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THE POLITICAL CULTURE of AFRICAN AMERICAN AIDS ACTIVISM a Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

THE POLITICAL CULTURE of AFRICAN AMERICAN AIDS ACTIVISM a Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

“DON’T WE DIE TOO?”: THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN AIDS A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

by Dan Royles January 2014

Examining Committee Members: Beth Bailey, Advisory Chair, History David Farber, History Bryant Simon, History Heather Thompson, History Alondra Nelson, External Member, , Sociology

© Copyright 2013 by Dan Royles

All Rights Reserved

€

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ABSTRACT

This project reveals the untold story of African AIDS activists’ fight against HIV and AIDS in communities. I describe the ways that, from 1985 to

2003, the both challenged public and private granting agencies to provide funds for HIV prevention efforts aimed specifically at black communities, and challenged homophobic attitudes among that, they believed, perpetuated the spread of the disease through stigma and silence. At the same time, they connected the epidemic among African Americans to and inequality within the , as well as to the pandemic raging throughout the and in the developing world. In this way, I argue, they contested and renegotiated the social and spatial boundaries of black community in the context of a devastating epidemic. At the same time, I also argue, they borrowed political strategies from earlier moments of black political organizing, as they brought key questions of diversity, equality, and public to bear on HIV and

AIDS. As they fought for resources with which to stop HIV and AIDS from spreading within their communities, they struggled over the place of blackness amid the shifting politics of race, class, and health in post-Civil Rights America. Adding their story to the emerging narrative of the history of the epidemic thus yields a more expansive and radical picture of AIDS activism in the United States.

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To those who have fought, and those who continue to fight.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Throughout this project, I have been blessed with generous support from a number of institutions. The Department of History at Temple University became my academic home in 2007, and gave me a place to hone my skills as a historian while providing me with fellowships, travel grants, and teaching gigs along the way. My committee members—David Farber, Alondra Nelson, Bryant Simon, and Heather

Thompson—offered invaluable advice and direction throughout the research and writing process. I must also thank the Center for the Humanities at Temple for providing me with generous financial support over the course of two years, as well as biweekly seminars that helped me to see my work in a broader interdisciplinary context. The coffee wasn't bad, either. I am also grateful to the Center for Historical Research at The Ohio State

University, and particularly to John Brooke and Chris Otter, for welcoming me and giving me the time and space to devote my full attention to writing and interviewing.

Over the past six years, my advisor Beth Bailey has guided, challenged, and supported me as I struggled to define and carry out this project. I can’t imagine a mentor who is more helpful and hands-on than she is, and this project has many more “people doing things” because of her writing feedback. She has also been a tremendous advocate, which is evident in the amount of departmental and external support I was able to secure throughout this process.

Thanks also to the Franklin Research Center for African and African

American History and Culture and the Human Sexuality Collection in the Division of

Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University for providing me with research

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travel funding. Steven Fullwood, Josue Garcia, Rebekah Kim, Jennifer Thompson,

Wesley Chenault, Susan Malsbury, Tom Whitehead, and Brenda Marston helped me find excellent archival material at various institutions.

Fellow graduate students at Temple at once wonderful colleagues and treasured friends. Roberta Meek, Susan Brandt, Abby Perkiss, Matt Johnson, and Brenna

O'Rourke made the experience far more pleasurable than it would have been otherwise.

Lindsay Helfman, Alex Elkins, and Melanie Newport saw me through tough moments, and listened to more than their fair share of dissertation-related angst.

Other friends made my life happier just by being in it. Meg Welsh was an awesome roommate. Evie Caldwell and April Burnette Caldwell have made the past half of my life immeasurably better by being a part of it. Dressing up with Sarah Sridasome for Becky Bamberger’s holiday party is the highlight of my year. Naoko Kozuki has known me since we were eight years old, which is a testament to her fortitude and grace.

I have laughed more with Jenny Thai than maybe anyone else on . Jacqui Shine, you are a guru—never stop doing you.

Throughout this process, my family has been wonderfully supportive, even when they didn’t quite understand what I was doing, or why. I could not have asked for a better gift than my aunt Nadine’s sense of humor. My grandfather Kent’s stentorian voice will be good for large lecture halls. My grandmother Jean has always been generosity and unconditional love incarnate. My stepmother, Leslie, has been both a parent and a friend, and is always willing to split a bottle of wine and have a deep conversation. I could not be more proud of my sisters, Annelise and Renee, and I can’t wait to see them become adults. My parents, Melanie and Ed, have taught me innumerable lessons, both explicitly

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and by example, about doing what you love, doing it well, and doing it with compassion.

They’re who I want to be when I grow up.

In the last year of this project, Nick came into my life. He encouraged me, kept me on track, and made me countless dinners when I couldn’t spare the time or mental energy to feed myself. He’s made me happier than I ever thought I could be, and I love him more than I thought possible.

Finally, I must thank all of the oral history narrators who generously shared their stories with me. I hope that I have done them justice here.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT...... iii

DEDICATION...... iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v

INTRODUCTION

MORE THAN MAGIC...... ix

CHAPTER

1. “A DISEASE, NOT A LIFESTYLE”: RACE AND AIDS IN THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE ...... 1

2. “BLACK MEN LOVING BLACK MEN”: AIDS AND BLACK GAY MEN’S POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS...... 52

3. “WE’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A FEW THOUSAND YEARS”: THE NATION OF ’S AFRICAN AIDS CURE...... 92

4. “THERE IS A BALM IN GILEAD”: AIDS ACTIVISM AND THE ...... 127

5. “STOP MEDICAL FROM TO SOUTH AFRICA”: ACT UP PHILADELPHIA AND GLOBAL TREATMENT ACCESS ...... 173

CONCLUSION...... 224

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 230

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INTRODUCTION

MORE THAN MAGIC

“Because of the HIV virus I have obtained, I will have to retire from the Lakers today,” Earvin “Magic” Johnson told a room full of reporters on November 7, 1991.

Outside the Great Western Forum, where the press conference was in progress, fans gathered to grieve the loss of the beloved star. McClendon of

Inglewood told Richard Stevenson of , “I came here because I was shocked... I wanted to actually see if it was true. It’s still hard to believe. , of all people. He’s the last person I would expect to be HIV positive.”1

Johnson, a gifted and determined player with a mega-watt smile to match his athletic prowess, cut a larger than life figure at six feet nine inches tall, on and off the court. His popularity and rivalry with the Celtics’ Larry Bird had helped revive the flagging National Basketball Association during the 1980s, bringing him millions of adoring fans and millions of dollars in product endorsement deals. Although rumors of his bisexuality swirled around gay enclaves like Key West and West Hollywood, where some residents reportedly sported t-shirts with the phrase “I love basketball; I had a

Magic Johnson,” Johnson himself insisted that he had contracted the virus through promiscuous sex with women, not men. Sexual gossip notwithstanding, when AIDS activists, basketball players, and Johnson himself emphasized that “If Magic Johnson can get the AIDS virus, then anybody can get it,” they stressed precisely how different

1 Richard W. Stevenson, “Magic Johnson Ends His Career, Saying He Has AIDS Infection,” New York Times, November 8, 1991, page A1.

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Johnson, an African American paragon of athletic masculinity, seemed from the most common images of people with AIDS—skeletal white gay men wasting away in the hospital or protesting in the street, and to a lesser extent, junkies who had shared needles while desperate for a fix. In short, though Johnson admitted to sleeping around, he appeared distinctly different from those whom many Americans saw as deviants who had earned their fate.2

AIDS had first been identified in 1981 in New York and among gay men who arrived at hospitals with the rare opportunistic infections Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystic pneumonia, which generally affected people whose immune systems had been severely depressed by old age or cancer treatment. That summer, as word of a deadly new disease passed through urban gay communities, the New York Times reported the possibility of an emergent epidemic under the headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41

Homosexuals.” For the most part, urban gay communities had been largely white, due to racism among white gays, homophobia among African Americans, and racial segregation in urban areas. As the death count rose, these communities organized in response, in what would be the initial wave of AIDS activism. Thus, since the first AIDS service organizations arose from the social networks of white gay men, the organizations themselves tended to be staffed by white volunteers, supported by funds from white donors, and oriented to the needs of white clients. Their visibility reinforced the sense

2 Michael Fumento, “Do You Believe in Magic?” The American Spectator, February 1992, p. 16; Kevin Johnson quoted in public service announcement for Magic Johnson’s Athletes against AIDS. See “Magic’s Athletes Against AIDS,” [n.d.], video clip, accessed July 27, 2012, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVuvN24U18o; Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness (University of , 1999), 166–7.

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that AIDS was in fact a disease of white gay men, even as doctors found cases of the disease among hemophiliacs and injection drug users, as well as their heterosexual partners and children. As groups of people with AIDS and their allies, most of them white, cared for one another, gathered at candlelight vigils to honor the dead, and later staged dramatic protests against the lack of a significant federal response to AIDS, they formed the public face of the disease.3

Meanwhile, the epidemic also raged in America’s black communities, where it was much less visible to the news media, policy makers, and even to the communities

3 Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” New York Times, July 3, 1981, page A20; Charles Nero, “Why Are Gay Ghettoes White?” in Black Queer Studies: a Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson (Raleigh: Press, 2005), 228–47. Doctors and scientists reinforced the association between AIDS and gay men, in part as a result of their own bias. Researchers aggressively pursued a “lifestyle hypothesis” of AIDS etiology, positing that drug use and repeated exposure to sexually transmitted infections had overloaded gay men’s immune systems to the point of failure. In , for example, doctors’ focus on patients’ numerous sexual partners and drug use obscured the significant presence of as a cofactor for disease among the first reported cases in San Francisco, which included a number of homeless male prostitutes. They would later recount that those early patients had been healthy young men struck down suddenly by crippling illness, even though a significant number had presented with pre-existing medical conditions related to their marginal existence. Moreover, doctors shaped the initial clinical definition of AIDS based on the opportunistic infections most common in gay men, which may have masked the prevalence of cases among African Americans in public health reporting by excluding women from official statistics of people with AIDS. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally revised the case definition to more accurately represent the extent of AIDS among women in 1993, twelve years into the recognized epidemic. See Gerald Oppenheimer, “In the Eye of the Storm,” in AIDS: the Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, 267–92; Michelle Cochrane, When AIDS Began: San Francisco and the Making of an Epidemic (New York: Routledge, 2004); Curt Sobolewski, “A Study of the 1993 AIDS Definition Revision” (M.A Thesis: Baylor University, 1996). Michael Scarce also examines the “discovery” of “gay bowel syndrome” in the 1970s as a result of homophobia embedded in the construction on medical knowledge. See Scarce, Smearing the Queer: Medical Bias in the Healthcare of Gay Men (New York: Haworth, 1999).

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themselves. In the year that Johnson announced his HIV status, the Centers for Disease

Control reported 14,162 AIDS cases among African Americans, making up almost a third of the national caseload, even though African Americans represented only about 12% of the total population. Whereas among HIV generally spread through gay men’s sexual networks, in black communities rates of heterosexual and perinatal transmission were much more common. Some ostensibly straight African American men carried on affairs with other men, and those who contracted the virus sometimes passed it on to their wives or girlfriends. Injection drug use also accounted for a significant number of HIV infections among African Americans, especially in impoverished communities where low access to education, employment, and health care puts people at risk for substance abuse. Women, whether infected by a sexual partner or a shared syringe, could pass HIV to their children either in utero or through breastfeeding. Nevertheless,

American news outlets generally failed to acknowledge racial disparities in the epidemic on the ground in their overall coverage of AIDS.4

Once Magic Johnson announced that he had HIV, newspapers, magazines, and television journalists took greater notice of the AIDS epidemic among African

Americans–or at least in one or two African Americans. Six months after Johnson’s press conference, black legend went public with his own personal battle against AIDS; he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during a 1983 heart

4 Cohen, 164. By 1997, a year after the National Institutes of Health announced that AZT treatment for pregnant HIV-positive women could dramatically reduce the risk of transmission in utero, African Americans accounted for well over half of those children with AIDS believed to have been infected through an HIV-positive mother. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report 9 no. 1, 1997 Midyear Edition, Table 6, http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pdf/statistics_hivsur91.pdf.

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surgery. To the extent that the New York Times and the nightly network news discussed

AIDS among African Americans, they focused on these two celebrated athletes, rarely discussing the wider epidemic in the nation’s black communities.5

Despite the lack of media attention to AIDS in black communities, by the middle

1980s a small but growing number of African Americans knew firsthand that AIDS was much more than a white, gay disease. Some medical professionals, such as Philadelphia nurse Rashidah Hassan or Harlem immunologist Pernessa Seele, had seen with AIDS who did not fit media stereotypes come through their hospital doors. Others, including the New Yorkers who formed Gay Men of African Descent, had seen friends and lovers die agonizing deaths from AIDS, without the comfort of help either from

AIDS service organizations oriented to white gay men or from traditional support systems of church and family. Over time, a diverse constellation of activists—black community organizers, writers, leaders, church pastors, and recovering drug users—would pursue different grassroots approaches to slowing the spread of HIV and AIDS among African Americans. The strategies that they chose in the fight against the epidemic reveal a great deal about how African Americans responded to the twin problems of race and class in the United States near the end of the twentieth century. The language, symbols, and tactics that activists deployed in their efforts to mobilize other

African Americans to fight HIV and AIDS point to different ideas about the nature of black community and identity, but also to the way that people in black communities saw themselves in relation to the society of the United States as a whole, and to other black

5 William C. Rhoden, “An Emotional Ashe Says that He Has AIDS,” New York Times, April 9, 1992, B9; Cohen, 159–85.

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people throughout the world. Hence, I analyze the meanings embedded in prevention and education messages produced by African Americans, as well as the claims they made on

“mainstream” AIDS service organizations, black community institutions, private granting agencies, and government actors.

African American AIDS activism represents only one of the most recent episodes in a longer history of health and disease politics among black communities in the United

States. Earlier health activists found the disease experience to be a useful rhetorical tool for challenging the injustice of racial discrimination, albeit with setbacks and complications. In Progressive Era , black health reformers used anti- tuberculosis campaigns to draw attention to squalid housing conditions for poor African

Americans in segregated Baltimore. Appealing to whites’ self-interest, they argued that although an outbreak of epidemic tuberculosis might start in the city’s black neighborhoods, the “savage horde of diseases… laugh at the color line,” and white

Baltimoreans would eventually be threatened.6 Ultimately, the city pursued punitive surveillance and quarantine measures and razed the infamous “lung block” of Lower

Druid Hill, a predominantly black neighborhood, without offering affordable options to replace the lost housing stock. Later on, in the much different context of the and

1970s, activists found somewhat greater success in raising awareness of sickle cell anemia which, with its frequent bouts of paralyzing pain, offered a potent metonymy for the history of African American suffering. Discussions of sickle cell as a theretofore

6 Constitution, 1914, quoted in Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr., Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2009), 160.

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“neglected disease” intersected with consciousness-raising strategies common across social movements at the time, and offered white Americans “an act of symbolic redemption” in recognizing the hereditary condition with all of its metaphorical heft.7

At around the same time, the was engaged in its own little- recognized grassroots health work, in which they drew on the long history of black health activism. The Panthers employed tactics similar to those of their forebears as they built their own health institutions in a handful of African American communities around the country, as they tried to break down de facto segregation in medical services, and as they intervened in scientific conversations about the biological basis of race itself. As sociologist Alondra Nelson has shown, the Panthers pursued a distinctive program of

“social health,” by which they linked the corporeal well being of individual African

Americans to the social justice interests of the larger black community. The Panthers’ approach—challenging racial marginalization as a whole through specific programs to address everyday health concerns—resonates through the work of African American

AIDS activists as they connected the spread of HIV among African Americans to forms of racial, economic, and sexual marginalization perpetrated by white society and within black communities both in the United States and throughout the African Diaspora.

African American AIDS activists drew on this history of what Nelson calls the “long medical ,” using the experience of disease to claim political

7 Roberts; Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001).

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belonging in the modern United States in the midst of a globalized, sexually transmitted pandemic.8

In general, African American AIDS activists followed two main, parallel approaches. On the one hand, activists demanded that at least some of the resources offered by public agencies and private foundations to fight the epidemic be directed specifically to black communities. On the other hand, they confronted homophobic attitudes among African Americans, which contributed to silence and stigma surrounding

HIV, and, activists believed, promoted transmission of the virus. In pursuit of both agendas, they reached back to the long medical civil rights movement for models to guide their efforts.

These earlier approaches to black health politics led African American AIDS activists to connect the epidemic in their communities to the social determinants of health, or the ways that the distribution of power and resources in a society affects the

8 Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: the Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Press, 2011).

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health of its members.9 They knew that as long as unemployment, incarceration, and physically deteriorating homes and neighborhoods threatened the everyday lives of many

9 Academic research on the role of social determinants of health in exacerbating the AIDS epidemic among African Americans is extensive. In general, African Americans had far less access to adequate health care than whites during the 20th century, and the closing of public hospitals during the 1970s and 1980s and shrinking social safety net under President hit urban black communities especially hard. Public policies, including the War on Drugs, the attendant mass incarceration of African Americans, and the physical destruction of poor urban neighborhoods have also exacerbated the AIDS epidemic in black communities. As lawmakers and police cracked down on city residents caught with clean syringes and other drug paraphernalia, intravenous drug users (many of them African American) responded by sharing or renting “works” (slang for a needle and plunger) from dealers or at the shooting galleries where they got high. Thus, escalated policing in black neighborhoods both inadvertently drove the spread of HIV and other blood-borne illnesses among intravenous drug users and limited the range of possible public health interventions once researchers identified this avenue of infection. Whereas needle exchange programs have proven effective at both reducing HIV transmission in drug users and directing people to counseling and treatment programs, policymakers in the United States have resisted implementing such measures under the logic that needle exchange promotes further drug use. For an overview of mass incarceration and its other consequences, see Heather Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (December 2010): 703–34. Warwick Anderson offered a brief history of the fight for needle exchange in , including black leaders’ opposition to such a program, in “The New York Needle Trial: Politics of Public Health in the Age of AIDS,” American Journal of Public Health 81, no. 11 (November 1991): 1506–17; while Lawrence O. Gostin et al surveyed the laws governing needle possession around the country in “Prevention of HIV/AIDS and Other Blood-Borne Disease among Injection Drug Users,” Journal of the American Medical Association 277, no. 1 (January 1997), 53–62.

