience from a relationship with a soldier. In 2012, he contributed the essay “Afraid of My Own Reflection” to the anthology For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Still Not Enough: Coming of Age, Coming Out, and Coming Home. He also produced a blog and vblog, With Love ATL, for thebody.com.
In addition to poetry and prose, Olukayode wrote songs, influenced by the music of the Baptist church of his childhood. In 2013, following the traumatic end of a relationship, he produced his first EP, Oluka Oluka.
In his work as a self-proclaimed “artivist,” Olukayode participated in the Centers for Disease Control’s initiative “Let’s Stop HIV Together” campaign. He also lobbied in Washington, D.C. for AIDS Watch, urging Congress to increase funding for HIV services. As a youth representative from the State of Georgia, Olukayode met Congressman John Lewis and shared his story.
He also worked on the project DA CRIBB for the National AIDS Education & Services for Minorities and The Evolution Project for AID Atlanta. He was a member of Lifting Our Voices for Equality (L.O.V.E) Coalition and Common Ground Ministries.
Olukayode was creative director of BOS+AROS, a vehicle for change with an avant-garde approach to empower the masses about HIV/AIDS, using art to connect with people and spread awareness. He premiered his multimedia exhibition, ANTRONICA, in 2016.
Olukayode spent the last years of his life in Atlanta, where he practiced Buddhism, and enjoyed the independent and avant-garde art scene.
According to a tribute posted by friend Mark S. King, Olukayode “had developed Kaposi sarcoma, a dangerous cancer that spread from his skin to his other organs during a month-long hospital stay before his death. AIDS caused Antron’s cancer.”
A few weeks before he died, Olukayode wrote: “Having my mother here in the hospital with me is healing. She came all this way to be by my side. I am so grateful and grateful for my friends who have been nothing but supportive. Having her witness my friends lavishing the love and meeting her and is extraordinary. A blessing and fills me with joy.”
Gilead Announces Initiative to Address Epidemic in U.S. South
Gilead Sciences announces the launch of the Commitment to Partnership in Addressing HIV/AIDS in Southern States (COMPASS) Initiative, a 10-year, $100 million commitment to support organizations working to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Southern United States.
December 23, 2017
NYT: Trump Angered at Influx of Haitian Visitors, Saying They ‘All have AIDS’
The New York Times reports on a June 2017 meeting at the White House during which President Donald Trump fumed over travel visas granted to 15,000 Haitians, saying they “all have AIDS.”
Learn More.
The explosive information in the NYT article was widely repeated by media outlets, although the two sources for the White House meeting were kept anonymous by request. According to NYT reporters Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, their sources were a White House staffer who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.
Trump’s comment about Haitian immigrants having AIDS came after he read aloud from a report listing the number of people from outside the U.S. who had received visas to enter the country in 2017.
When members of his administration tried to explain that many were short-term travelers making one-time visits, Trump responded by angrily berating his senior advisors for allowing too many foreigners to enter the country.
Although the White House subsequently denied that Trump made any such comments, ABC News would counter this by noting that Trump made a similar, albeit softer, comment about Haitians in a recent Fox News interview: “Take a look at what’s happening in Haiti. A tremendous problem with AIDS.”
In response to the report on Trump’s comments about Haitians and AIDS, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (CA-43) issued the following statement: “Donald Trump has proven that there is no limit to his hatred, bigotry, and vulgarity. As a longtime friend of Haiti who has traveled to the country numerous times, I am especially appalled by Trump’s racist and ignorant comments about Haiti.”
For Haitian author Edwidge Danticat, Trump’s reported comments opened an old wound from a time when Haitian immigrants had to endure the stigma of being a “high risk group” for HIV/AIDS. For several years, Haitian immigrants were not permitted to donate blood in the U.S.
In an article for The New Yorker, Danticat wrote, “At the junior high school I attended, in Brooklyn, some of the non-Haitian students would regularly shove and hit me and the other Haitian kids, telling us that we had dirty blood.”
Of the four groups the CDC identified as “high risk” for the disease in 1983, Haitians were the only ones identified by nationality. The other three groups were intravenous drug users, homosexuals, and hemophiliacs. Members of all these group were stigmatized by the association with AIDS.
Just a few weeks later after the NYT article exposed the goings-on behind Oval Office doors, racist comments from Trump would surface again in reports of a January 11 meeting with senators in which the president referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to people briefed by The Washington Post.
Trump then suggested that the bipartisan group of senators focus instead on countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with the day before. According to one White House official, the president also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.
