Photo credit: Mohamed Hassan
The theme for this year’s World AIDS Day, which falls on Sunday, Dec. 1, is “communities make the difference.” In fact, the struggle against HIV/AIDS has always been a community affair. In the opening years of the AIDS pandemic, while our government did its best to ignore the crisis (in fact, laughed about it), our communities throughout the country did their best to confront it, care for its victims and plead for help. Our response to AIDS forged the community’s individual components into the LGBT alliance of queers of all persuasions and their allies.
Milwaukee is a perfect example of the confluence of local activism and resources that set the response to HIV/AIDS in motion.
On the health front, in 1985, BestD Clinic, a small facility created a decade earlier as an internal community health care resource, established the Milwaukee AIDS Project. It would evolve into the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin (ARCW) and become one of the leading HIV organizations of its type in the nation. Meanwhile, through mergers with similar facilities in Denver and St. Louis, ARCW has expanded its sacred mission of providing quality care to thousands of clients who require it to live healthy lives. Reflecting that ever-broadening reach, just this week, ARCW announced its new name, Vivent Health.
My own activism began at ARCW. When, in late 1994, I walked into the ARCW’s Downtown offices, I had merely intended to make a donation to its upcoming Make-A-Promise Dinner and Auction, one of the organization’s main fundraising events. I left as a volunteer and Chair of the auction, a position I held for the next five years. The staff member in charge of my first Make-A-Promise was himself HIV+ and suffering from its effects. He would later die of AIDS. I recently flipped through the 1998 Make-A-Promise program. What amazed me while I took my proverbial trip down memory lane were the columns upon columns of familiar names listed as donors, sponsors and participants. If anything speaks of a community making a difference, it is that document. Of course, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Over those first decades of our response to AIDS, everyone seemed to be involved and many are still actively supporting the cause today.
Elsewhere in the community, bars and the city’s many LGBTQ organizations held fundraising events. Drag queens played their part, as did the LGBTQ press. In 1990, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) formed as a very vocal and demonstrative political wing to break recalcitrant government inaction vis-à-vis the AIDS crisis. It succeeded.
And all the while, dealing with those horrific deaths were volunteer hospice workers who held the hands of the dying whose families had abandoned them.
There was even an arts component to help raise awareness of HIV/AIDS. The Milwaukee Gay Arts Center produced Tony Kushner’s AIDS drama, Angels in America, and its first art show displayed Milwaukee-relevant panels of the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt. Activist-philanthropist Joe Pabst donated art works—Taryn Simon’s photo “Live HIV” and the controversial papal portrait in condoms, “Eggs Benedict” by Niki Johnson—to the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM). He also underwrote an AIDS Quilt display at MAM.
Communities do make a difference. Our LGBTQ community always does.