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In general, punitive drug laws and aggressive inner city police enforcement have produced ballooning prison populations made up of disproportionate numbers of African Americans. Once in prison, arrestees found themselves confined to a space in which sex behind bars may have been relatively common, but condoms and educational materials about HIV and AIDS were rarely available. The prison itself thus arguably fostered the efficient spread of the virus among inmates, who upon release may have then spread it to their sexual partners. However, many incarcerated men and women with HIV entered prison already infected; for them, the initial diagnosis came from being tested behind bars. The more far-reaching effect of mass incarceration on AIDS in communities of color has likely come from damage to social networks and sexual relationships. The gender imbalance in African American communities produced by mass incarceration put women at a distinct disadvantage in demanding protected, monogamous sex from their partners, giving rise to sexual networks dense with multiple and concurrent partnerships that spread HIV with deadly efficiency. Women may also forego marriage, which can serve as a check on sexual promiscuity, because their male partners have trouble finding legitimate employment with a criminal record. Finally, widespread arrest and imprisonment, not to mention policing and harassment, inflicted lasting psychological and emotional trauma on even those who remain in the community, with long-term implications for drug use and sexual behavior. See Adaora A. Adimora et al., “Social Context of Sexual Relationships among Rural African Americans,” Sexually Transmitted Diseases 28, no. 2 (February 2001), 69–76; Lisa E. Manhart et al, “Sex Partner Concurrency: Measurement, Prevalence, and Correlates among Urban 18–39-Year-Olds,” Sexually Transmitted Diseases ( 2002), 133–43; Adimora et al., “Concurrent Partnerships among Rural African Americans with Recently Reported Heterosexually Transmitted HIV Infection,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 34, no. 4 (December 2003), 423–9; Adimora et al., “Heterosexually Transmitted HIV Infection among African Americans in North Carolina,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 41, no. 5 (April 2006), 616–23; Theodore M. Hammett and Abigail Drachman- Jones, “HIV/AIDS, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and Incarceration among Women: National and Southern Perspectives,” Sexually Transmitted Diseases 33, no. 7 (July supplement 2006), S17–S22; Maria R. Khan, et al., “Incarceration and Risky Sexual Partnerships in a Southern U.S. City,” Journal of Urban Health 85, no. 1 (2007), 100–13; Maria R. Khan, et al., “Incarceration and High-Risk Sex Partnerships among Men in the United States,” Journal of Urban Health 86, no. 4 (2009), 584–601.

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in black communities, preventing HIV would remain at the bottom of their clients’

Scholars working at the intersection of city planning and public health have argued that the urban policy during the 1980s had a similarly disruptive effect on inner city communities. During the 1970s, New York City mayor John Lindsay implemented a policy of “planned shrinkage,” cutting essential services, like fire protection, to sections of the city that had been partly abandoned. These areas comprised some of the poorest sections of the city, populated mostly by African and Hispanic Americans. Lindsay’s policy of literally letting entire neighborhoods burn to the ground engendered migration and social dislocation on the order of those found in war zones. As community ties disintegrated, substance abuse and frequent sex proliferated, likely spreading HIV and other sexually transmitted infections throughout poor communities of color. Moreover, the burned-out buildings left by planned shrinkage provided intravenous drug users with accessible spaces to use as “shooting galleries,” in which needle-sharing among addicts offered another means of HIV transmission. See Rodrick Wallace, “Urban Desertification, Public Health and Public Order: ‘Planned Shrinkage,’ Violent Death, Substance Abuse and AIDS in ,” Social Science & Medicine 31 no. 7 (1990), 801–13; “Social Disintegration and the Spread of AIDS: Thresholds for Propagation along ‘Sociogeographic’ Networks,” Social Science & Medicine 33 no. 10 (1991), 1155– 62; Wallace and Mindy Fullilove, “AIDS Deaths in the Bronx 1983–1988L Spatiotemporal Analysis from a Sociogeographic Perspective,” Environment and Planning A 23 (1991), 1701–23; Wallace et al, “Will AIDS Be Contained within U.S. Minority Urban Populations?” Social Science & Medicine 39 no. 8 (1994), 1051–62; Rodrick Wallace and Kristin McCarthy, “The Unstable Public-Health Ecology of the New York Metropolitan Region: Implications for Accelerated National Spread of Emerging Infection,” Environment and Planning A 39 (2007), 1181–92. He published some of this research for a popular audience with Deborah Wallace in A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and Public Health Crumbled (: Verso, 1998).

Even for those communities left more or less physically intact by neglect from policymakers, the residential segregation of people of color produced racially segregated sexual networks. Since people most often (but certainly not always) seek sexual partners from within their social world, the disproportionate prevalence of HIV in black communities has become a self-perpetuating phenomenon since African Americans are simply more likely to have sex with a partner who is HIV positive. Moreover, those who have few sexual partners are still more likely than whites to encounter someone with a large number of partners, making them part of a much larger sexual network than their circle of immediate sexual contacts. See John L. Peterson, et al, “Multiple Sexual Partners among Black in High-Risk Cities,” Perspectives 25, no. 6 (November–December 1993), 263–7; Adimora, Victor J. Schoenbach, Michelle A. Floris-Moore, “Ending the Epidemic of Heterosexual HIV Transmission among African Americans,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 37 no. 5 (November 2009), 468– 71.

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priorities. By connecting the epidemic to a wide range of social, economic, and psychological ills, they hoped to focus other African Americans’ political energies on stopping the spread of AIDS and to improve the overall material conditions of afflicted communities. At times they framed the AIDS epidemic among African Americans as part of the larger pandemic among people in the global south, where colonial exploitation had created similar conditions of mass poverty and underdevelopment, engendering the rapid proliferation of HIV as well as overall ill health. In emphasizing these commonalities, activists issued implicit criticism of the treatment of African Americans in the United

States by highlighting the forms of marginalization and inequality similar to those experienced by people throughout the developing world. At the same time, these claims created the opportunity for new or stronger solidarities with those suffering under similar conditions around the globe.

In so doing, African American AIDS activists brought key questions of diversity, equality, and public welfare to bear on the deadly epidemic. Such questions had been forced to the forefront of American politics by the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and

60s, and the ensuing rights revolution of the 1970s. At the same time, they moved AIDS politics beyond the quest for biomedical solutions by focusing on the ways that segregation, poverty, racial discrimination, and homophobia exacerbated the epidemic in black communities. Adding African American activists to the larger story of AIDS activism thus yields a more radical picture of the grassroots politics surrounding the epidemic in the United States, and offers a lens through which to examine the changing politics of race, class, and health during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.

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As African American AIDS activists drew on older models of organizing to fight the epidemic in their communities, they also found a new language for their demands in the growing popularity of cultural competence in public health and medicine. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, health care educators began to examine the ways that the culture of medicine in the United States, which has been predominantly white, middle class, and focused on biomedical solutions to health problems, alienates poor and minority patients, leading to the sort of racial and ethnic health disparities evident in the

AIDS epidemic. As the idea of cultural competence gained explanatory power throughout the 1980s and 1990s, African American AIDS activists positioned themselves as uniquely qualified to educate black communities about reducing their risk for HIV and AIDS.

They argued that only culturally competent messages—those produced with black communities in mind, by those who knew their values, language, and everyday activities—would be at all effective in educating African Americans about AIDS. They also insisted that, for black communities, the messenger mattered as much as the message itself. Due to both individual encounters with racism in medical settings and the powerful collective memory of centuries of medical exploitation of black people in the United

States, activists argued, African Americans likely would not trust warnings about the dangers of needle sharing or unprotected sex if such messages were delivered by white officials or agencies. Hence, African American AIDS activists challenged what they saw as the dominance of AIDS service organizations staffed primarily by white gay men and their lesbian or straight allies, charging that those groups would be unable to effectively reach black communities, where the epidemic would have the worst impact.

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In order to develop culturally competent HIV prevention programs for black communities, African American AIDS activists had to first define the boundaries and contours of black culture. Some turned to the social networks and institutions central to

African Americans’ lives, and in particular to black churches, as channels for delivering messages about HIV and AIDS. However, some churches and ministers were ambivalent about involved in HIV prevention. Many faith leaders discouraged open discussion of sexuality and illicit behavior or denied that some of their parishioners were gay or used drugs. Nevertheless, the church had long been the center of the political and social life of African American communities around the country, and AIDS activists saw the reach and strength of its authority as indispensable to their efforts. In order to bring effective HIV prevention to African Americans through the church, AIDS activists had expand notions of black community and identity to make room for gay men.

Many African American AIDS activists also believed that Africa, as a place of ancestral origin, could provide a set of common values and symbols to unite and educate people of African descent around the goal of stopping HIV/AIDS. Some drew on the nguzo saba, the seven principles outlined by in 1966 to guide the pan-

Africanist holiday of , to formulate Afrocentric HIV prevention and education programs. Others looked to Africa for an outright cure to the disease, believing that the continents’ doctors could produce AIDS remedies according to holistic healing principles, which would be more effective than the toxic medications produced by

Western scientists. Still some others carried their HIV prevention programs across the

Atlantic, advising health workers and agencies in Africa based on the lessons they had learned through their work in the United States. Thus Africa could be a resource for

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activists crafting HIV interventions or looking for new medical treatments for black communities within the United States, as well as a target for the energies of those who sought to expand their prevention programs throughout the Diaspora.

As they addressed AIDS, a "cross-cutting issue" that highlighted divisions and divergent interests among African Americans with respect to sexuality and illicit behavior, African American AIDS activists redrew the contours of black politics. Some claimed inclusion for those who had been marginalized; some placed the epidemic among

African Americans within an array of global contexts; some did both. By confronting the epidemic on the terrain of culture and community, they challenged and renegotiated the meaning of blackness itself, and in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. At the same time, as they fought for resources with which to stop HIV and AIDS from spreading within their communities, they struggled over the place of blackness amid the shifting politics of race, class, and health in post-Civil Rights America.

In spite of a voluminous body of literature on the politics of AIDS, scholars have generally neglected African American activism, which has similarly lingered at the margins of popular consciousness of the epidemic. Some academics that have addressed

African American responses to AIDS sought to explain the lack of response to the epidemic from certain institutions, or the dearth of activism in a particular locale. For example, in her book The Boundaries of Blackness, political scientist Cathy Cohen lamented the reluctance of major black political organizations like the NAACP and the

Urban League to take up AIDS as a political issue. She read “the breakdown of black politics” in their inactivity, as their unwillingness to address an epidemic disease linked

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to gay sex, drug use, and poverty belied the apparent unity of African Americans around certain political goals which, she argued, had characterized earlier periods of struggle. In contrast, I have focused my analysis on organizing at the grassroots level, describing

African American AIDS activism where it took place rather than endeavoring to explain its absence elsewhere. Certainly, the actors who populate this story worked at the margins of black social and sexual respectability, and thus Cohen’s framework of secondary marginalization, which she used to describe the fracture of black politics along lines of class, gender, and sexuality, remains useful for thinking about the relationship of black gay and same sex-desiring men to both white gay men and straight African Americans.

And yet, her account missed much of the HIV education and political organizing around the epidemic that took place within black communities. By shifting focus from the entrenched national institutions that anchored her study to the grassroots level, we find a reimagining of black politics rather than their collapse.

On the other hand, in his study of AIDS politics in North Carolina historian

Stephen Inrig argued that the efforts of AIDS activists, both black and white, to effectively reach out to African Americans foundered on racial tensions and the poverty of many of the state’s black communities. Perhaps African Americans undertook HIV prevention programs outside of the state’s Research Triangle, in which Inrig located much of his study. Perhaps efforts within North Carolina’s black communities to stop the spread of HIV have escaped the historical record. In any case, the actors in the story I tell grappled with racism and poverty on a daily basis, but chose to organize around these

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problems rather than yield to their intractability, and did not sit idly by as AIDS devastated their communities.10

Throughout this study I use “African American AIDS activism” to describe this range of efforts to combat the spread of HIV and AIDS within black communities in the

United States. The phrase “AIDS activism” likely conjures images of dramatic street theater rather than an anthology of prose exploring the gay black experience or the rather mundane act of offering condoms to patrons of a beauty salon. However, the actors in this story understood that AIDS in the black community was exacerbated by histories of oppression based on race, class, gender, and sexuality, and their responses to the epidemic thus contained critiques of such intersecting forms of marginalization. Although historian Jennifer Brier uses the terms “AIDS work” and “AIDS workers” to include both

“activism” (meaning protest to effect policy change) and service (meaning care provision to people with AIDS, or prevention education to the broader public), actors in this story saw service provision itself was a political act. For this reason, “activism” encompasses the complex and diverse responses of those African Americans who organized to stop the spread of AIDS in their communities.11

In this project, I use five examples of grassroots efforts to slow the spread of HIV and AIDS through black communities in order to illustrate the scope and complexity of

10 Stephen Inrig, North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS: Advocacy, Politics, and Race in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

11 Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2009.

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African American AIDS activism. Each of these grassroot groups adapted a different organizing framework from earlier black political struggles to the exigencies of the new and deadly epidemic. Taken together, the efforts of these five groups demonstrate the continued salience of a range of tactics and visions of political community drawn from earlier struggles, including the long medical civil rights and movements.

These stories thus challenge the idea of the post-Reagan era as one marked by increasing and mass withdrawal from public life.12 The chapters proceed in a rough chronology from the earliest responses to the epidemic to the most recent, although to a large extent many of the stories overlap temporally.

Chapter one explores the tensions in Philadelphia between established, largely gay and white, AIDS service organizations and the African American activists who challenged what they saw as inadequate efforts to reach out to the communities of color disproportionately affected by HIV and AIDS. In Philadelphia, where African Americans comprised over half of the city’s people with AIDS, black activists challenged both the

Philadelphia AIDS Task Force and its parent organization, the gay-oriented Philadelphia

Community Health Alternatives, to address the epidemic in the city’s communities of color. They claimed that, although PATF and PCHA absorbed most of the meager funds then available for AIDS education and prevention, the groups spent the bulk of their resources on services for white gay men in the downtown “gayborhood,” rather than the

12 Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003); Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980’s (Princeton University Press, 2007); Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2008); cf. Michael Stewart-Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (Hill and Wang, 2013).

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black gay men, intravenous drug users, and women who lived in other sections of the

“City of Neighborhoods” and made up a disproportionate number of local cases. Spatial segregation in Philadelphia, they claimed, thus made it nearly impossible for the city’s black residents to receive HIV prevention messages bankrolled by the city.

Led by Rashidah Hassan, a black Muslim nurse and former vice president of the

PATF, like-minded professionals and activists formed Educating Blacks About

Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI), one of the nation’s first African American AIDS service organizations, as a counterweight to the largely white gay AIDS groups. Hassan and her BEBASHI colleagues sought community control for African Americans of prevention efforts aimed at the city’s black communities. Arguing that public funds should be used to benefit the greatest possible number of city residents, they also fought to bring local spending on HIV prevention in line with the demographics of the epidemic.

Although activists of color in cities across the country similarly pushed for outreach and prevention efforts specifically at their communities, in Philadelphia racial issues fractured the city’s AIDS activist community with particular vitriol. There, African American activists’ fight for funding to combat AIDS in the city’s black community built on long- standing tensions of race and class, revealing the deep connections among space, identity, resources in Philadelphia.

Chapter two describes the emergence of black gay men’s political activism through the story of Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), an New York AIDS service organization. Deeply influenced by feminists of color such as Audre Lorde and Barbara

Smith, they integrated consciousness-raising activities into their HIV prevention programs. They also explored the ways in which their identities as both black and gay

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intersected to produce a unique set of social, cultural, and psychological pressures which, they argued, eroded black gay men’s self-esteem, driving them to the sexual behaviors and drug use that put them at risk for HIV infection. When the epidemic “hit” the United

States in 1981, many black gay men who mostly or exclusively slept with other black men saw themselves as insulated from risk of the new disease because the people with

AIDS represented in mainstream media were gay white men.

However, by the middle of the 1980s few could deny that gay men of color were also dying from AIDS. On the one hand, they fought against homophobia in black communities and racism among white gay men, in part by highlighting the role of black gay men in earlier struggles for African American and gay rights. On the other hand, they sought to undo the prejudicial attitudes that many black gay men had internalized by asserting themselves as integral parts of both the larger African American and gay communities. They insisted that black gay men required interventions designed specifically with them in mind, rather than those designed for white gay men but transposed for minority consumers. To this end, GMAD designed nationally popular HIV education programs, centered on affirming images of black gay men, which equipped participants with skills to negotiate and eroticize safer sex. In this way, they group worked to ameliorate black gay men’s psychological ills at the same time that they tried to shape community norms around condom use and sexual practices. This simultaneous assertion of inclusion and difference formed the crux of an emergent black gay men’s political consciousness, overlapping but distinct from heterosexual African Americans and white gays and lesbians alike.

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Chapter examines the controversy surrounding Kemron, an inexpensive AIDS drug developed and tested in Kenya in the late 1980s and subsequently championed by the Nation of Islam as an effective treatment for AIDS among people of African descent.

Kenyan scientists insisted that Kemron was an inexpensive, super-effective AIDS treatment with few side effects that would serve as an affordable alternative to the handful of costly drugs that had been approved in the United States and Europe to treat the disease. However, due to the unconventional design of their clinical trial and the inability of the World Health Organization to replicate the Kenyans’ results, Western scientists dismissed their claims. While the mass-market press relayed this skepticism about Kemron’s alleged efficacy, black newspapers and some African American leaders spread word of the drug, pressuring the National Institutes of Health to fund a clinical trial. Officials from the Nation of Islam, who led the campaign for a clinical trial, framed the epidemic within a cosmology of racial antagonism, claiming that white scientists had produced HIV and AIDS to kill people of color worldwide and prevent the economic ascendance of post-colonial Africa. They claimed that Kemron, which they touted as a holistic remedy in line with traditional healing practices and evidence of Africa’s legacy of scientific ingenuity, was the casualty of a coordinated campaign by Western scientists and the pharmaceutical companies that bankrolled them to keep the drug off the market.

Finally, the plan to market Kemron fit into the Nation’s larger strategy of promoting black economic self-determination, since the group’s leaders held the American distribution rights for the drug and stood to profit from its success.