In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said.
“Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. “Take them out.”
Dr. Mathilde Krim, a geneticist and virologist who founded the AIDS Medical Foundation (AMF), dies at age 91.
[photo courtesy of amfAR]
Learn More.
Dr. Krim turned from studying cancer to studying AIDS in the early 1980s, she founded AMF in 1983, creating the first organization dedicated to raising funds for scientific and medical research on AIDS.
In 1985, AMF merged with the National AIDS Research Foundation to form the American Foundation for AIDS Research. As the founding chair of amfAR, Dr. Krim raised hundreds of millions of dollars for AIDS research, prevention, treatment, and advocacy.
In announcing her passing, The New York Times calls her “America’s foremost warrior in the battle against superstitions, fears and prejudices that have stigmatized many people with AIDS.”
Dr. Krim, a geneticist and virologist, as well as an advocate, has a long history of notable contributions to science and social justice.
After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Geneva in 1953, she studied cytogenetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Six years later, she moved to New York and made a name for herself as a researcher of cancer-causing viruses. But in the early 1980s, her focus turned to a growing epidemic that almost no one else had yet sought to address.
Less than a year after the publishing of a 1982 paper in which the disease was first called by that name, Dr. Krim founded the AIDS Medical Foundation, the first privately funded AIDS research organization, which originally operated out of a storage room in her husband’s Manhattan office.
The stigma at that time was overwhelming: A former staff member recalls that “The mail guy was scared to come up to our office because it said ‘AIDS’ on our envelopes [which often contained hate mail anyway].”
AmfAR credits Dr. Krim as being a pivotal figure in moving Washington to belatedly provide significant funding for both research and treatment regarding the epidemic, after nearly a decade of neglect.
AmfAR grew out of Dr. Krim’s collaboration with Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, who in New York in the early 1980s pioneered a community-based approach to studying and responding to AIDS. With other allies, they formed the AIDS Medical Foundation in 1983, which two years later merged with a California-based group to form amfAR.
In addition to her scientific credentials and her impassioned advocacy, Dr. Krim also brought a connection to New York society life and its deep pockets, with her marriage to Arthur B. Krim, an entertainment lawyer who had chaired both United Artists and Orion Pictures. Dr. Krim was able to bring on board Elizabeth Taylor, who became the group’s founding international chair and lent Hollywood glamour and universal visibility to an epidemic that in its earliest years was ignored by public officials and other leading figures .
In 2006, ACT UP Founder Larry Kramer said of Dr. Krim, “One can only be filled with overpowering awe and gratitude that such a person has lived among us.”
January 24, 2018
NIH Launches Study of Antiretrovirals & Pregnant Women
The National Institutes of Health launches a large international study to compare the safety and efficacy of antiretroviral treatment regimens for pregnant women living with HIV and their infants.
Learn More.
It will provide data on the use of newer HIV medications during pregnancy, helping to ensure that women living with HIV and their infants receive the best available treatments.
January 28, 2018
PEPFAR Turns 15, Celebrates Worldwide Impact
PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) celebrates its 15th anniversary.
Learn More.
When PEPFAR began in 2003, only 50,000 people in Africa were on lifesaving HIV treatment. At the time, it was the largest commitment ever by any nation to address a single disease.
“Over the past 15 years, PEPFAR has transformed the impossible into the possible by rapidly accelerating access to lifesaving HIV prevention and treatment services,” says Ambassador Deborah L. Birx, M.D., U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator. “We have not only saved more than 14 million mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons, but also accelerated global progress toward ending AIDS as a public health threat.”
In this video, one of PEPFAR’s first treatment recipients, John Robert Engole from Uganda tells his remarkable story of survival thanks to PEPFAR’s lifesaving programs.
April 16, 2018
Singer Thomas Neuwirth / Conchita Announces HIV-Positive Status
After a former boyfriend threatens to blackmail him over his HIV status, Austrian singer and Eurovision winner Thomas Neuwirth, who won the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest performing as Conchita Wurst, announces that he is HIV-positive.
Learn More.
In a press statement, Neuwirth notes that he has been in treatment and virally suppressed for many years, and says “I hope to show courage and take another step against the stigmatization of people with HIV.”
A spokesman for the performer said in an email that Neuwirth’s preferred pronouns are “she” for references to the stage persona of Conchita Wurst and “he” for Neuwirth, the private individual.
An international research team finds that early antiretroviral therapy is key to avoiding brain atrophy for people living with HIV.
Learn More.
Researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro) of McGill University, in collaboration with researchers from University of Washington St. Louis and Yale University, analysed magnetic resonance imaging data from 65 patients at the University of California San Francisco who had been infected less than one year before. Assessment of the MRI data found that the longer people living with HIV went without treatment, the greater the atrophy in several brain regions.
Once patients began antiretroviral therapy, the atrophy stopped and some brain volume was even restored. These results underscored the need for early detection of HIV and delivery of ART as soon as possible to avoid neurological damage.
June 2018
G8 Nations Renew Commitment to Global Fund
The “Group of Eight” Summit announcemes new commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria over the next three years.
Learn More.
The U.S. alone pledged up to $4.3 billion to the Global Fund, which was created in 2002 to address the AIDS, TB and malaria epidemics, which claimed 4 million lives that year alone, mostly in poor countries.
The Global Fund mobilizes and invests billions of dollars each year to support programs run by local experts in more than 100 countries. In partnership with governments, civil society, technical agencies, the private sector and people affected by the diseases, the Global Fund seeks to overcome funding barriers.
Following the announcement from the G8, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released a statement supporting the funding commitment.
“There is now a critical test for G8 governments: to follow through on the commitments announced this year, and in previous years, by translating what they have agreed into actual financial outlays that support the efforts of poor countries and communities to overcome poverty and disease,” the foundation said.
In 2018, the Global Fund helped finance the distribution of 131 million insecticide-treated nets to combat malaria, provided anti-tuberculosis treatment for 5.3 million people, supported 18.9 million people on antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, and since its founding saved 32 million lives worldwide.
G8 members make up most of the world’s largest economies and include: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
June 11, 2018
Early Antiretroviral Therapy Linked to Cancer Prevention
In the first study to focus specifically on the effect of viral suppression on cancer risk, researchers find that early, sustained ART helps to prevent cancers in people living with HIV.
Learn More.
The research shows that early and sustained ART reduces the onset of AIDS-defining cancers and — to a lesser degree — other cancers in HIV-positive people.
But the long-term study, which followed nearly 150,000 veterans over the years of 1999-2015, also found that the cancer risk for HIV-positive patients with long-term viral suppression still was greater than the risk of cancer for HIV-negative patients.
June 28, 2018
Online HIV-Prevention Program Targets MSM Aged 18-29
In a Northwestern University study, a novel online HIV-prevention program is shown to reduce sexually transmitted infections by 40%.
A month later, the National Institutes of Health would award Northwestern’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing with an $8.8 million grant to put its research into practice.
Keep It Up! continues to build its program. So far, it has been delivered to over 1,500 young men in several major cities. The program is preparing to bring KIU! to 44 counties across the U.S., and plans to reach at least 4,000 young men in the next few years.
July 18, 2018
Studies Show HIV-Positive People Suffer from Heart Disease at 2x Rate
A global analysis finds that people living with HIV are twice as likely as their HIV-negative counterparts to suffer from heart disease.
The greatest impact is in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia Pacific regions, with Swaziland, Botswana and Lesotho particularly affected.
Researchers say the findings will help to target treatments to people facing the greatest risk, helping to maximize resources in countries with limited healthcare funding.
August 1, 2018
Computer Simulation Predicts Transmission Patterns Across Populations
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory demonstrate that computer simulations can accurately predict the transmission of HIV across populations.
The simulations could allow state health departments to track the spread of HIV and provide a powerful new tool to help prevent new HIV infections.
“We looked for special genetic patterns that we had seen in the simulations, and we can confirm that these patterns also hold for real data covering the entire epidemic,” said Thomas Leitner, a computational biologist at Los Alamos and lead author of the study.
HIV is particularly interesting to study in this manner, Leitner noted, as the virus mutates rapidly and constantly within each infected individual. The changing “genetic signatures” of its code provide a path that researchers can follow in determining the origin and time frame of an infection, and the computer simulations are now proven to be successful in tracking and predicting the virus’s movements through populations.
September 7, 2018
HHS Collects Community Input for Updating HIV/AIDS Policy
Community leaders, frontline workers, individuals living with and at risk for infection, and other members of the community from across the nation provide input to leaders from the Office of HIV/AIDS and Infectious Disease Policy.