Chapter four describes the efforts of The Balm in Gilead, an organization that helps churches throughout the African Diaspora provide pastoral care to people affected

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by AIDS. In 1989 Pernessa Seele, then an immunologist at Harlem Hospital, began organizing local African American ministers to address the epidemic among their parishioners. She created the Harlem Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, a convention of African American religious leaders, to harness their political energies in preventing the further spread of HIV within black communities. Although Seele often confronted entrenched homophobia from ministers and congregations in the course of her work, she knew that the church had long been the center of black social life and had proved indispensable to earlier struggles for African American political rights. As the

Week of Prayer gained national recognition, Seele founded The Balm in Gilead, a faith- based non-profit organization, to help churches around the country address HIV and

AIDS. In order to reduce the spread of HIV among African Americans, The Balm in

Gilead designed programs that would help churches accept and include gay members. In

2001, The Balm in Gilead contracted with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to extend its work with black churches to sub-Saharan Africa, setting up programs in

Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and . Seele and her organization argued that because of black people’s particular relationship with church and faith, the approach that The Balm in Gilead had developed in the United States would work in

Africa as well. As a result of the partnership formed with faith leaders in Tanzania, the group now maintains a second headquarters in Dar es Salaam, the country’s capital.

The final chapter examines the Philadelphia chapter of the AIDS Coalition to

Unleash Power (ACT UP) during the late 1990s and early 2000s. ACT UP had been the most visible and outspoken AIDS activist group during the late 1980s and early 1990s, winning important victories that helped streamline the process for clinical trials and

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approvals of new HIV drugs. By 1996, however, most chapters had disbanded.

Meanwhile, both white and African American grassroots activists at ACT UP

Philadelphia redirected the group’s protest politics to address the structural inequalities driving AIDS rates in poor communities, both at home and abroad. Just as some Civil

Rights and Black Power activists had linked their own political projects for African

American rights to broader anti-colonial struggles, ACT UP Philadelphia members situated their own local work in the larger international movement against globalization and free trade. In Philadelphia, they focused on issues of concern to poor people of color with HIV/AIDS, including privatization, needle exchange, and access to highly effective but expensive HIV drugs. The campaigns they waged at the local level fed into work on a much broader scale, as members joined forces with anti-globalization groups to protest American free trade policies in Africa. Using both theatrical protest and policy analysis, ACT UP Philadelphia worked in concert with other groups, pressuring federal officials to allow countries in the developing world to manufacture generic versions of medications patented under United States law, to increase funding for the fight against global AIDS, and to support debt cancellation for deeply impoverished African nations.

Today, the group claims at least a partial victory in the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, a massive funding package to support HIV prevention and AIDS treatment in sub-Saharan Africa and other countries in the developing world that have been hit particularly hard by the epidemic.

To be sure, African American AIDS activists were not alone in touting the need for cultural competence in HIV prevention, in criticizing the social inequities undergirding the epidemic, or in highlighting the international dimensions of their

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struggle. Nevertheless, these three themes run through the work of the actors in this story, making it clear that they pushed AIDS politics beyond a narrow biomedical framework.

However, their expansive vision of the HIV/AIDS, the factors driving its spread, and the range of possible solutions never became the dominant one in addressing the epidemic. In the United States, AIDS continues to wreak havoc on African Americans far more than on any other racial or ethnic group. According to recent statistics, about two percent of

African Americans are HIV positive, and the rate of new HIV infections among African

Americans is almost eight times that of their white counterparts. Moreover, African

Americans who develop AIDS die much faster than any other racial or ethnic group. As the epidemic continues to rage in black communities throughout the United States, understanding the work of African American AIDS activists is now more important than ever. Altogether, a better understanding of the ways that African Americans have made sense of and fought back against the AIDS epidemic may lead to more effective approaches to the disease in black communities, where HIV and AIDS continue to present a pressing health crisis.13

13 Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “The HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the United States,” March 22, 2013, http://kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-in-the- united-states/.

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CHAPTER 1

“A DISEASE, NOT A LIFESTYLE”: RACE AND AIDS IN THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE

Unlike New York and San Francisco, which have anchored much of the literature on AIDS in the United States, Philadelphia is not a gay mecca, nor is it a global capital of finance and culture. Instead, Philadelphia represents the Rust Belt city. Shaped by successive waves of industrialization, migration, segregation, capital flight, and job loss,

Philadelphia was a difficult environment plagued by deep tensions over space, resources, and identity. It was also home to nearly a million African Americans in 1980, the year before doctors first identified the clusters of opportunistic infections among gay men in

Los Angeles and New York that signaled the onset of the AIDS epidemic.1 As such, the deep tensions over space, resources, and identity in that gave rise to “AIDS wars” in the

City of Brotherly Love speak to the social, cultural, and structural obstacles that black

AIDS activists faced in bringing the attention of their communities to the growing epidemic.

The Changing Face of AIDS in Philadelphia

Rashidah Hassan was nervous. Waiting to take the stage in LOVE Park on a wet

September night in 1986, she knew that the short speech she had turned over and over in her mind would anger some of the crowd gathered for Philadelphia’s first AIDS vigil as

1 “Philadelphia, PA—NJ: Summary Profile,” diversitydata.org, accessed November 25, 2013, http://diversitydata-archive.org/Data/Profiles/Show.aspx?loc=965.

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they marched to remember the friends, lovers, siblings, and children they had lost over the previous four years to AIDS. She shared their grief. But she was nonetheless resolute about her message. As board vice president of Philadelphia Community Health

Alternatives, which oversaw the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force, Hassan had grown increasingly frustrated at her colleagues’ response to the growing AIDS epidemic among

African Americans and other people of color in the city. The impact of AIDS on African

Americans in Philadelphia and in the United States as a whole had not been immediately visible. When the disease first came up on public health officials’ radar in 1981, it was as a nameless concentration of opportunistic infections among gay men in Los Angeles and

New York. Doctors did not compile data on the racial or ethnic identities of these early patients, and thus failed to notice that a significant number were black. To the extent that symptoms appeared among visible communities of gay men–in neighborhoods like the

Castro District in San Francisco, Chelsea in New York City, or Washington Square West in Philadelphia–the men of those communities tended to be white. Because the “face” of gay men’s communities was white, the “face” of the horrifying new “gay cancer” was white as well.

But Rashidah Hassan knew differently.

2

Hassan2 presents herself as a lifelong skeptic and iconoclast, though her work has also been driven by a deep sense of faith. She recalls being a “fairly concrete thinker” even as a child, when she earned trips to the pastor’s office for “disrupting Sunday school by asking these very complex questions that the teachers didn’t know how to answer.”

Following the command from Second Timothy, “study to show thyself approved,” she dove into the history of Christianity and biblical scholarship, which led her to Rabbi

Jacob Goldstein, under whose tutelage she nearly converted to Judaism. Finally, as she was pursuing a degree in nursing, a college course on world religions introduced her to the Qur’an and Islam. She found the religion’s tenets attractive:

Because all of my questions in terms of faith and religion and practice and expectations as human beings [were] identified in that text. And what stood out the most was, we are placed here solely to worship god, and there’s a whole listing of ways that worship can be manifested, and one of them is service to humanity, which tied back to my nursing, which was service to humanity, and in ways of care and treatment, and understanding human conditions, which after a bit expands itself into social care and

2 At the time of the speech, some news sources referred to Hassan as “Rashidah,” her Muslim name, and others as “Lorraine,” her given name. Since she signed her correspondence “Rashidah Lorraine Hassan,” I use the first of the two names. Also, although she has since divorced and remarried, taking Abdul-Khabeer as her last name, I use “Hassan” when referring in the text to the oral history I conducted with her in the present, for the sake of coherence. In citing the interview, however, I use her current name, Rashidah Abdul-Khabeer. When referring to her oral history, I also use the present tense to differentiate between present recollections and information gleaned from past sources. Rashidah Abdul-Khabeer, interview with author, April 11, 2012, Philadelphia, PA.

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public health. And so there I landed, exactly where I was supposed to be, and in the midst of all that up came the HIV epidemic.3

That “exactly where” turned out to be a hospital room at Einstein Medical Center in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, where during the early 1980s she worked as an infection control practitioner. One of the first African Americans with

AIDS she encountered was a young, poor high school dropout infected with HIV, most likely either by the older men who paid to have sex with him, or by injecting the drugs that he bought with money he made from hustling. Either way, he landed in Hassan’s hospital when his kidneys stopped working; they were clogged with the cornstarch used to cut the drugs he shot up. Because the young man had HIV, doctors called Hassan in as an infection control specialist. As she entered the hospital room, she found a horde of renal physicians, doctors, residents, and medical students, all looking at the young man

“as a specimen.” “They literally said to him, ‘Your kidneys are shot. We’re going to put you on dialysis, you have AIDS, and,” gesturing to Hassan as the doctors turned to leave,

“she’s going to tell you what you need to do next.” Hassan asked the patient if he understood, to which he replied, “My kidneys don’t work. I’m not sure about what dialysis is, and I don’t know whatever else it was they said.”4

3 Abdul-Khabeer interview. A 1990 profile of Hassan in the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested that Hassan’s conversion from Baptist to Muslim corresponded with her marriage to her first husband, Nimr, but the story she told about her conversion during our interview made no mention of him. Perhaps the Inquirer got this sequence of events wrong; perhaps this is how she now prefers to tell her personal religious history. She may also simply remember the story in this way, without conscious preference or intent. Regardless of the reason, the story she told me is no less significant in revealing how she, today, connects her identity to her faith and her work around HIV and AIDS. Lini S. Kadaba, “The Black Warning,” Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, July 8, 1990, 12.

4 Abdul-Khabeer interview.

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In the young man’s hospital room, Hassan glimpsed the future of AIDS in the

United States. Her patient–impoverished, “functionally illiterate,” infected with HIV through drugs or sex work, and treated brusquely by his doctors–embodied the myriad ways that economic, educational, and medical inequities would fuel the AIDS epidemic in black communities. At that moment, Hassan realized “that this would be more likely the kind of people that would develop AIDS and HIV, and they would die not understanding anything that happened to them.” In fact, the disease had already begun to

“settle” in Philadelphia among the city’s black and Latino residents, who on average were poorer and less educated than their white counterparts. By the middle of 1984, 51% of the city’s AIDS cases were among African Americans, over ten points higher than their share of the city’s total population.5

Hoping to change the course of the epidemic, Hassan signed up as a volunteer at the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force. The group had developed as the volunteer arm of

Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives, a clinic for gay men and lesbians that found itself on the front lines of the city’s fight against AIDS when it became clear that the cases reported in New York and Los Angeles represented not just a handful of isolated cases, but rather the leading edge of a national epidemic primarily identified among gay men. With her medical background and seemingly unlimited energy, she became a valuable asset to Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives and the AIDS

5 Philadelphia Department of Public Health, “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) Cases in Philadelphia and Philadelphia Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area (PMSA) Monthly Report,” July 6, 1984,” Temple University Manuscripts and Special Collections, Scott Wilds Papers, Box 4, “AIDS in Phila 1984-87” [hereafter “Wilds Papers, ‘AIDS in Phila’”].

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Task Force, becoming the vice president of PCHA’s board of directors within a few years. During that time, the group established an internal committee called Interpreting

Minority Perspectives for Action (IMPACT), to reach out to Philadelphia’s black and

Latino community, but Hassan and a group of supporters believed that the task force simply wasn’t trying hard enough. At best, they argued, PCHA and PATF made token efforts at minority outreach that amounted to little more than lip service to their demands.

Over time, Hassan came to believe that the group used her to cultivate an appearance of diversity without shifting resources away from the white gay men to whom they were primarily directed. While serving as the vice president of PCHA, she founded Blacks

Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI), one of the nation’s first black

AIDS service organizations, to provide education and services around the epidemic specifically to the city’s African American community.

PCHA and PATF’s approach to minority AIDS education left others similarly dissatisfied. Critics argued that although just over half of people with AIDS in the city were African American, the groups’ programs were concentrated in the community of gay white men and women from which PCHA had emerged. Some, like Hassan, pressed for change at the AIDS Task Force from within, at times venting their frustrations in the local press. At PATF, Interpreting Minority Perspectives for Action (IMPACT), a committee formed by a handful of black volunteers, pushed within the agency for more effective outreach to communities of color. Other critics came from District Local 1199C of the Healthcare and Hospital Worker’s Union and from Black and White Men Together for Education, an offshoot of the local chapter of the National Association of Black and

White Men Together, an interracial gay men’s social group. David Fair, a white gay

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native of Southwest Philadelphia who held leadership positions in both organizations, proved to be PATF’s most vocal and persistent critic, arguing that the minority communities being hit hard by AIDS should be given a greater stake in shaping HIV education and prevention programs.

Similar contests over AIDS education and prevention efforts played out in other cities, as racial disparities in the epidemic across the country became clear at roughly the same time. In New York City, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the AIDS service organization founded by a group of white gay men in early 1982, added programs specifically for communities of color in the middle 1980s. In San Francisco, black, Asian American, and

Hispanic AIDS activists formed the Third World AIDS Advisory Task Force (TWAATF) in 1985 to help predominantly white gay AIDS service organizations such as the San

Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) tailor their education campaigns to people of color.

TWAATF members argued that outreach efforts that worked for white gay men would be less effective among men of color, who might be put off by sexually explicit educational materials, and whose daily lives would be shaped more by their racial identity or economic class than by their sexuality. In Durham, North Carolina, the Lesbian and Gay

Health Project (LGHP), founded in the late 1970s by gay men and women as a medical advocacy group, made some limited forays into outreach to the city’s African American community. Garry Lipscomb, an LGHP volunteer, spearheaded these efforts; as a black gay man, he knew that other black men who had sex with men gathered at private homes

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and unlicensed liquor joints rather than the local gay bars that LGHP targeted for education campaigns.6

In Philadelphia’s gay community, where the city’s first cases of AIDS were diagnosed and from which the initial grassroots response to the epidemic emerged, economic pressures and social conventions alike had helped to maintain racial divisions in the ways that black and used public and commercial space. Racial discrimination in bars produced a relatively segregated gay nightlife in the city’s downtown, while high Center City rents kept less-affluent gay men of color from living in or near the “gayborhood.” The racial division posed a twofold problem for the AIDS

Task Force. First, the group’s mostly white staff had difficulty reaching out to the city’s black gay bars to disseminate information about safer sex and HIV prevention, as they frequently did in white gay bars. Second, discrimination within the city’s gay community fostered a volatile racial atmosphere that spilled into conflicts over AIDS funding and services.

The racial tensions that divided gay Philadelphians also suffused the city as a whole. Wilson Goode had become Philadelphia’s first black mayor in 1984, replacing fellow Democrat Bill , who had not sought a second term. Green’s predecessor,

Frank Rizzo, had been known for his poor relationship with the city’s African American community, stretching back to his tenure as police commissioner. Early in his first term,

Goode oversaw one of the worst racial crises in the city’s history, when police fire-

6 Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 45-76; Stephen J. Inrig, North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS: Advocacy, Politics, and Race in the South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 43-57.

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bombed the West Philadelphia compound of the MOVE collective, a group of anarcho- primitivist black liberationists living in squalid conditions on the 6200 black of Osage

Avenue. The incendiary bomb set the entire block ablaze, destroying sixty-five homes and killing eleven people. The two blocks of brick row homes, gutted by fire, served as powerful metaphor for deepening inequality. Although the city had elected a black mayor in Goode, black poverty and racial boundaries remained. The MOVE crisis thus pointed up the bitter ironies of race and class in post-Civil Rights America, serving as a grim object lesson for African Americans in Philadelphia and around the country.

Threads of historical segregation, rising poverty and joblessness among African

American, racism among white gays, and homophobia in black communities were the backdrop for the battles over funding for AIDS prevention and education in Philadelphia that raged during the latter half of the 1980s. Some activists argued that efforts should be concentrated in the white gay community downtown, where many of PCHA and PATF’s clients, volunteers, and donors lived. Others looked to the more racially mixed surrounding areas of North, West, and South Philadelphia where gay men who felt marginalized within the largely white, affluent “gayborhood” carried on their sexual and social lives, and where signs of spreading heterosexual infection within communities of color were beginning to surface. The conflict surrounding the “changing face of AIDS” in the City of Brotherly Love thus turned on intertwined disputes over space, communal identity, and the distribution of public resources and AIDS services in Philadelphia.

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Where Does That Leave You?

The advent of the new “gay cancer” coincided almost perfectly with a social and cultural reaction against the visibility of gay men and women in the United States. The

New York Times announced a “rare cancer seen in 42 homosexuals” in July of 1981, just eight months after Ronald Reagan rode a wave of conservative evangelical support to victory in the 1980 presidential election. Although the new disease was also identified in heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians, it was most closely associated with and prevalent among gay men. Beyond the stigma of being linked to a fearsome new disease, as well as the fear among both gay men and women that a forceful crackdown on their communities might come under the guise of emergency public health measures, gay men lived in near-constant cycle of fear and mourning, burying more friends each week and worrying that the next cough, fever, or rash might portend their own painful death. Some even wondered whether, as social conservatives charged, that they had brought the plague on their own houses.7

Nevertheless, white gay men and lesbians had some resources to confront the epidemic when it arrived in the early 1980s. Many were well educated, affluent, and

7 Lawrence Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” New York Times, July 3, 1981, A20; Deborah Gould argues that some gay men and lesbians responded ambivalently to the early years of the epidemic, wondering whether wrath-of-God moralizers who blamed the epidemic on gay men’s sexual practices might actually be right. Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago, 2009); While literature on responses to AIDS has emphasized women’s, and particularly lesbians’ role as caretakers in the early epidemic, Jennifer Brier showed that women also offered important critical interventions in discussions about the place of gay sexual liberation in the early epidemic, framing AIDS as in part the symptom of intolerant social attitudes, and AIDS prevention as wholly commensurate with an active sex life. Jennifer Brier, “Locating Lesbian and Feminist Responses to AIDS, 1982– 1984,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1/2 (Spring 2007): 234–248.

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connected to local politics, although many were also wholly or partly closeted in their professional lives. Because of their social position and in spite of widespread homophobia, many felt entitled enough to demand a public response to the growing medical crisis. Having grown up amid unprecedented affluence, they were certain that something like this was not supposed to happen to them, and they demanded a government response to . Moreover, they had their own grassroots institutions, including social groups that could serve as networks of care, as well as clinics and other medical resources set up to provide for the health needs of people with a troubled historical relationship to mainstream medicine. In Philadelphia, local activists led by openly gay regional health commissioner Walter Lear had established Lavender Health, a gay and lesbian community health group, in 1979, and renamed it Philadelphia

Community Health Alternatives in 1981. Drawing on the women’s health movement of the 1970s, Lavender Health aimed to educate gay men and women about their health along a model of “holistic health care which goes beyond the limits of the medical model of disease treatment and medical crisis intervention,” as well as to advocate for gay health concerns, at clinical, research, and policy levels.8

At the outset, the frightening new disease seemed largely confined to Los

Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, but within three years, Philadelphia doctors had identified sixty five cases of AIDS among the city’s adult population, thirty nine of

8 “Lavender Health Description,” n.d., Wilds Papers, “AIDS in Phila”; Marc Stein argues that the demand from gay communities for a government response to AIDS was delayed somewhat by the libertarian strain in gay politics that sought an end to sodomy laws in the United States. See Marc Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (Routledge, 2012).

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whom had died, with another twenty two cases reported in the surrounding counties making up the Philadelphia Metropolitan Statistical Area. In response, Philadelphia

Community Health Alternatives launched the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force to disseminate what little information existed, collect money for the sick, and organize volunteers. Through the AIDS Task Force, PCHA developed a slate of programs for people with AIDS, along with staff and a roster of volunteers to deliver AIDS services to the sick and education to the “worried well.” Curious or confused callers could access the latest information on HIV and AIDS through the agency’s hotline, while posters, pamphlets, and public service announcements aimed to educate the general public about the disease. A buddy program matched people living with AIDS to volunteers who could assist them with daily chores, accompany them to doctor’s appointments, or offer the comfort of a loving embrace–no small thing since many had been abandoned by friends and family. The Fund offered money to people with AIDS who needed help covering their non-emergency medical expenses, while PCHA continued to offer medical services, including treatment of AIDS symptoms, to Philadelphia’s gay and lesbian community. In 1986, the group added a housing program for people with AIDS to its list of services, providing a place to stay for those who could physically care for themselves but could not afford a place of their own.9

The AIDS Task Force became a target for criticism once the city began to systematically tabulate statistics on AIDS in Philadelphia. In July 1984, the Department of Public Health released its first monthly report on the epidemic, showing that just over

9 Philadelphia AIDS Monthly Report, July 6, 1984.

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half of people with AIDS in the city were African American. The report’s findings called into question whom the AIDS Task Force–an agency rooted in the white gay community but supported in part by public funds–should serve, and how. Critics insisted that the group concentrated education and outreach efforts in the downtown bars, bookstores, and bathhouses frequented by white gay men, failing to reach self-identified gay black men, much less black men who had sex with other men (MSM) but who identified as straight.

Moreover, critics charged, the almost total absence of people of color from the AIDS

Task Force’s paid staff and volunteers, including outreach workers and buddies for people with AIDS, led African Americans to discount those messages aimed at a

“general” audience. As a result, many African Americans saw the new disease as one affecting white gay men, and saw themselves as insulated from the epidemic. Linda

Burnette, a longtime AIDS advocate and educator for youth at Philadelphia’s Urban

Affairs Coalition, recalls a general sense of relief among African Americans during the first years of the epidemic, because “finally it’s something that’s not about black people.”10

Before the Department of Public Health released its July 1984 report, the

Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s highest-circulating black newspaper, ran several pieces distancing AIDS from black readers. In the first, a fire-and-brimstone opinion piece,

Reverend W. L. Banks invoked the apostle Paul to argue that was a chosen behavior, “the prime example of the outcome of idolatry [and] the result of omitting God from one’s life.” Framing the epidemic in terms of sexual practice rather

10 Linda Burnette, interview with author, May 15, 2012, Philadelphia, PA.

13

than whiteness, he presented homosexuality and AIDS as incommensurate with the church, a major locus of African American social life and communal identity. In the second piece, a columnist remarked that since most homosexuals and bisexuals were white and influential, “AIDS gets virtually licked within three years,” since researchers had recently identified HIV as the disease’s viral agent, while research on majority black ailments such as sickle cell anemia and keloids suffered for lack of funding. Though the two articles trafficked in different notions of blackness–one bound by religion, the other by embodied illness–they both definitively located AIDS outside that identity.

Nevertheless, African American AIDS activists in Philadelphia worked to educate black institutions, such as churches and newspapers, while taking a more oppositional stance to gay-identified AIDS service organizations that received most of the resources–however meager–that the city devoted to fighting the epidemic.11

In July 1984, the Department of Health and the AIDS Task Force convened a meeting for media and medical professionals to highlight the alarming new statistics showing the disproportionate impact of the disease on African Americans. Joseph Beam, a black gay writer living in Center City, linked the lack of minority education to the city’s informal spatial boundaries: “Blacks do not think they can get AIDS... Because most

Blacks do not go to Center City, they don't get to read the Gay News or other publications which would have this information.” The disconnect between PATF’s outreach and the shifting demographics of the AIDS epidemic in Philadelphia emerged from historical

11 Rev. W. L. Banks, “AIDS,” Philadelphia Tribune, , 1984; Deborrah Wilkinson, “Digging Up Obscure, But Newsworthy Items,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 27, 1984.

14

patterns of residential segregation and the postwar development of the city’s gay community. As Philadelphia developed into a “city of brotherly and sisterly loves” during the decades between the end of World War II and the onset of the AIDS, the Center City neighborhood emerged as the nexus of gay life, particularly for men drawn to cruising areas in Washington Square and Rittenhouse Parks, and to gay bars along Spruce Street.

However, the developing downtown gay scene was mostly white, reflecting an overall demographic shift as white Philadelphians moved to the downtown. Black gay men and lesbians instead set up their own social clubs in West Philadelphia, which at the time was drawing new African American residents. Unlike whites, African American gay men and women also tended to frequent bars and clubs that attracted both gay and straight clients.12

Nevertheless, by the late 1970s, a handful of bars catering mostly to black gay men had cropped up in Center City, including Smart Place near 10th and Arch, Pentony’s near 13th and Arch, and Allegro II at 21st and Sansom. While other gay bars in Center

City were not entirely shut off from black clients, owners and staff had their own ways of enforcing racial boundaries. For patrons, the process usually began at a club’s entrance, where the bouncer would demand identification–sometimes multiple forms–from black patrons while letting whites enter freely. Once inside, white customers might draw informal racial boundaries in their sexual choices, accepting the advances of other white men while turning down those from men of color. Terence Young, an African American

12 Evelyn Dickerson, “Blacks Fall Victim to AIDS, Too,” Philadelphia Tribune, July 31, 1984, 13; Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004); Tyrone Smith, interview with author, May 7, 2012, Philadelphia, PA.

15

man who became PCHA’s housing director in 1986, notes that rejection from a white man might not have been explicitly racial:

I don’t necessarily want to say because I was black. I might not have been the right height, I might not have been the right weight, I might not have had any facial hair, I might’ve had too much–I don’t know what it was.

However, in the racially and sexually charged atmosphere of a mostly white bar like

Woody’s or The Post, such distinctions would be hard to draw.13

The bar discrimination problem culminated in a two-year study undertaken by nine gay community groups that came together as the Coalition on Lesbian and Gay Bar

Polices. Their report, released in June 1986, listed recommendations to remedy

“pervasive racial and sexual exclusivity in Greater Philadelphia's lesbian and gay bars.”

They urged local gay and lesbian bars to fill vacant positions with people from

“underrepresented” groups, require only one piece of photo identification from all patrons, and have a poster visible near the entrance to explain the carding policy.

However, the report did not only blame the problem on bar owners and managers.

Coalition treasurer Larry Frankel explained that bar policies reflected prejudice of different kinds in the gay and lesbian community at large: “Many patrons tolerate and encourage this kind of racial and sexual discrimination in our bars. If patrons demanded more, we'd get more out of our bar owners.” The downtown gay bar scene’s charged racial atmosphere described in the report promoted a sense of distrust for gay men of color for the white gay establishment strongly identified with PATF, and led some to frequent black gay bars that were largely untouched by the agency’s outreach efforts,

13 Terence Young, interview with author, May 23, 2012, Philadelphia, PA; Pentony’s appears to have sometimes been spelled “Pentones” in the local press.

16

rooted as they were in the social networks and commercial spaces of its mostly white staff, volunteers, and clientele. Even for black gay men who simply preferred to drink and dance at Smart Place or Allegro II, racial discrimination suffused the white gay

Center City scene, including the PCHA and PATF.14

Which is not to say that the AIDS Task Force did not at least try to extend its educational efforts to the city’s African American community. In 1984, the AIDS Task

Force launched its “One New Case Per Week” campaign to highlight the shifting demographics of the epidemic, with posters featuring three different faces–one white, one black, and one Hispanic–along with a tagline about the rate of new AIDS diagnoses in the city. Perhaps in a deliberate attempt to push their message beyond the downtown

“gayborhood” and transcend the spatial divisions between black and white parts of the city, they placed the posters on Philadelphia’s subway system. Tyrone Smith, a black gay man and lifelong Philadelphia resident, remembers that:

[T]hey used to have on the subway… these posters up, and it would be how many folks had become infected within that week or with that month. And I started seeing these white faces… and then I got appalled one day when I saw black faces there. I thought it was the enemy, I thought it was a trick, I thought that… if anybody was to get AIDS, it would be the black children who fucked with white men.15

Smith’s story reveals that, not surprisingly, interracial couplings did occur among gay men in Philadelphia, but with a certain level of social opprobrium. Similarly, Jose de

Marco, a black queer Philadelphia native, remembers that “gay black men… thought this

14 Tommi Avicolli, “Uniform Carding Policy Urged,” Philadelphia Gay News, June 20-26, 1986, 35.

15 Tyrone Smith interview.

17

only happened to nasty gay white boys because [they] do nasty, dirty things. But in reality, a lot of black men and white men were having sex.” For black gay men, deflecting the identification of AIDS as a gay disease onto gay white men showed their frustration with racism and segregation in the downtown gay community, and countered the historical association of blackness with hypersexuality and disease.16

The “One New Case Per Week” campaign angered other black Philadelphians as well. One woman called the agency to say, “You have a lot of nerve showing a Black person on that poster.” AIDS Task Force president Nick Ifft defended the campaign to : “Many of the calls we received suggested that we are doing something which is not true, but our reason for using three different images (Black, white and Hispanic) is because all people can get AIDS.” African Americans viewers, or at least those who objected to the posters, saw them not as evidence of the disease’s morbid equanimity, but as yet another attempt by a white organization to demonize blacks by associating them with the burgeoning epidemic. Given their initial relief that AIDS was being “marketed as a gay white man’s disease,” the revelation that African Americans were also at risk would seem to be a terrible reversal of fortune, or even, in Smith’s words, a “trick”–possibly one masterminded by some powers that be to pin the blame for the epidemic on black folks. 17

16 Jose de Marco, interview with author, September 4, 2012, Philadelphia, PA; Mia Bay describes a similar inversion of racial stereotypes among black intellectuals in The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830- 1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000).

17 Dickerson, “Blacks Fall Victim to AIDS, Too”; Tyrone Smith interview; Jose de Marco interview; see Chapter 3 for more on theories and discourses of blame around HIV and AIDS.

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Two years later, the AIDS Task Force still found little traction in reaching out to

Center City’s black gay bars. Len Bost, a black gay man who served as co-chair of the

Mayor’s Commission on Sexual Minorities and sometimes did minority outreach for

PATF, reported at a community meeting that his own efforts to distribute educational materials at black gay bars had been rebuffed; Pentony’s had turned him away outright, and other bars threw away his pamphlets as soon as he left. Perhaps Bost met with a cool reception from Philadelphia’s black gay bars because of the agency’s poor reputation;

Philadelphia Gay News staff writer Cei Bell, a black gay man, reported that another customer at Allegro II had asked him when PATF would become “integrated.” In the context of discrimination and segregation within both the downtown gay community and in greater Philadelphia, employees and patrons at black gay bars may have rejected the literature because it came from a reputedly all-white organization, even though Bost himself was black. Perhaps, even after two years’ worth of epidemiological statistics showing that AIDS disproportionately affected African Americans, some gay black men still suspected that such reports might be a “trick.” In any case, even when the Task Force tried to do some due diligence, whether through the subway poster campaign or by sending someone like Bost to distribute pamphlets in the places where black gay men congregated, the gravity of the message could be easily lost in sedimentary layers of suspicion and denial.18

18 Cei Bell, “Racism Charges at Phila. AIDS Task Force Unfounded,” Philadelphia Gay News, April 4, 1986, 1, Periodicals Collection, William Way Community Center Archive. All articles from Philadelphia Gay News found in William Way Community Center Archive’s collection of gay newspapers.

19

Cei Bell’s anecdote speaks to another common criticism of PATF, namely that the agency remained primarily staffed by and oriented toward openly gay white men even as the epidemic spread in minority communities among black gay men and MSM.19 The debate over who the agency represented was deeply linked to the question of where its efforts should be concentrated. Critics and allies alike framed this not just as a problem of segregation and discrimination within gay spaces in Center City, but also in terms of how racial, sexual, and class identity mapped onto Philadelphia’s physical geography. In the

“City of Neighborhoods,” critics argued, expanding outreach to downtown black gay bars would not be enough to make a dent in the epidemic among black gay men; PATF needed to reach beyond Center City, a neighborhood identified as overwhelmingly white and middle class. Through this spatial rhetoric, AIDS activists linked public health practice to community identity and political economy, contesting precisely whose interests PATF represented, and how its resources should be distributed.

Critics sought more than tokenistic representation of African American at the

AIDS Task Force. They felt that shifting the agency’s demographic composition to better reflect racial disparities in the epidemic would yield more effective AIDS services for people of color. For example, if the organization recruited more black operators to the

19 Although gay men and MSM were not exclusively affected by AIDS, as of January 1986, the Philadelphia Department of Health reported that 88.7% of people with AIDS in Philadelphia county fell into the “gay/bisexual” or “gay/bisexual + IV drug user” risk group, only 3% of people with AIDS in the county were women. Although vastly disproportionate numbers of women of color would later be diagnosed with AIDS, at this early stage the extent of HIV infection among black and Latino women had not yet become clear. Philadelphia Department of Public Health, “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) Cases in Philadelphia and Philadelphia Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area (PMSA) Monthly Report,” January 3, 1986, Wilds Papers, “AIDS in Phila”.

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AIDS hotline, African Americans would be more comfortable calling and more likely to believe the information they received. Similarly, they noted, black volunteers for the buddy program would be more sensitive to the needs of black people with AIDS. Tyrone

Smith recalls, in terms that collapse race, income, and neighborhood, how black gay men with AIDS differed from their white counterparts:

[Gay white men with AIDS] were the Center Citiers, the Main Liners, they were the affluent who were being stricken with this disease. And what was being said to them is, we want you to live a normal life, as normal as your life has been. Well going to brunch was common for them, but going to brunch wasn’t something my boys did. They just wanted a couple of dollars to go to a movie, and basic stuff like that. So it was us who had to say to institutions, ‘Okay, well, but this is what these guys need.’ He wants a hoagie! I mean, he doesn’t want truffles and luffles and luffles. He wants a hoagie, and he wants it where he wants it from.20

To be sure, not all gay white men with AIDS took home hefty paychecks or lived in upscale parts of the city, but Smith’s comment reveals the way that racial divisions among gay Philadelphians were understood, at least by some, in terms of social class and space as well. Thus, some critics of PCHA and PATF argued, the agencies needed to also take these intersecting factors into account when addressing the epidemic among black

Philadelphians.

Even activists who agreed that a problem existed at the AIDS Task Force disagreed on a solution. Some looked to organizing in the gay and lesbian community as a model. At the end of an investigative report for Philadelphia Gay News (PGN) on racism at PATF, Bell proposed that “there are enough black gays around to create a serious change in how our community works.” He noted that bringing black gay men into

20 Tyrone Smith interview. The Philadelphia Main Line is a wealthy neighborhood outside of the city’s downtown.

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an organization like the AIDS Task Force would be challenging, since many “regard the added burden of ‘being out’ as lunacy,” but stressed the importance of black and white gays alike laying aside their differences to work toward common goals. “It is not as though,” he warned, “there are so many of us (both black and white) or as though we are so invulnerable we can not be eliminated en masse.” Bell saw AIDS as bringing a

“bizarre equality to the gay world that has never existed,” by striking down people regardless of class, education, or race. He criticized “people within our gay community– both black and white–who will do and say some divisive things [to] gain some small personal advantage,” arguing that in this new context, “we can no longer afford the luxury of fighting with each other.”21

Bell located the problem of minority underrepresentation at PATF among black gay men, particularly those reluctant to label themselves as gay. He allowed that “in a grouping of 250 Caucasian men, is it reasonable to assume that at least a portion of them are racist,” but otherwise concluded that charges of racism at the agency were

“unfounded.” Not that Bell dismissed the existence of racism in the Philadelphia gay community. Months earlier, he eulogized John Stevens Powell, a friend who had died from AIDS, with whom Bell shared “a kind of exile status from most of the black community, functioning within a mostly white environment and not being a member of that world.” In light of a deadly epidemic that transcended social hierarchies, Bell argued, black and white gays should close ranks, and in the process the gay community would become more welcoming to people of color. Although Bell considered himself an

21 Bell, “Racism Charges Unfounded”; Cei Bell, “Black, Gay and Free: Eulogy for a Friend,” Philadelphia Gay News, November 29, 1985, 7.

22

outsider among white gays, he still felt more at home in the Center City gay community than he did in the black community from which he had been “exiled.”22

Rashidah Hassan, quoted in Bell’s piece on the AIDS Task Force, took a different stance. For Hassan, the epidemic reinforced and reflected patterns of inequality, as evidenced by the disproportionate number of African Americans living with AIDS in

Philadelphia. Nevertheless, she allowed that the exclusion of people of color from the agency “[hadn’t] been intentional,” but rather resulted from the blindness of its members to the social realities of homosexually active men outside their downtown enclave filled with “gay males… whether black or white, those with the economic ability to be there.”