Joined by colleagues from the HHS Office of HIV/AIDS and Infectious Disease Policy, the listening session was convened at a special event during the U.S. Conference on AIDS. Among the many comments offered during the session, the HHS staff heard about:
The importance of addressing housing, incarceration, and other social determinants of health;
The need to be strategic in the scale-up PrEP;
Concerns that issues of aging and HIV be addressed;
Concerns that adequate funding be provided to enact strategies contained in updated plans;
The importance of focusing on HIV and hepatitis disparities if we are to end the epidemics;
Expectations that funding and support for programs currently in place will be continued, particularly the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program; and
A desire for new forms of accountability for progress.
September 28, 2018
Thai Study Confirms Accuracy of U=U Message
A study of MSM in Thailand finds that having a sexually transmitted infection does not affect the ability of people living with HIV to achieve and maintain an undetectable viral load, confirming that “Undetectable = Untransmittable.”
Learn More.
Months earlier, UNAIDS launched its “Undetectable = Untransmittable” (or U=U) campaign to spread the message that people living with HIV with an undetectable viral load cannot transmit HIV sexually.
UNAIDS’s campaign is supported by the results of three large studies of sexual HIV transmission among thousands of couples, one partner of which was living with HIV and the other was not, were undertaken between 2007 and 2016. In those studies, there was not a single case of sexual transmission of HIV from a virally suppressed person living with HIV to their HIV-negative partner.
October 17, 2018
Australian Study Links Diagnosis Reduction to PrEP
A research study finds that a targeted, high-coverage roll-out of PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) is associated with a 25% reduction in new HIV diagnoses in one year.
The report concludes that rapid, targeted, high-coverage PrEP implementation is effective to reduce new HIV infections at the population level.
Less than a year later, Andrew Grulich, MD, head of the HIV Epidemiology and Prevention Program at the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney, would present follow-up data supporting the initial study at the 10th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science in Mexico City.
.
November 20, 2018
PrEP Urged for High-Risk Individuals
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends clinicians to offer PrEP (preexposure prophylaxis) to those at high risk for HIV infection.
Learn More.
The Task Force gives its “A” recommendation — the strongest endorsement it can give — to PrEP, stating that when taken as prescribed, PrEP is highly effective at preventing HIV among those at high risk, and concluding with “high certainty” that there is a substantial benefit to the target population. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is an independent, volunteer panel of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine.
In June 2019, the Task Force would upgrade its draft recommendatin to a “Final Recommendation Statement” and present its supporting evidence in a separate report issued to governmental agencies.
December 1, 2018
30th Anniversary of World AIDS Day
The date marks the 30th anniversary of the observance of World AIDS Day.
Learn More.
The World Health Organization joins its global partners to commemorate World AIDS Day under the theme “Know Your Status.” The occasion is celebrated as the 30-year anniversary of a pioneering global health campaign first initiated by WHO in 1988.
2019
NIH Develops Tool to Measure HIV Cure Strategies
Scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health develop a tool to measure the success of HIV cure strategies.
Learn More.
The tool accurately and easily counts the cells that make up the HIV reservoir, the stubborn obstacle to an HIV cure. This advance enables researchers who are trying to eliminate the HIV reservoir to clearly understand whether their strategies are working.
February 5, 2019
President Trump Announces 10-year Goal to End HIV
In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump announces his administration’s goal to end the HIV epidemic in the U.S. by 2030.
Learn More.
The Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America proposed leveraging new biomedical prevention and treatment options and data to reduce the number of new HIV infections in the U.S. by 75% in 2025 and by 90% in 2030, said Brett P. Giroir, M.D., HHS Assistant Secretary for Health.
“In short, we will diagnose all people as early as possible, treat rapidly and effectively, protect those at highest risk, respond to any outbreaks with an overwhelming force, and we’re going to create a public health workforce throughout this country with a specific goal of reducing new diagnoses by 75% within 5 years and 90% within 10,” Giroir said.
“This pledge is nothing more than an empty gesture following a series of actions that have ignored the needs of the communities most affected by HIV,” said Scott Schoettes, HIV project director at civil rights group Lambda Legal.
Claiming the Trump administration had left HIV risk groups more exposed, activists pointed to the president’s recent acts of cutting research funding for HIV/AIDS and attempts to roll back healthcare access for vulnerable groups. Trump also had publicly stated his support for medical staff who wanted to refuse treatment to LGBT+ patients on religious grounds.
“President Trump once again presented a broad-strokes narrative that people with HIV and AIDS, including LGBTQ Americans, simply can’t trust,” tweeted Sarah Kate Ellis, chief executive of U.S. LGBT+ advocacy organisation GLAAD.