PATF had structured its response to the epidemic according to the social milieu of its staff and members, inadvertently putting its efforts outside the reach of some of the most affected. Moreover, Hassan argued, becoming involved with a gay-identified organization could put such men in a precarious position: “Once you step out you label yourself. If you separate yourself from the black community, where does that leave you?

In the black community, what affects one of us affects all.”23

According to Hassan, black gay men who identified themselves as gay risked ostracism from the African American community, and would almost certainly face discrimination in the downtown gay community as well. Coming out would make them literally out of place–unwelcome in black neighborhoods for their sexuality and in Center

City on account of their race. She argues now, as she did then, “There’s no single place to

22 Bell, “Racism Charges Unfounded”.

23 Bell, “Racism Charges Unfounded”.

23

go, it’s not like saying, ‘Oh, we’ll go to the gayborhood.’ There’s no black gayborhood, so I’ve got to do the whole community, to make sure the most at risk hear the message.”

Even for those gay black men who frequented the downtown gay scene, spatial mobility and sexual fluidity could combine to create a “difficult dynamic” for AIDS prevention, since “Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods, and you pretty much stay in your neighborhood. And you might be gay downtown, but you’re something else in the neighborhoods[.]” Even if a bisexual man encountered messages about safer sex at a gay bar or bathhouse, his female partner in North or West Philadelphia would not, putting her at risk for contracting HIV.24

Like Hassan, David Fair framed the issue of racism at the AIDS Task Force as a function of spatial and structural exclusion, rather than as the result of malicious prejudice on the agency’s part. Like some of the African American men he met at Black and White Men Together (BWMT), Fair recalls that he never felt quite comfortable in the

“downtown” gay community, although he helped found numerous influential gay organizations based there, including Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives.

Moreover, as secretary-treasurer of a union with mostly working-class black members, he felt particularly attuned to the needs of poor people of color.25

Fair recognized the ways in which social and political power were embedded in the Philadelphia landscape; as a native of the Kingsessing neighborhood of Southwest

Philadelphia, he had protested the construction of high-rise dormitories at the University

24 Bell, “Racism Charges Unfounded”; Abdul-Khabeer interview.

25 David Fair, interview with author, April 13, 2012, Philadelphia, PA.

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of in his youth and later organized campaigns against discrimination in

Center City gay bars during the late 1970s. He criticized the city’s gay political leadership for spending time, money, and political capital addressing the needs of white, middle class, “yuppie” gays in Center City while ignoring and minority neighborhoods such as South Philadelphia, Nicetown in the northern part of the city, and

Kensington in the Northeast. Whether gay people elected to live in these other neighborhoods or had been shut out of downtown by historical segregation, high rents, or an unwelcoming atmosphere, they remained outside the orbit of the AIDS Task Force as long as the agency neglected to expand its outreach beyond the Center City gay enclave.

As Fair told local radio host Dan Daniel in 1985:

[P]eople are dying as a result of our racism, people are dying as a result of our elitism, and they’re dying as a result of our lack of courage in being able to develop real strategies and real commitment, to involve people outside of the barriers that have been set up for us so far.26

Fair also saw himself as an “Alinsky-style organizer,” envisioning political leadership that would bring a more diverse, inclusive gay and lesbian movement into being, rather than claiming to represent the interests of people outside Center City, with whom they had little to no contact. Fair was also a controversial character in local AIDS politics, with a reputation for violent outbursts–he was known to “bang on tables and flip phones over” during contentious meetings. Fair was also prone to inflammatory public comments, as when he told Philadelphia Gay News that Len Bost, one of a small number of African Americans doing minority outreach and education for the AIDS Task Force,

26 David Fair, interview with Dan Daniels on “Gaydreams,” air date March 3, 1985, WXPN-FM, Philadelphia, PA, Folder “AIDS in Phila 1984-87,” Box 4, Scott Wilds Papers [hereafter “Wilds Papers, ‘AIDS in Phila 1984-87’”].

25

brought “nothing but his skin color” to the agency. While Fair saw himself as a powerful advocate for the least empowered, his demands for self-determination for people of color with AIDS were complicated by the fact that Fair himself was white and HIV negative.27

As a solution to PATF’s minority outreach problem, Fair insisted that Tom

Livers, executive director of the AIDS Task Force, hire someone “with proven community organizing skills in Philadelphia’s black and Hispanic communities.”

Anything less would amount to nothing more than “pious proclamations,” forestalling his own cooperation with the agency. In March 1986, Fair announced at a meeting of BWMT for Education, an AIDS education group for people of color that he co-chaired, that he had been meeting with thirty five black members of his union “who were angry at having lost… lovers, friends, or family members to AIDS.” When asked why “Fair kept those people in his hip pocket while BWMT was trying to find ways to get blacks involved in

AIDS education and increase their involvement in PATF,” he replied, “I don’t believe that the structure of the gay and lesbian community works for black people, and I will not input them into that structure.”28

Bell reported the events of in his piece on racism at the AIDS Task

Force, perhaps playing up the other man’s intransigence; he concluded with a jab at the

“unscrupulous” Fair for “using this time of distress for [his] own political opportunism.”

Nevertheless, Fair had earned his reputation as a difficult personality. When Darlene

27 Fair interview; Abdul-Khabeer interview; Vernon Loeb, “The Guerrilla Bureaucrat,” Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, May 15, 1988; Bell, “Racism Charges Unfounded”.

28 Bell, “Racism Charges Unfounded”.

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Garner, his black lesbian co-chair of BWMT for Education, contradicted Fair’s demand for the immediate hiring of a minority outreach specialist, instead asking Livers to seek

“a grant to support educational efforts in black and Latino communities and possibly to hire a staff person responsible for that work,” Fair resigned from the post they shared. In his letter of resignation, Fair presented himself as the wiser, more experienced political operative, complaining that he found it “particularly frustrating to have to listen to people who have personally benefitted from my accomplishments pretend that that record doesn’t mean anything, or that pious posturing is more meaningful than a record of organizing success.” Not only did Fair have, in his own mind, a more considered political worldview and greater organizing acumen than his fellow board members, his expertise and tactics would also be of greater benefit to poor and minority gay people. Whereas, according to Fair, fellow board members Garner and Bell believed “from their stated experience in working with predominately white organizations that real change occurs from within by slowly infiltrating the infrastructure and somehow magically making progress,” Fair believed, based on his own experience “spent almost solely in minority and/or poor people’s organizations–power, as the man once said, concedes nothing without a demand.” Thus, according to Fair, opponents such as Garner and Bell were not only ungrateful beneficiaries of his own organizing history, but also queer Uncle Toms beholden to white gay and lesbian groups, alienated from the needs and concerns of poor, minority gays and lesbians.29

29 David Fair, Memo to BWMT for Education Board, March 26, 1986, Scott Wilds Papers, Box 4, “David Fair–Various Controversies,” Temple University Manuscripts and Special Collections [hereafter “Wilds Papers, ‘David Fair’”]. The title of this folder in the papers of Scott Wilds, who was an aide to Councilman Ed Schwartz as 27

Bell, Hassan, and Fair each presented a somewhat different diagnosis of PATF’s minority outreach problem, as well a different solution. Bell saw racism in the gay community as a problem of interpersonal relations: some white gay men were certainly racist, but closeted black gays should overcome their personal misgivings so that they could join the “out” gay community in addressing a terrible crisis. Hassan and Fair argued that by concentrating its efforts in the Center City gay community from which it emerged, the AIDS Task Force failed to reach gay men in the city’s minority and working class white neighborhoods, although Fair tended to be more vitriolic in his indictments of the agency. According to Hassan, openly gay black men risked separating themselves from the rest of the African American community, and its networks of social support and care, if they openly identified themselves according to their sexuality. Since black gay men were also excluded from or unwelcome at many of Philadelphia’s downtown gay commercial spaces and largely lacking their own autonomous spaces, the best way to reach them would be to canvass entire black communities. Such blanket outreach efforts would have the added benefit of reaching women of color, intravenous drug users, and men who had sex with men but didn’t identify themselves as gay, all of whom had also been shown to be at increased risk for contracting HIV. By contrast, Fair sought a movement by and for those who fell outside the white, middle class model of organizing presented by the downtown gay community, even as he pressed Ifft and Livers to hire more minority staff, as well as someone to increase PATF’s capacity to reach the city’s communities of color.

well as a friend and political ally to Fair, speaks volumes about the latter man’s personality.

28

By the summer of 1986, repeated calls for the AIDS Task Force to hire minority staff had yielded some results. When the group landed a contract with the city’s

Department of Human Services to set up a residential housing program for indigent people with AIDS, Ifft told PGN that the search committee was considering minority candidates “as an explicit part of the search process.” Henry Nicholas, president of the

District Local 1199C and Fair’s boss, put out a call to black community leaders to recommend qualified candidates for director of the new program, as well as any of

PATF’s other open positions. Later that summer, PATF hired Terence Young, a black gay native of Wynnefield, a predominantly African American neighborhood in West

Philadelphia, to direct the program. The AIDS Task Force’s steering committee also approved a measure to bring on a Minority Outreach Coordinator, despite an earlier reduction in block grant funding from the city, which had put the position in jeopardy.30

Critics of the AIDS Task Force argued that because the agency was funded in part by city contracts and block grants, it should serve people with AIDS across the city, not just in the neighborhood or community from which it had arisen. Fair told the

Philadelphia Gay News that his union was considering a lawsuit against the AIDS Task

Force under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by institutions

30 “City Gives PATF Funds for Up to Five Houses.” Philadelphia Gay News. Philadelphia, PA, June 6, 1986; Terence Young interview.

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receiving federal funding, including federal block grants.31 Similarly, a leaflet entitled

“Don’t We Die Too?” (which may have been produced by Fair’s union) accused the Task

Force of failing to hire minority staff, and of not using $100,000 of received public funds–a number disputed by Nick Ifft–to “serve the needs of the majority of people with

AIDS” in a city where 54.4% of the AIDS caseload was non-white. At a public meeting hosted by 1199C to discuss the pamphlet, Darlene Garner proposed that concerned people of color could continue to press the Task Force on minority outreach while setting up parallel services through black churches. To this Gwendolyn Johnson, the 1199C member chairing the meeting responded, “We don’t want to do that. The Task Force has money. We want to get our share.” Johnson stressed her concern with the AIDS Task

Force’s funding sources and client population because, she said, “It’s our tax dollars, too.”32

However, the agency’s budget and staffing was just one way to measure the extent of its minority services. In a May 1986 memo to Livers and the IMPACT committee, PATF support services coordinator Anna Forbes reasoned that the AIDS Task

Force’s buddy program actually served an outsized number of African American clients.

The agency provided AIDS services not just to Philadelphia, but to the entire

31 Although the 1964 Civil Rights Act predated the widespread use of federal block grants to fund local and state programs, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel determined in a 1982 legal opinion that federal block grants fell within the “literal terms” of the 1964 law. “Applicability of Certain Cross-Cutting Statutes To Block Grants Under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981” quoted in Bill Lann Lee, “Block Grant Memo,” U.S. Department of Justice, January 28, 1999, http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/cor/Pubs/blkgrnt.php, accessed May 20, 2013.

32 Cei Bell, “Task Force Committed to Black Outreach, Says Ifft,” Philadelphia Gay News, April 11, 1986, 3.

30

Philadelphia Metropolitan Statistical Area (PMSA), encompassing eight counties in

Pennsylvania and New Jersey. That month, 51% of PATF clients using the agency’s buddy services were black, as opposed to 49% of people living with AIDS in

Philadelphia County, and 41.9% of people in the entire PMSA. Forbes did not specify in her memo how many clients came from outside Philadelphia County, but her memo suggested another way of thinking about the agency’s constituency, in terms of both space and demography. However, other measures of the agency’s client population may have not been available; a former employee would later charge that the AIDS Task Force did not record statistical information on clients reached by educational efforts or making use of the agency’s HIV testing site.33

The panoply of voices in the debate over minority outreach and representation at the AIDS Task Force presented different ideas about the place of black gay men, literally and figuratively, in relation to both white gay men and other African Americans. None proposed outright that PATF should not address the problem of AIDS among black gay men, but competing visions of the agency’s mission and constituency pointed to divergent solutions with respect to the distribution of AIDS prevention resources to communities across local and regional space. Once the AIDS Task Force fractured into a handful of more specialized groups later in the year, conflicts over space, identity, and

AIDS prevention would become more pronounced as a growing number of organizations competed for resources to fight the growing epidemic.

33 Anna Forbes, Memo to Tom Livers and IMPACT Committee Members re Support Services Provided to People of Color with AIDS in the Philadelphia Area, May 21, 1986, Wilds Papers, “AIDS in Phila 1984-87”; Barbara Faggins, “AIDS Activists Angry, but Not Surprised at Firing,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 3, 1987, 1A.

31

We All Have to Do What We Have to Do

After a summer of back and forth between PATF and its critics, in September

1986 Hassan decided she would publicly resign from the vice presidency of Philadelphia

Community Health Alternatives. She thought about the text of her speech that day as she bought a huge candle for the event–black in contrast to everyone else’s white, and large enough to make a statement. That evening, she marched through rain showers with over two thousand others, many holding lit candles or signs stenciled with numbers to represent those who had died, to LOVE Park, where the assembled crowd waited to hear from a slate of speakers, including a woman who had recently lost her son to AIDS.

Hassan felt guilty; as the mother of two young boys, she understood the other woman’s pain. However, she also knew that “it couldn’t be one of those nice speeches where once again” she would be “put up as the sort of poster child, because that’s pretty much what I had become.” Hassan recalls that she approached the other woman near the podium, and explained:

I had a very painful task that I was assigned, and that nothing that I was going to say should reflect negatively on her son, or her grief, and that I understood what she was going through, but that there was a socio- political statement that I needed to make in order to save the lives of others.

The woman hugged her and replied, “We all have to do what we have to do.”34

When her turn came, Hassan stepped behind the podium, placed the giant black candle in front of her, looked out at the crowd, and castigated the city’s AIDS services establishment. She began by quoting from Webster’s Dictionary to define the term

34 Tommi Avicolli, “Over 2000 Participate in AIDS Walk & Rally,” Philadelphia Gay News, October 3, 1986, 2; Abdul-Khabeer interview.

32

“minority,” as “the smaller, inferior part… of a population, different from others in some characteristics,” ironically eliding the distinction between racial and sexual minorities.

She may have intended to arouse sympathy of the many white gay men in the crowd, frustrated by the anemic response of government to the horrific plague stalking their community, with her rhetorical slippage between gay people and people of color as marginalized “minority” groups. She insisted:

Our people–minority, those differing comparatively to the population– have the right to be educated, have the right to have resources committed, have the right to stand here with you and say that we are dying from this disease and you are making it our disease.

Members of the audience signaled their approval with shouts of “Tell ‘em about it!” and

“That’s right!”35

At the same time, however, she clearly directed her criticism at the AIDS Task

Force. Since PATF “didn’t, couldn’t, haven’t, won’t provide education for the minority community,” she had founded her own group, Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual

Health Issues (BEBASHI), to pick up the slack. Hassan and her BEBASHI colleagues had worked “diligently” with the AIDS Task Force to improve the older organization’s minority outreach, but to little effect. As a result Hassan had decided to resign her post as vice president of Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives, there at the vigil. She warned, “If in your presentations… you don’t remember the Hispanics and you don’t remember the blacks, I guarantee you–I guarantee you we will be there to haunt you for it.” She knew that her criticism of the AIDS Task Force, which provided much of what

35 AIDS vigil videorecording, VHS, Rashidah Abdul-Khabeer personal collection, African American AIDS History Project, http://afamaidshistory.omeka.net/items/show/38; Abdul-Khabeer interview.

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little local services were available, would anger some, but told the audience, “I want you to be upset,” so that they might “turn that energy to committing yourselves to seeing that minority people obtain the same treatment, the same empowerment to suffer from this disease and get away from it, to have health care, as you have.” She ended on a conciliatory note, adding:

I want you to remember that while you’re fighting, there are those who are different from you who need to have a voice in how things are done… because they do not recognize that it is not just a white gay disease, and I ask your help and your support in trying to provide that information to the community. 36

Once again, the audience applauded and shouted their encouragement.

Today Hassan remembers the speech somewhat differently, as her “ speech,” an “intense” piece of oratory that “was a little graphic about bending black butts over and feeling free to bang them without giving them the information or the protection they needed.”37 However, an extant video recording shows that the speech contained no such language; Hassan was forceful and resolute, but not bombastic, in her criticism of the city’s AIDS establishment.38 Looking back on that moment through the turmoil that came afterward probably makes it seem much more contentious in retrospect, and helps explain why Hassan now frames it as “the skirmish of the war” for minority AIDS education in Philadelphia.39 As she split from PCHA and PATF to pursue her own work with BEBASHI, Hassan drew fire for “creating division within the community,” and as a

36 AIDS vigil videorecording.

37 Abdul-Khabeer interview.

38 AIDS vigil videorecording.

39 Abdul-Khabeer interview.

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greater number of specialized AIDS groups came on the scene, eventually became the target of the very kind of criticism that she had once leveled at others.40

Although the crowd at the vigil had been apparently supportive, the negative reaction to Hassan and her speech was almost immediate. A week later, PGN ran an editorial by Bill Whiting, a white gay man, criticizing the march as a whole, and Hassan in particular, for her “intolerable” speech. He questioned the route laid out for the marchers, which began at the intersection of Broad and Spring Garden Streets, heading south to Benjamin Franklin Parkway, City Hall, and finally JFK Plaza for the candlelit rally. Instead of going down the section of Broad Street just north of Center City, which took marchers past “bombed-out building sites, industrial warehouses, and vacant lots,” he argued, the march should have gone along Spruce and Pine Streets, which formed the nexus of Philadelphia’s gayborhood. Here “our experiences might have been brought closer to people in their homes” instead of “bewildered rush-hour motorists” on a largely commercial strip. When Whiting asked the march organizers why they had selected the

Broad Street route, they told him they had wanted to disassociate AIDS from the downtown gay community, and instead to show that the epidemic “is a growing concern that would effect [sic] every person, not just gays.” He saw this decision as yet another example of Philadelphia gays “trying to be all things to all people at all times,”

40 Abdul-Khabeer interview.

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lamenting, “we couldn’t even do this thing right and remember our own in the setting where they had lived most comfortably.”41

By “we,” Whiting meant the AIDS Task Force and Center City’s largely white, middle class gay community. Though he excoriated many of the rally speakers as

“blathering, ill-prepared, and often destructive,” he heaped special scorn on Hassan, who in his view “proved to be no friend to either the gay or the black community by acting out her own therapy at everyone’s expense.” He painted her as an interloper at PCHA and

PATF of whom he had only recently become aware when she “[appeared] on the scene to unleash venom for an unclear purpose,” despite his having worked with both organizations for four years. He compared her to David Fair, “Philadelphia’s own version of the Reverend ,” and warned readers parenthetically, “I advise that no one accept Kool Aid from either of them.”42

Although Hassan and Fair criticized PATF for not allocating resources in accordance with the demographics of the epidemic in Philadelphia, Whiting insisted that the group used half of its time and money “to help blacks.” He meant this point not as a defense of the group but as a criticism–another example of the downtown gay community trying to be “all things to all people at all times.” Given that most of the volunteers at

PATF were white and that “the monies donated by middle class white gay men… carried

41 Bill Whiting, “Divisive Events Hurt Everyone,” Philadelphia Gay News, October 3-10, 1986, 9. Whiting’s influence in the Philadelphia gay community is hard to discern but, perhaps tellingly, PGN paired his letter not with a defense of Hassan, but with another editorial criticizing the vigil’s “heavily religious program.” Michael J. LoFurno, “Should Religion Be the Focus?” PGN, October 3-10, 1986, 9.

42 Whiting, “Divisive Events.”

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the financial burden of AIDS in Philadelphia,” he argued that the group’s resources should be spent in the Center City gay community. To drive home his point, he asked readers to consider, “When was the last time that half of the monies and efforts by any black organization were used to further the health and welfare of whites?”43 Here

Whiting drew on race, not sexual identity, as the salient axis of difference; PATF was not a gay organization being asked to devote time and resources to all gay people, but a white organization being asked to do so for black people.

Whiting’s criticism of the march route also demarcated the racial and sexual division of urban space in Philadelphia. Instead of the comfortable, affluent homes of the

“mostly gay men who have suffered from this disease and borne the burden of the fight,”44 the march began amid the post-industrial decay of the no-man’s land created when the sunken Vine Street Expressway sliced through the neighborhood just north of

Center City. Here, the dilapidated landscape served as a microcosm of a Rust Belt metropolis in decline due to the flight of capital to cheaper labor markets and affluent white residents to the more racially homogenous suburbs. At the same time, the

“bombed-out” lots he described adjacent to the march route more specifically recalled the disastrous outcome of the MOVE standoff a year and a half earlier.

Ironically, Hassan departed PCHA just as the AIDS Task Force finally hired a minority outreach coordinator as part of the agency’s full-time paid staff. Delays in hiring someone to fill the post had been a bone of contention between Livers, who thought the

43 Whiting, “Divisive Events.”

44 Whiting, “Divisive Events.”

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funds to pay the salary of the new position should come from city block grants, and Fair, who argued that public monies already secured by PATF obligated the agency to provide more meaningful outreach to communities of color, which by then contributed over half of the city’s total AIDS caseload.45 In early October, District Local 1199C hosted a reception for Johnson, with speeches by Hassan and Fair, as well as Tyrone Smith and

Curtis Wadlington, two IMPACT members who had helped to interview Johnson for the position; Smith would go on to start his own organization for black gay men, Unity

Incorporated, while Wadlington would become a key early member of BEBASHI. At the reception Wadlington struck a conciliatory note, affirming, “We are all committed to something–services to persons with AIDS.” Others pointed to the enormity of Johnson’s task. Leon Bacchues, an African American man who served as secretary of the PCHA board, admitted that he had no idea how to educate the city’s black community about

AIDS, but offered his “professional and personal commitment to be with him because he can’t do it by himself.”46

Johnson would hardly get a chance. The following February, after six months on the job at PATF, he was dismissed from his position and replaced with Wesley Anderson, who had co-founded BEBASHI with Hassan in 1985, but resigned from that group’s board due to internal politics.47 Johnson had recently criticized the agency in an interview for continuing to do a “fantastic” job for its white clients while providing “unequal and

45 Tommi Avicolli, “Goode’s Hatchet Again Falls on Minority Necks,” Philadelphia Gay News, May 9, 1986, 1.

46 Tommi Avicolli, “New Minority Coordinator Honored at Local Reception,” Philadelphia Gay News, October 10, 1986, 3.

47 Kadaba, “Black Warning”.

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uneven” services to the city’s black and Hispanic communities. Johnson claimed that he had given the interview out of frustration after “not getting any results” from his new boss, Francis Stoffa, who had replaced Tom Livers as executive director of the AIDS

Task Force. Stoffa claimed that Johnson had simply reached the end of his probationary hiring period, and declined to further “discuss personnel issues or respond to complaints from a disgruntled employee.”48

In contrast, an anonymous “advocate” of Johnson explained to the Philadelphia

Tribune that Johnson had “brought about his own demise… by being outspoken… about the lackluster support he charged the group gave to educating” minority communities.

Fair charged that the organization had hired a handful of minority staff and created

Johnson’s program out of fear of losing some of the $400,000 they received annually from the city. However, according to Fair, black employees held little to no power at the

AIDS Task Force; Johnson complained that he “did not even have a say-so in budgetary matters,” while IMPACT, a committee of volunteers, held greater decision-making power at the agency. As a result, Johnson’s program suffered from lack of funding: on top of his

48 Tyree Johnson, “Unequal Treatment?,” Philadelphia Daily News, February 26, 1987, 15, Wilds Papers, “David Fair”; Terence Young also reports interpersonal difficulties with Stoffa, leading to the housing director’s demotion and eventual departure from the AIDS Task Force in 1988. In 1994, financial troubles at the agency led to Stoffa’s resignation and a criminal investigation from the District Attorney. The following year, Stoffa was charged with stealing money from the AIDS Task Force, after a long trial entered a plea of no contest the following year and was sentenced to four years’ probation. See Terence Young interview; Huntly Collins, “Head of AIDS Task Force Quits Amid Criminal Probe,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 12, 1994, A1; Linda Loyd, “Stoffa Ordered to Stand Trial,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 29, 1995, B1; Linda Loyd, “AIDS Group’s Ex-Boss Enters No-Contest Plea,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 7, 1996, B1.

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own $25,000 salary, the AIDS Task Force budgeted only $10,000 for minority outreach out of its $519,000 budget.49

Johnson’s unceremonious departure from PATF validated some of the criticisms that Hassan and her allies leveled at the agency. BEBASHI’s 1986 annual report, released not long before the firing, charged that PCHA and PATF had been unable to overcome their “inherent limitations” as organizations “centered in [an] openly gay community that is overwhelmingly white, educated, and employed.” According to the report’s authors— presumably Hassan and Curtis Wadlington, the IMPACT member who had become

BEBASHI’s program director that October50—black employees like Johnson and

Terence Young, the agency’s housing director, had been hired “only as a result of intense political and community pressure” and their presence reflected no real change in the groups’ power structure, since “PCHA/PATF continues to allow no meaningful black involvement in its leadership or decision-making.” Even IMPACT, the volunteer committee within the AIDS Task Force guiding minority outreach, served primarily “to provide a token black presence in PCHA/PATF in order to silence critics within the organized gay community of historical racism at PCHA/PATF.”51

Overall, Hassan and Wadlington argued that while the AIDS Task Force received funding from the city to both help Philadelphians protect themselves from AIDS and

49 Faggins, “AIDS Activists Angry”.

50 An introductory letter, signed by Hassan and Wadlington and attached to the copy of the report that is available in the Scott Wilds papers, suggests that they at least contributed to the document.

51 BEBASHI, “AIDS and Minorities: A Crisis Ignored,” 1986, Wilds Papers, “AIDS in Phila 1984-87,” 5-7.

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provide services to those who had fallen ill, they failed to reach the people of color that made up a majority of the city’s people with AIDS. Some criticisms centered on particular programs. The authors lambasted PCHA’s HIV testing program, arguing that the agency was unwilling to hire non-white staff, demonstrated “bias toward gay clients as opposed to non-gay clients,” and had discouraged use of the test to begin with. When the HIV antibody test became widely available in 1985, at least some AIDS groups opposed widespread screening for HIV, fearing that test results might be used to discriminate against people with the virus.52 Though the report authors did not elaborate on the group’s “political reasons” for opposition to testing, they couched acknowledgment of the possibility that HIV test results might be used for discriminatory purposes in a further criticism of PCHA and PATF, charging that the other group’s use of funds “for organizational purposes other than screening has put the entire screening program at greater risk of government interference and abuse of screening results.”53

52 Though discriminatory measures never became law, a small number of notable attempts made it onto the ballot during the late 1980s, both supported by Lyndon LaRouche and U.S. Representative William Dannemeyer. See Dennis Altman, “Legitimation through Disaster: AIDS and the Gay Movement,” in AIDS and the Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 302-16. Outside the United States, the Cuban government had instituted a compulsory system of national HIV testing in the middle of the 1980s, relocating those who tested positive to sanatoria away from the rest of the population, where they remained until 1993. Although today has an extremely low rate of HIV infection, the island government’s aggressive and coercive approach to the epidemic served as an object lesson for AIDS advocates in the United States during the seven-year quarantine. Donald G. McNeil, Jr. “A Regime’s Tight Grip: Lessons From Cuba in AIDS Control.” The New York Times, May 7, 2012, D1.

53 BEBASHI, “AIDS and Minorities,” 9, 28.

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The report’s authors similarly criticized PCHA’s handling of a city contract for

Terence Young’s “independent living” housing program for people with AIDS. On top of the program’s inefficiency, having delivered only five out of a promised twenty-five beds with $250,000 of city money, they argued that the program ignored “the real nature of the disease, especially among the poor and homeless individuals who are the intended clients of the program.” The authors claimed that PCHA had used “the most restrictive definition of ‘independent living’ possible,” effectively excluding homeless and indigent people with AIDS, who experienced “long-term problems with obtaining adequate health care because of poverty and discrimination.” Finally, they charged, PCHA had “refused” to seek housing clients outside of its own “highly personal networks and… existing gay community structures, most of which have little connection to the city’s poorer neighborhoods.” Just as a failure to reach beyond the downtown gay community had limited the efficacy of education and prevention campaigns, the biases of the AIDS Task

Force and its parent agency–figured here in spatial terms–crippled the deliver of needed services to people of color with AIDS.54

Beyond criticism of any one program, the Hassan and Wadlington used arguments about space and identity to explain why groups rooted in Philadelphia’s gay community would fail to make a dent in the epidemic among people of color. Elaborating on

Hassan’s earlier claim in Cei Bell’s piece on racism at the AIDS Task Force, the report argued, “For the most part, black communities do not segregate themselves by lifestyles; instead, people of all types and conditions live together in one community.” Historically,

54 BEBASHI, “AIDS and Minorities,” 10.

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this had been a source of strength for African Americans, and the key to collective survival in the face of enormous adversity. In terms of AIDS prevention, however, this strength ironically proved to be an Achilles . While groups like PATF had apparently convinced many white gay men to reduce their risky sexual activity by reaching out to the public and commercial spaces where they congregated, the absence of a “clearly defined ‘black gay community,’ or ‘black drug community’”–bars like Smart Place and

Pentony’s notwithstanding–meant that “the only way to stop the spread of AIDS among non-whites is to orient AIDS education efforts to the entire non-white community.” The report’s authors argued that the problem lay not only in the different structure of communities of color, but in the way that minority gay men and MSM thought of themselves, since “the primary characteristic of the communities most at risk of AIDS in

Philadelphia is that they are black and Latino, and that their homosexual/bisexual preferences are secondary factors from a public health education perspective.” If race superseded sexuality as the salient category of identity for many gay men and MSM of color, they argued, those men would respond better to prevention and education efforts targeted to minority communities than they would to those aimed at gay or bisexual men.55

Here Hassan and Wadlington deployed a vision of same-sex male desire in

African American communities that resists easy characterization through gay or bisexual men driven to life “on the down low” by black homophobia. To be sure, they acknowledged homophobic attitudes in communities of color as a significant barrier to

55 BEBASHI, “AIDS and Minorities,” 5, 24.

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AIDS prevention and education, just as homophobic attitudes in American politics and society more generally forestalled an effective and deliberate response to the epidemic at all levels of government.56 This view was based, at least in part, on the authors’ personal experience. Curtis Wadlington remembers a flamboyantly gay man with AIDS, a beloved and important part of the neighborhood, whose long-time partners also maintained relationships with wives and steady girlfriends:

When Tommy died from AIDS, and I’ll never forget this, I went to preach his funeral, and I was standing there looking out, and I mean the neighborhood was devastated. The girls who were going with these guys were devastated because he was the one that kept their men responsible to them and their kids. This gay man now, that they’d been screwing since they were little. All of this dynamic is going on, and I said, “Somehow I’ve got to let them know that this is nice, this is good, this is beautiful, but there’s something else. Tommy got AIDS, y’all. And y’all got to think about that. He did half this audience, and y’all did all of them women.” And slowly it started to break out in the neighborhood, you know, this one died, that one died.57

56 To say that the difference between manifestations of same-sex desire in white America versus black America arises mainly from the homophobic attitudes of black communities oversimplifies the complex social and sexual lived reality of African American MSM. To be sure, such attitudes exist within black communities, as they do in America society more generally, but using the congruity (or lack thereof) between black men’s sexual activities and their public identities as a yardstick for the progressiveness of their communities reduces sexual and progressive politics alike to a single criterion of normatively white sexual expression. Mark Haile writes that “there is a construction of sexuality far more elaborate than mere ‘straight’ or ‘gay,’ especially in the black community. When coupled with the racism that is the history of this nation, that affects every aspect of life, the end result is a field of sexual identities for black lesbian and gay men that is identical to neither the white gay and lesbian community in America, nor the framework of sexual orientation as had been studied on the African continent.” Mark Haile, “‘It Can Happen to Anybody. Even Me, Magic Johnson,’” BLK 3:9 (1991), 20–25, quoted in David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS, 1st Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 162.

57 Curtis Wadlington, interview with the author, May 9, 2013, Philadelphia, PA.

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The story of an openly black gay man with AIDS who nevertheless occupied a valued social and sexual role in his community points to a more complicated lived experience than caricatures of vitriolic black homophobia and “down-low” men. For Wadlington, the tension between racial and sexual identity was reflected in his choice to live in a mostly black neighborhood, as well as a source of conflict with openly gay African Americans:

I said, “I don’t think that promoting my sexuality as a feature of who I am should be in the front. ‘Hi, I’m Curtis. And it ain’t none of your business who I fuck. Is there anything else you want to know?’ Because I’m not politically gay, I don’t live in a gay community, most of my friends are not gay. So according to you, I’m not.” And when I got into the community and found out what was going on, oh damn no, I don’t want to be. I don’t want to even be black and gay, because you all let this shit go on. I can’t believe that you all ain’t had no riot or protest, and this has been going on this long. And most of the guys that I grew up with never considered themselves gay. Some got married, and you know, they did, and then they stopped and they didn’t. But what I always knew was, I would be judged for being an African American man before I would for being gay. And then I said to myself, “That’s who I am.”58

Overall, BEBASHI did not dismiss the toll that AIDS was taking on the city’s minority gay men and MSM, but subsumed sexual identity within a constellation of other factors and social pressures driving the epidemic. While white gay men were learning to protect themselves from AIDS and incorporating lessons about safer sex into their daily lives, their black and Latino counterparts were not. The reason for their continued risk lay not primarily in their sexuality, Hassan and Wadlington argued, but in a host of other social pressures and inequities. In terms that now seem prescient, Hassan and Wadlington predicted that “[w]ithout an urgent shift in the direction of AIDS policy, funding, education and service efforts, AIDS will become a disease identified mostly with the

58 Wadlington interview.

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poor, with the non-white, with the uninsured and under-insured, with the uneducated and illiterate, with the homeless and outcast.” Though it had initially been framed as an epidemic among white gay men, they concluded, “AIDS is a disease, not a lifestyle.”

Hassan and Wadlington set about implementing their vision of what AIDS prevention for black Philadelphians should look like, with support from disparate sources. Sponsorship from the Urban League resulted in a grant from the Philadelphia

Foundation to cover the group’s operating expenses and District Local 1199C provided office space to the fledgling group, while a temporary position in the Philadelphia

Department of Health’s infection control unit kept Hassan afloat financially until she could draw a salary from BEBASHI. The group gave educational seminars to black churches, gay and lesbian groups, and the residents of public housing projects, among others, taught social and medical service providers how to give culturally sensitive care to

African Americans with AIDS, and in 1988 opened an HIV testing site in North

Philadelphia under a contract with the city’s Health Department. Beyond education,

BEBASHI trained “comfort care givers” to provide emotional support and help people with AIDS navigate daily life with their symptoms, essentially replicating the buddy program run by the AIDS Task Force, though presumably with the African American volunteers that group had been unable to recruit. However, BEBASHI’s street outreach in minority neighborhoods became the group’s most celebrated program. A staffer from the agency would stake out a spot on a city corner–perhaps one popular among prostitutes–to

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talk to passersby about how to protect themselves from AIDS, and give them condoms and bleach to put their new knowledge into practice.59

BEBASHI also became an important model for other minority AIDS organizations, both locally and around the country, driven in no small part by Hassan’s personal magnetism and no-nonsense approach to AIDS education. Carmen of

Programa Esfuerzo, a Latino AIDS group based in North Philadelphia, modeled her agency’s one-on-one education program after BEBASHI, crediting the other woman as a personal and professional mentor. Some of Hassan’s staff ventured out to start their own organizations, as Michael Hinson did in 1991 when he founded COLOURS, a community empowerment group for LGBT people of color. Hassan also became a sought-after conference speaker, as others sought her expertise in developing AIDS service programs for their own communities. Her work garnered accolades from the National Association of Social Workers, the U.S. Department of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control, and in 1987 she received a standing ovation at the Fourth International AIDS Conference in Stockholm.60

However, Hassan was not without detractors, who saw her as “arrogant” and referred to her as the “AIDS diva.” Moreover, as BEBASHI grew quickly, the group could no longer claim outsider status among Philadelphia’s AIDS service organizations.