“The only way our world could end HIV transmissions and prioritize proper treatment and prevention is through an exhaustive, across-the-board investment, but President Trump’s words do not back up his administration’s actions,” she said.
February 7, 2019
PrEP & Vaginal Ring Considered for Girls in Southern Africa
In a response to rising rates of infection among adolescent girls and young women in sub-Saharan Africa, the National Institutes of Health announces the launch of a clinical trial with girls and young women aged 16–21 at five sites in Kenya, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe
Learn More.
The research project seeks to examine the safety and use of two HIV prevention tools — PrEP and a vaginal ring — for young women and girls under the title “REACH” (Reversing the Epidemic in Africa with Choices in HIV prevention).
One in four new infections in sub-Saharan Africa were women and girls aged 15-24 – despite making up 10% of the population.
“Women in less-developed countries disproportionately bear the burden in terms of ill health when facing food insecurity or a shock or disaster like drought that impacts the ability to get food or harvest food,” said Kelly Austin, associate professor of sociology at Lehigh University.
Essentially, lack of resources can lead to sexual assault, marriages of economic necessity and the resultant transmission of HIV.
Conducted for 1.5 years, the study would go on to show that the vast majority (97%) of the 247 participants used the vaginal ring and daily oral PrEP some or all of the time. Fewer than 3% of participants would use neither of the products, according to laboratory tests for adherence.
“In many ways, these results exceeded even our own expectations, yet at the same time, it’s not surprising to find that these young women have the capacity and desire to protect themselves against HIV,” explains Gonasagrie (Lulu) Nair, MBChB, MPH, REACH protocol chair, Centre for Medical Ethics and Law, Faculty of Medicine, at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. “They simply need to feel empowered and have the agency to make choices based on what they feel is right for them.”
March 4, 2019
‘London Patient’ Reportedly Second to be Cured of HIV
At the 2019 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle, researchers announce the second cure of a person with HIV.
Learn More.
According to the case report published in Nature, an HIV patient in London has successfully received stem cell transplants of CCR5-delta 32, a rare genetic mutation that appears to make a small number of people resistant to HIV by preventing the virus from attacking the immune system.
The patient was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2012, which led his doctors to suggest gene therapy to create healthy blood cells. Since receiving the treatment, he has stopped taking antiretroviral medications and his body has reportedly been free of the virus for the past 18 months.
The patient, who is not named, is the second person to have successfully received such treatment. The first was Timothy Brown, a.k.a. the “Berlin Patient,” who made headlines in 2008 when he received a similar bone marrow transplant.
March 7, 2019
Longtime AIDS Survivor Jim Chud Dies at 62
Jim Chud, who may have been among the first people in the U.S. to exhibit symptoms of HIV/AIDS, dies of sepsis, most likely after a bacterial pneumonia, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 62.
Learn More.
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.
March 18, 2019
CDC Corrects Course as Testing & Treatment Gaps Slow Progress
Of the new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2016, the vast majority — about 80% — were transmitted from the nearly 40% of people with HIV who either did not know they had HIV, or who received a diagnosis but were not receiving HIV care.
Learn More.
Published on the first day of CDC’s 2019 National HIV Prevention Conference, the Vital Signs report provides the latest data on the impact of undiagnosed and untreated HIV in the U.S.
The report underscores the critical need to expand HIV testing and treatment. A critical part of the proposed “Ending the HIV Epidemic – A Plan for America,” the proposed initiative would strive to end the HIV epidemic in 10 years by focusing first on the geographic areas with the greatest HIV burden, before expanding to reach all areas of the nation affected by HIV.
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
In the year:
Lives lost to AIDS
New diagnoses of HIV
Back to top
Figures represent estimated lives lost in the year.
For the years 1982-1986, data is based on estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. For the years 1987-2019, data is based on estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Number of U.S. deaths attributed to HIV infection is in death certificate data (per the NCHS’s Tenth Revision of the ICD [ICD-10] for selecting underlying cause of death).
The first cases of what would become known as AIDS were discovered in Los Angeles in 1981. AIDS would soon become a global epidemic. Since 1981, over 700,000 lives have been lost in the US, and approximately 40 million globally. The World Health Organization recently estimated approximately 38 million people are living with HIV across the world.
Figures represent estimated new diagnoses for the year.
The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) series is prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). For the period 1981-2007, the data for HIV diagnoses is based CDC estimates as reported in the MMWR.
For the period 2008-2019, the data for HIV diagnoses is from National HIV Surveillance System (NHSS).
HIV cases include persons with Stage 3 (AIDS) classification.