59 BEBASHI, “AIDS and Minorities,” 16-18; Vernon Loeb, “AIDS Program Director Complains Of Funding Delay,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 31, 1988, B4; Alexis Moore, “Fighting AIDS In Phila. A Mission To Inform Blacks,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 25, 1988, J1; Abdul-Khabeer interview.

60 Alexis Moore, “Fighting AIDS In Phila. Programa Esfuerzo Reaches Out To Latinos,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 25, 1988, J1; Kadaba, “The Black Warning”; Abdul-Khabeer interview.

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David Fair moved into a new post as head of the city’s AIDS Activities Coordinating

Office (AACO) in late 1987, giving Hassan a key ally in city government but inviting charges of political patronage because of their close working relationship. Nine months into his tenure at AACO, a PGN editorial criticized Fair for funding BEBASHI despite the group’s “atrocious” record on outreach to black gay men and IV drug users.

Meanwhile, some of the newer AIDS groups found themselves competing with the former upstart for city funding and contracts, creating resentment that echoed the conflict between Hassan and the AIDS Task Force, now only a few years past. Critics charged that Hassan had taken on the characteristics of the very system she had railed against, while she resented that the profusion of new groups, spurred by an increase in city funding for AIDS programs, duplicated existing services and created redundancies in an already crowded field of health and social services.61

For critics, Hassan’s decision to out of the 1199C offices to a separate space near 16th and Walnut Street, in the heart of Center City and a stone’s throw from the tony condos overlooking Rittenhouse Square, epitomized BEBASHI’s transition from ingénue to insider. Even Fair, Hassan’s friend and political ally, criticized her in a profile published by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Using terms that echoed his earlier with

Darlene Garner and Cei Bell at BWMT for Education, he told a reporter that Hassan had made “a political alliance with the people downtown,” having “basically decided her survival means doing the bidding of a white AIDS bureaucracy not particularly sensitive to the black community’s needs.” Hassan shrugged off such criticisms, defending the

61 “Editorial Viewpoints: Business as Usual.” Philadelphia Gay News. Philadelphia, PA, August 19-25, 1988.

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move “because Center City is the seat of power. You cannot interface with power from out there in Philadelphia.” Nevertheless, the interplay of space and identity provided fodder to critics who suspected that physical proximity to power might just corrupt

Hassan and BEBASHI.

By 1984, racial disparities in the local AIDS epidemic had become apparent in

Philadelphia. Contrary to narratives that stress the inaction of African Americans during the first decade of the epidemic, at least a few key black Philadelphians mobilized locally to draw their communities’ attention to the growing epidemic and to demand that resources be devoted to minority AIDS prevention and education programs. Their efforts yielded BEBASHI, the nation’s first black AIDS service organization, which quickly became an important resource for local African Americans concerned about the epidemic.

A half decade later, minority AIDS prevention and education had become a key part of

AIDS services in Philadelphia, with funding from the city’s AIDS office—a testament to the difficult work of Hassan and her allies, if also to the growing AIDS epidemic in

Philadelphia’s communities of color. However, even though a general consensus within the city’s AIDS service structure had been reached on the need for minority education and prevention programs, major disagreements remained about what such efforts should look like.

Such disputes stemmed largely from black communities’ complicated relationship to the new disease. In part, that relationship had been shaped by the initial identification of AIDS as a disease of white gay men, combined with homophobia in black communities. However, that relationship was also shaped–at least in Philadelphia–by the

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spatial disconnect between white gay community groups in the downtown core and more geographically marginal groups to the north, south, and west. Historical patterns of segregation and racism had produced different models of sexual identities and subcultures in the city’s black and white communities, with a mostly white gay enclave downtown, while black gay men and women tended to live in neighborhoods defined by race rather than sexuality. In order to be credible to people of color, BEBASHI and its allies had argued, messages about AIDS would have to come from trusted sources within minority communities. However, as BEBASHI grew in size, moved downtown, and became integrated into the city’s AIDS services structure, some critics argued that the organization could no longer claim the kind of community relevancy necessary to do grassroots minority outreach. As before, communal identity, spatial politics, and the distribution of power and resources within the city shaped ideas about how to address the epidemic among black Philadelphians.

Early black AIDS activism also produced a more visible, organized, politically powerful black gay presence in Philadelphia, one that mirrored similar developments taking place elsewhere. While Unity, Incorporated emerged from Tyrone Smith’s work at

IMPACT, COLOURS came out of Michael Hinson’s work at BEBASHI. These were not the first or only black gay groups in the city, but they emerged as part of a larger wave of black gay activism that attended the growing recognition of the crisis that AIDS represented for black gay men in particular. That groundswell of visibility also included a movement of black gay artists and intellectuals, centered on New York City but stretching across the country. In contrast to BEBASHI’s claim that black gay men’s sexual identity was subordinated to their race, the writers and artists of this “Black Gay

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Renaissance” forged a distinct black gay identity that drew from both race and sexuality without being subsumed within either.

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CHAPTER 2

“BLACK MEN LOVING BLACK MEN”: AIDS AND BLACK GAY MEN’S POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

In a May 1986 editorial for the Philadelphia Gay News, black gay writer Joseph

Beam argued that problems with minority outreach at the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force, the city’s largest AIDS service organization, represented part of a much bigger problem.

“The State (a euphemism for the ruling class),” he wrote, “has never been concerned with the welfare of black people.” For Beam, the “ruling class” included the white gay men running some of the country’s most prominent AIDS service organizations; though marginalized by widespread, entrenched homophobia, they still had access to greater economic resources and social privilege than their black counterparts, and couldn’t be counted upon to consider black gay men’s welfare. He continued:

Our responsibility is twofold: we should continue holding a gun to the heads of Philadelphia AIDS Task Force, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the Whitman-Walker Clinic1 until minority outreach coordinators are hired and specific programs are implemented. But concurrently we must ensure our own safety and administer to our own sick.

Beam ended with a challenge: “Black men loving black men is the act of the eighties. So I say to you: What have you done for us lately?”2

Beam’s question offered both a sardonic rebuke to white gay men for their blindness to racism within their communities, and a challenge to black gay men to care

1 A Washington, DC gay men’s health center.

2 Joseph Beam, “Caring for Each Other,” Philadelphia Gay News, May 16–22, 1986, p. 9.

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for one another– a critical task in the context of a terrifying plague that disproportionately affected both gay men and African Americans. Beam similarly sought to challenge both the overwhelming whiteness of gay public culture and the overwhelming straightness of black public culture by framing “black men loving black men” as a “revolutionary act.”

He was not alone in this project. Beam worked alongside a cohort of black gay intellectuals who advanced a political consciousness, forged in the darkest days of the epidemic, that held blackness and gayness as mutually reinforcing and deeply intertwined parts of the same public identity. Beam’s social, cultural, and intellectual network included the like-minded artists and writers that would become the most prominent figures in this “Black Gay Renaissance.” These men came of age in the 1970s, during the heyday of both Black Power and , two of the movements to which they traced their intellectual origins. As editor of In the Life, the first anthology of writing by black gay men, published in 1986, Beam forged connections with others from around the country who used prose, poetry, and film to explore their own “tenuous position as Black men in white America… exacerbated because we are gay.” New York City served as the epicenter for this cultural foment, as home of both the writers’ collective Other Countries and the consciousness-raising advocacy group Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD).

Additionally, the intellectual cohort included acclaimed Bay Area documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs, Beam in Philadelphia, and his collaborator Essex Hemphill in

Washington, DC.3

3 Joseph Beam, “Introduction: Leaving the Shadows Behind,” in In the Life: a Black Gay Anthology, ed. Joseph Beam (Boston: Alyson Books, 1986), 17.

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Altogether, the men of the Black Gay Renaissance linked the spread of AIDS among their friends and peers to their own exclusion from the normative identities assigned to gay men and to African Americans. Like critics of Philadelphia AIDS Task

Force, they identified racism among white gay men and the need for minority messengers as obstacles to outreach by white gay men’s groups to communities of color. However, they also argued that the cultural invisibility of black gay men put them at unique psychological risk, producing low self-esteem that led them to engage in unprotected sex and drug abuse, and so increasing their risk of contracting HIV. As a remedy, some produced literature and art to representing their experience as black gay men at the intersection of racism and homophobia in the midst of a deadly epidemic. Meanwhile,

GMAD translated their artistic labor into public health practice by incorporating the prose, poetry, and film of the Black Gay Renaissance into the consciousness-raising sessions and cultural events that made up their work around AIDS advocacy and education.

When original GMAD members Harold Robinson, Colin Robinson, and Charles

Angel got together to write the group’s statement of purpose in the summer of 1986, they framed their goals in expansive terms, dedicating themselves “to end any and all ills that interfere with individuals to exist and co-exist in a free, democratic society,” as well as “[to end] racism, , class oppression, and all Lesbian and Gay oppression, wherever these may exist.” They made no specific reference to HIV or AIDS, although the minutes of an early GMAD meeting, held later that month, indicate that they discussed New York City’s Minority Task Force on AIDS and the recently-formed

Minority Caucus of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Within six months Angel had died of

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complications from AIDS, prompting a brief hiatus in the group’s activities. After re- forming the following year, GMAD narrowed its focus to a consciousness-raising model centered on weekly meetings, called Friday Night Forums, where members would gather at someone’s home to discuss pertinent issues, including the ways that racism, homophobia, and sexism together shaped their own lives as black gay men. This nuanced analysis of black gay identity would become a hallmark of the group’s programming.4

During the first few years of GMAD’s existence, Friday Night Forums occasionally addressed HIV/AIDS or related issues, but the group had not yet made fighting the epidemic a central part of its mission. However, in the late 1980s, GMAD leaders began to expand the organization, shifting from an all-volunteer structure supported by member donations to an incorporated non-profit with paid staff and outside funding. Over the next half decade, the group sought and won grants and contracts to deliver HIV education and services, which allowed GMAD to hire its first paid staff members, produce AIDS education materials, and expand their slate of services to include support groups and youth outreach. Within a few years, the group boasted a membership of 300 and a mailing list of 1,200 for the GMAD Calendar of monthly events, announcements, and classifieds, positioning the group to deliver educational messages about AIDS to large numbers of black gay men in the New York metropolitan

4 Colin Robinson, Preliminary sketch by Statement of Purpose Committee, August 6, 1986, Box 1, Folder 1, Box 5, Folder 4, Gay Men of African Descent Records, Schomburg Center, New York, NY [hereafter “GMAD Records”].

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area.5 In grant applications to public and private funders, GMAD also highlighted consciousness-raising as a unique element of their approach to HIV prevention.

To prevent the spread of HIV among black gay men, GMAD promoted a positive black gay identity and built a sense of community among members. They hoped that self- esteem and a sense of belonging would salve the psychological wounds black gay men endured as “double minorities,” empowering them to protect themselves against HIV through safer sexual behaviors, while encouraging one another to do the same. To this end, GMAD aimed to increase the visibility of black gay men, both past and present.

They highlighted same-sex desiring men in African and African American history, hoping to validate their own presence in contemporary black America. They also sought to make common elements of black gay men’s experiences visible to one another through consciousness-raising discussions and the work of artists and writers who explored intersecting pressures of racism and homophobia in their own lives. At the same time, they used Afrocentric symbols and language to call on what they saw as a set of values shared among African-descended people that could form the basis of AIDS prevention and education programs.

Even as GMAD claimed inclusion in black history and identity, they insisted that black gay men themselves best understood their peers’ needs with respect to HIV and

AIDS, and that only black gay men could design culturally competent HIV prevention programs. The group clashed with the Black Leadership Commission on AIDS (BLCA), a coalition of African American political, religious, and community leaders in New York

5 “November 1991 GMAD Calendar,” November 1991, Box 5, Folder 4, GMAD Records.

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City, over the meaning of cultural competency in AIDS education and prevention. BLCA had designed Lifestyles Genesis, an Afrocentric HIV prevention program for black gay men funded by the New York State Department of Health’s AIDS Institute, and contracted GMAD to run the program for the group’s constituency in . GMAD leaders, however, found the program curriculum to be so culturally incompetent and poorly designed as to be ineffective, which they chalked up to BLCA’s failure to include input from gay and lesbian African American groups in designing Lifestyles Genesis.

Thereafter, the group designed their own interventions, including a thirty-minute dramatic video intended to help black gay men protect themselves from HIV. As GMAD grew, they sought and won contracts supporting their HIV prevention work and AIDS services, based on their complex model of black gayness and emphasis on empowerment and self-esteem for members. Yet even as GMAD saw race and sexuality as interdependent and irreducible parts of a coherent black gayness, they couched many of their consciousness-raising efforts within a forthright claim to black history and identity.

Although the onset of the AIDS stirred up anti-gay feeling among African Americans, as throughout the rest of American society, it also spurred black gay men to organize politically and artistically to claim a place for themselves in black communities. For Gay

Men of African Descent and their friends in the Black Gay Renaissance, making room for same-sex desire within the “boundaries of blackness” was not just a political act, but also a matter of sheer survival.

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Visibility Is Survival

The writers and artists in the Black Gay Renaissance brought intellectual capital to the project of black gay men’s , including struggles around funding for

AIDS prevention and education. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, they published a slew of books featuring the prose and poetry of black gay men: Beam’s In the Life and

Brother to Brother, Essex Hemphill’s Ceremonies, Assotto Saint’s The Road Before Us, and Other Countries Journal: Black Gay Voices and Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the

Age of AIDS, both produced by the black gay writers’ collective Other Countries.

Altogether, Beam, Hemphill, Saint, Riggs, and their contemporaries worked to build a cultural canon that affirmed their racial and sexual selves as part of a coherent, complex whole. Their work also overlapped with GMAD’s consciousness-raising program, as a

Friday Night Forum or fundraiser might include a screening of one of Riggs’ films, a reading by Other Countries, or a performance by Essex Hemphill. GMAD leaders, including executive directors Colin Robinson, Cary Alan Johnson, and Robert Penn, contributed their own work to anthologies of black gay writing. Beyond the catharsis of storytelling, they hoped that presenting such work would help members see themselves as part of a larger community, decreasing their alienation by establishing a sense of shared experiences across time and space. Consequently, while GMAD leaders sketched the contours of a black gay identity that was more than the sum of its parts, they also staked a claim on African and African American history, looking to examples of black same-sex loving men and gender transgressors from the past to validate their own present existence. Simultaneously asserting their need for autonomous cultural spaces as a result of being different from straight blacks and gay whites, and their crucial place in

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communities of African descent throughout history, they aimed to make gay black men visible both to themselves and to outsiders because, as Joe Beam wrote in a 1984 editorial, “Visibility is survival.”6

Beam and his cohort modeled their quest for a new canon on the example of Third

World lesbian and feminist writers, and most particularly Kitchen Table: Women of

Color Press, established by Barbara Smith in 1980 to “to make visible the writing, culture, and history of women of color.” In the introduction to In the Life, the first anthology of black gay men’s writing, Beam recalled seeking refuge from the white gay literary world, in which “[a]ll the protagonists are blond; all the Blacks are criminal and negligible,” in work by queer feminists of color, including Smith, Audre Lorde, Cherríe

Moraga, and June Jordan. In the acknowledgements for Brother to Brother, a second anthology of writing by black gay men left unfinished after Joseph Beam’s death from

AIDS complications in 1988, editor Essex Hemphill singled out Smith for particular thanks for her assistance in completing the project. Similarly, Colin Robinson, a longtime

GMAD member and officer who contributed to several literary anthologies and worked as a crewmember on Tongues Untied, Marlon Riggs’ controversial and deeply personal exploration of black gay life in the age of AIDS, acknowledged his own intellectual debt to Lorde and Moraga, as well as Cheryl Clarke and Jewelle Gomez, whose work he

6 Colin Robinson, Memo to Eddy Lilavois, November 4, 1991, Box 3, Folder 7, GMAD Records; “US Conference of Mayors Collaborative HIV/AIDS Prevention Grant Quarterly Report, November 15, 1994–January 31, 1995” February 1995, Box 24, Folder 3, GMAD Records; “US Conference of Mayors Collaborative HIV/AIDS Prevention Grant Monthly Update Report,” February 1995, Box 24, Folder 4, GMAD Records; Joseph Beam, Philadelphia Gay News editorial dated October 25, 1984 quoted by Beam in “Introduction: Leaving the Shadows Behind,” in In the Life, ed. Joseph Beam, (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1986), 14.

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referenced in his own poetry. These women’s intellectual labor on the ways that their lives had been shaped simultaneously by racism, misogyny, poverty, and heterosexism influenced Beam, Hemphill, and Robinson as they reflected on their own experiences with race, gender, class, and sexuality.7

The complex identity envisioned by the men of the Black Gay Renaissance departed sharply from other ideas in circulation about the place of gay or bisexual communities. Afrocentric scholars such as Frances Cress Welsing and Molefi

Asante, who gained popularity during the 1980s and 90s, argued that “true” blackness and homosexuality were mutually exclusive. Welsing, a psychiatrist with “quite a following among black cultural nationalists,” claimed that homosexuality “was an almost non-existent behavioral phenomenon amongst indigenous Blacks in Africa,” but had developed among African American men due to their emasculation by a racist society.

According to Welsing, white men were “invested in the effeminization and homosexualization of black men” whose genetic superiority threatened to eliminate the

“recessive deficient state of albinism” that defined the white race. She had begun her career during the 1970s, and became popular once again in the early 1990s during the resurgence of cultural , having been embraced by the controversial rap group

Public Enemy. Similarly, Molefi Asante, widely known for his 1980 book Afrocentricity:

7 Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own,” Frontiers 10, no. 3 (1989): 11–13; Beam, “Introduction”, 13; Cheryl Clarke, “Pomo Homo Vexing of Black Macho in the Age of AIDS,” Corpus 4, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 56–63; Kevin McGruder, a former executive director of GMAD and now assistant professor of history at Antioch College, acknowledges the intellectual debt owed by the men of the Black Gay Renaissance to Lorde, Smith, Moraga, and others in “To Be Heard in Print: Black Gay Writers in 1980s New York,” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora 6, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 49–65.

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the Theory of Social Change and as the founder of the first doctoral program in African

American studies, at Temple University, claimed that homosexuality was not an

“Afrocentric relationship,” and thus at odds with the best interests of the race.8

Going beyond Riggs’ criticism of heterosexist Afrocentric thinkers, GMAD advanced an alternative version of African history and society, identifying same sex desire on the continent both before the fall and in the present day to validate their identity as gay African Americans. The group frequently presented programs on African cultures and societies, past and present, though their interest in the continent and its peoples sometimes reproduced colonial stereotypes of Africa as an exotic, prehistoric place. In

July 1988, GMAD vice president Elbert Gates hosted two African gay men at his home as one of the group’s Friday Night Forums. The GMAD calendar promised attendees

“exotic native foods” and asked them to wear traditional dress. At another forum, members learned about black gay men in history, “from Africa to the present,” positioning the continent as both spatially and temporally distant.9

At other times, GMAD combined the trope of the Dark Continent with a concern for contemporary African politics. The cover image of the March 1992 consisted of an outline of the African continent with “Brother to Brother” across the top and “Keep the

8 Frances Cress Welsing, “The Politics Behind Black Male Passivity, Effeminization, Bisexuality and Homosexuality,” The Isis Papers: the Key to the Colors (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991), 81-84 quoted in Dwight A. McBride, “Can the Queen Speak?: Racial Essentialism, Sexuality, and the Problem of Authority,” Callaloo 21, no. 2 (Spring 1989), 369–370; Asante, Afrocentricity (Buffale: Amulefi Pub Co., 1980), 65 quoted in Devon W. Carbado, Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader (NYU Press, 1999), 284.

9 Byron Johns, “July 1988 GMAD Calendar,” Box 5, Folder 1, GMAD Records.

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Pressure On!” at the bottom, above a shaded-in South Africa. A pair of arms joined by clasped hands overlaid the landmass, linking a black man’s disembodied torso to an

African mask, visually connecting across space and time primitive Africa to the modernity of the black diaspora in the United States. At the same time, the phrase

“Brother to Brother” echoed both the title of Joseph Beam’s posthumously published literary collection, as well as the spoken refrain that opened Riggs’ Tongues Untied,10 and reinterpreted the visual rhetoric of trans-Atlantic connection as African American investment in the South African transition from apartheid state to multi-racial democracy.

The disparate elements layered messages of diasporic unity, black self-help, social diversity, and African history into a single visual field.

Over time, the group’s programming became more Afrocentric in style, using the names of Kwanzaa principles and other Swahili words to describe weekly activities.

Thus, “Can We Talk?” a series of “rap-style sessions with self-awareness and communication exercises” became “Can We… Ukwangela?” which the calendar defined as “the enjoyment of good company and the mutual aid and sympathy which spring from mutual relationships.” The event would offer attendees the “opportunity for us as Gay men of color to titter like sissies or palaver like princes in an unstructured, non-

10 See below.

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competitive setting,” calling up the possibility for members to embody different identities–effeminate “sissies” or African royalty–in the same evening.11

The September 1991 cover featured a series of photographs of a sinewy black man naked from waist up, posed against a lush vegetal background, standing and wearing a sarong and beaded necklace, sitting on a rock and wearing little, if any, clothing, and jogging in a pair of bright white running shorts and sneakers. The Afrocentric visual vocabulary established by the sexualized pseudo-warrior echoed through the rest of the calendar, which included a Friday Night Forum titled, “Older Black Gay Men Loving

Each Other is Seen as an Act of Survival,” to explore the role of older black gay men as

“ADODI, the wise men/healers of Yoruba society.” The announcements section also advertised the Shango Project, an effort to collect materials relating to the history of black gay men and women, named after the Yoruba god of fire, lightning, and thunder.

The cover of the first 1992 issue, encompassing January and February, urged readers to

“Keep Kwanzaa Principles Throughout the Year” with a list of the nguzo saba, the seven

Kwanzaa principles defined by Maulana Karenga, on the cover. A Friday Night Forum in late January promised to do just that, through a discussion of media representations of black gay men. The program description asked readers, “How can we begin the process

11 GMAD, June 1989 Calendar, Box 5, Folder 2, GMAD Records; “Ukwangela” in July 1989 Calendar, Box 5, Folder 2, GMAD Records; “palaver” came to English from the Portuguese “palavra,” which early traders in West Africa used to describe their interactions with the native population. Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, s.v. “palaver,” accessed November 10, 2013, http://www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.temple.edu/view/10.1093/acref/978019954792 0.001.0001/acref-9780199547920-e-3511.

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of defining ourselves in the mass media?” while urging them to “revisit the principle of

Kujichagulia [self-determination] as we discuss and answer these questions tonight.”12

GMAD also supported and promoted the work of other groups that similarly looked for a usable black gay past. ADODI, a black gay men’s group in Philadelphia that started in 1983, took its name from the plural of ado, a Yoruba word to describe “a man who ‘loves’ another man. More than just a description of partners, in Africa, the ADODI of the tribe are thought to embody both male and female ways of being and were revered as shamans, sages, and leaders.” The group organized an annual summer retreat to

Fellowship Farms in Pottstown, Pennsylvania beginning in 1984. The theme of the first retreat, “Self-Esteem: Loving Ourselves through the 80’s” anticipated Joe Beam’s later injunction for black gay men to love one another, as well as GMAD’s overall consciousness-raising approach. Like GMAD, ADODI also emerged in the midst of, and in response to, the early AIDS epidemic. Founder Clifford Rowlands felt, as one group member recalls:

the need to bring black men together to do some mourning rituals. We were all walking zombies, all of our friends and partners dying not knowing how to process… It was a very sad time… We all knew that we needed each other, we needed a space to be with each other.13

12 GMAD, September 1991 Calendar, Box 5, Folder 4, GMAD Records; GMAD, January/February 1992 GMAD Calendar, Box 5, Folder 5, GMAD Records.

13 ADODI New York Habari Gani e-Newsletter Archive Homepage, http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs065/1101859413381/archive/1102432339232.html, accessed 10 Nov 2012. Also quoted from www.adodiintl.org in Myron M. Beasley, “‘Tribute to the Ancestors’: Ritual Performance and Same-Gender-Loving Men of African Descent,” Text & Performance Quarterly 28, no. 4 (October 2008): 435–436. Interview from Beasley, 435.

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ADODI and GMAD also overlapped in their programming. ADODI advertised its

1989 summer retreat on the theme of “Self-Empowerment in the Age of AIDS,” and a

Thanksgiving retreat on the theme of “Family Reunion: Getting Back to Our Roots” in

GMAD’s monthly calendar, which also periodically reported the deaths of ADODI members. In August 1991, GMAD hosted ADODI’s New York chapter to talk about

“exploring the spiritual side of our development… in the spirit of Umoja,” the Swahili word for “unity” and one of the nguzo saba.14

Moving into the middle of the 1990s, GMAD’s programming became more explicitly Afrocentric, with calendar covers that frequently featured the outline or silhouette of the African continent, or symbols of African heritage, such as the Yoruba door carving that adorned the cover of the June 1993 calendar. Friday Night Forums covered topics related to Afrocentric or diasporic themes, such as the September 1993 workshop titled “Roots,” which promised to “look at the roots of many of those things we inherit from the Motherland.” Other events dealt with the status of gay black men and lesbians abroad, as when GMAD hosted prominent South African activist Simon Nkoli in

October 1993, or representatives from black gay and lesbian community groups from

Africa, the Caribbean, and the in July 1994. Interest in black queerness as a historical phenomenon overlapped with the desire to locate a usable black gay past.

A May 1994 program, “Cross-Dressing in African Culture,” asked, “Was the famous

Hatshepsut a queen or a pharaoh? Or perhaps both? Did she rule wearing the drag of a

14 GMAD, May 1989 Calendar, Box 5, Folder 2, GMAD Records; GMAD, October/November 1990 Calendar, August 1991 Calendar, and September 1991 Calendar, Box 5, Folder 4, GMAD Records.

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? Was Akhenaten an effeminate homosexual? What is the attitude of traditional

Africa on cross-dressing and gender roles?” Such questions held open not only the possibility that queer embodiments such as female masculinity or male effeminacy might have been tolerated in “traditional Africa,” but also attributed them to ancient Egyptian pharaohs, symbols of both political savvy and advanced civilization that had been denied as an attribute of African peoples, imagined in modern Western thought as backwards, primitive, even pre-historical.15

Aside from African history, Black Gay Renaissance artists and GMAD leaders looked to earlier periods of cultural and political foment in the United States, particularly the and the Civil Rights Movement, to locate a usable black gay past. Beam’s anthology of black gay writing, In the Life, included an interview with black gay bohemian Bruce Nugent, who partly based the protagonist in his homoerotic short story, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” on his contemporary, famed Harlem Renaissance poet

Langston Hughes. At one Friday Night Forum in 1995, members learned about “the creativity and strategies of Black Gays and Lesbians during [the Harlem Renaissance] in creating or accessing social networks and spaces,” concluding with a black gay man in his seventies who shared “a candid personal history” about growing up in Jazz Age

Harlem. According to a monthly report made to one of the group’s funders, gay men’s involvement in the storied Harlem Renaissance surprised many GMAD members, and most had never met a black gay man so much older than themselves. The report’s author asserted that such programming served “as a powerful psychoeducational intervention

15 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (University Of Chicago Press, 1996).

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that provides information to GMAD’s constituents which supports the development and maintenance of a healthy identity, a critical preventive measure to an array of risk behaviors.”16

GMAD leaders also highlighted the contributions of their black gay forefathers to claim a place for themselves in the contemporary African American community. In a

1995 press conference at the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building in Harlem, board co-chair George Bellinger pointed to , the gay Civil Rights operative and “architect” of the 1963 March on Washington. “The Black community,” he told the crowd, “believed that it would be better if the gay director of that momentous march took a backseat to a heterosexual spokesperson…. [Rustin’s] contribution was rarely acknowledged and his silence was expected.” He continued, “We as a community are a vital component of our families and will be silent no longer. To paraphrase Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr., ‘Until we are all free, none of us can be free.’” Bellinger then projected gay involvement in black politics into both the past and future:

We have and will continue to defend you tooth and nail. We have been a part of every major activity and yet some of you dare not speak our names…. We will no longer be rendered invisible, for we are as proud of our gayness as we are of our Blackness.17

GMAD leaders were aware that homosexuality rarely appeared in representations of African American life, and similarly black men were for the most part absent from the pages of national gay interest publications such as The Advocate. To the extent that black

16 GMAD, “US Conference of Mayors Collaborative HIV/AIDS Prevention Grant Monthly Update Report,” February 1995.

17 “African Americans Are Vocal About Gay Pride,” City Sun, June 28–July 4, 1995, in Box 24, Folder 4, GMAD Records.

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men did appear in gay contexts, they tended to be sexualized and objectified. For example, in gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial portraiture, Hemphill argued that the auteur’s “eye pays special attention to the penis at the expense of showing us the subject’s face, and thus, a whole person.” In Mapplethorpe’s shots that focused closely on the black subject’s genitals, he continued, “The penis becomes the identity of the Black male, which is the classic racist stereotype recreated and presented as Art in the context of a gay vision.” To combat this absence, GMAD promoted the work of writers and artists of the Black Gay Renaissance. Group events included readings and performances by Other Countries, and screenings of films such as Riggs’ Tongues

Untied.18

Marlon Riggs made a career of using film to explore connections between prejudice and popular culture. After graduating with a degree in history from Harvard

University and another in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, Riggs won a national Emmy Award for his 1986 documentary Ethnic Notions, which explored anti-black stereotypes through over a century’s worth of American media images. While undergoing treatment for an acute kidney problem in 1987, Riggs learned that he had contracted HIV. Faced with his own mortality, Riggs used film to make sense of his experience, turning the camera on himself to connect the rampant spread of HIV among

18 Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1992; 2000 ed.), 42– 43.

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black gay men to the ways that depictions of black queer sexuality reinforced normative values of whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexuality.19

Riggs wove themes of silence and invisibility through Tongues Untied, exploring the experience of black gay men in America in a film that blends autobiography, poetry, and performance. Tongues Untied opens with a single voice chanting, “Brother to brother, brother to brother,” which then swells to a chorus, suggesting that the film functions as an intimate conversation between Riggs and each of many viewers, both gay and straight. Riggs might have spoken to fellow black gay men “brother to brother”— echoing the title of Joseph Beam’s follow up to In the Life, already underway at the time of his death but not published until 1991—and to his straight black brothers as well, as the disembodied voices make no reference to their sexuality. Throughout the film, Riggs meditated on the meaning of being out–or not–as a black gay man. Early on in the film, a conversation between two voices points to the peril of remaining silent:

Silence is my shield. It crushes. Silence is my cloak. It smothers. Silence is my sword. It cuts both ways.20

Riggs also considered the meaning of his blackness in the midst of a gay community defined by whiteness, recounting his move to San Francisco, where he found himself “immersed in vanilla.” Calling back to Ralph Ellison, he lamented, “in this great

19 Tongues Untied, dir. Marlon Riggs, 55 min., Strand Releasing, 2008 re-issue, DVD; B. J. Bullert, Public Television: Politics and the Battle over Documentary Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 91-122.

20 Tongues Untied.

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gay mecca, I was an invisible man,” as exaggerated and pornographic images of black

“studs” flash on screen. Riggs intended the film to serve as a rebuke to the “absence of black images in this new gay life,” as well as to the “black macho” ideal of black masculinity propagated in the cultural nationalism of the 1970s and carried on by

Afrocentric thinkers such as Frances Cress Welsing and Molefi Asante. One scene takes viewers to “The Institute of Snap!thology,” where a group of gay black men demonstrate variations of the snap, a flamboyant, non-verbal gesture meant “to read, to punctuate, to cut.” The “snap divas” act out neither the macho performance of Castro clones, nor the revolutionary bravado of the . By presenting actual black gay men throwing snaps with a “multiplicity of coded meanings,” Riggs challenged the contemporary vogue for “Negro Faggotry,” seen in both the “proliferating bit-part swish- and-dish divas” cropping up in television and film, and ardent denials of homosexuality by black rappers and cultural icons. To Riggs’ mind, straight black artists and thinkers deployed the Negro Faggot in much the same way as blackface entertainers or D.W.

Griffith depicted shuffling Sambos and voracious black rapists–as the counterpoint Other, denied interiority and authority, to construct one of a number of superior masculine images: the Afrocentric warrior, the fraternity brother of ’s School Daze, or the swaggering straight MC.21

The film’s finale claims black gay men as heirs to the earlier freedom struggles.

Here Riggs intercut footage of GMAD, Other Countries, and NTFAP marching in New

York City’s gay pride parade, carrying a banner that reads, “Black Men Loving Black

21 Marlon T. Riggs, “Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen,” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (July 1, 1991): 389–394.

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Men is a Revolutionary Act,” with shots from the 1965 march from Selma to

Montgomery. In the closing frames, Riggs juxtaposed pictures of Joseph Beam and black gay disco icon Sylvester with and , tying them back to not just a long activist tradition, but to famous orators whose public eloquence and visibility belied racist claims of black subhumanity.22

The controversy that erupted in 1991 when the PBS documentary film series

P.O.V. decided to screen Riggs’ deeply personal film, Tongues Untied, illustrates the problem of black gay men’s representation that GMAD sought to remedy, as well as the place of black gay men’s art in the culture wars. Due to the film’s sexually graphic nature and bondage imagery, some local PBS station managers refused to air it. Black leaders also criticized Riggs for sexualizing slave imagery and promoting a vision of black people as promiscuous and sexually deviant, although Riggs had produced such images precisely in order to show their oppressive quality. Congressional Republicans reacted by criticizing the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded P.O.V., for awarding

Riggs a grant of $5,000 through the Western Regional Arts Fund. As the Palm Beach

Post reported, the struggle over Riggs’ film threatened to “reignite” the fight over public funding for controversial artwork. Two years earlier, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in

Washington D.C. had canceled a planned exhibition of work by Robert Mapplethorpe, funded by the NEA, after its similar homoerotic and sadomasochistic themes drew the ire of Republican pundits and Congressional leaders.23

22 Tongues Untied.

23 Bullert.

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Colin Robinson, then serving on the GMAD board of directors, and Robert Reid-

Pharr, then a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at Yale University who had edited

“Sojourner: a Chronicle of Living” for Other Countries, lodged a trenchant critique of the

PBS affiliates who refused to air the film, as well as the mainstream media for failing to include black gay men’s voices in their coverage of the controversy. They claimed that the decision to block the film represented “not simply censorship, but a wilful [sic] contribution to prejudice” and an abrogation of “public TV’s fundamental mission… to honestly represent Americans’ rich diversity and complexity.” Not only had “Black Gay

Americans [missed] an opportunity to see our tax money spent in ways which directly seek to empower and affirm our lives,” but the invocation of “chimeric ‘community standards’” to block the film reinforced the invisibility of black gay men in the national

“community” whose standards PBS purported to enforce. Robinson and Reid-Pharr argued that no such measure of decency would be applied to depictions “of war, of the transatlantic slave trade, of the Nazi holocaust,” drawing a parallel between physical brutality and the erasure of black gay men from the public sphere.24

Whether locating a usable past or promoting writers and artists in the present,

GMAD worked to make black gay men more visible–to one another, to black communities, and to the wider world. They believed that, for gay black men, learning about the experiences of others like themselves–in a discussion group, at a poetry reading, or on television–would salve the spiritual and psychological trauma of growing up doubly marginalized as racial and sexual minorities. By highlighting the presence of

24 Colin Robinson and Robert Reid-Pharr, Open Letter to PBS, n.d., Box 3, Folder 8, GMAD Records.

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same-sex desire in black history GMAD could promote the inclusion of gay men in contemporary black communities, cutting against the influence of Afrocentric thinkers who saw homosexuality as incommensurate with “true” blackness. Altogether, the group’s leaders hoped that their efforts would indirectly prevent the spread of HIV among black gay men, by giving GMAD’s members a more stable sense of their own identity that would, in turn, lead them to adopt safer sex practices. This concern with black gay men’s psychological and social well-being carried over into two of the group’s first major forays into AIDS prevention and education.

Lifestyles Genesis

In 1990, GMAD contracted with the Black Leadership Commission on AIDS

(BLCA), a coalition of African American religious, political, and community leaders in

New York City, to present the latter group’s Lifestyles Genesis Learning Series, an

Afrocentric HIV education program based on the seven nguzo saba, or Kwanzaa principles. In four meetings over the course of a month, groups of twenty-five black gay men would meet with a licensed clinician, who would deliver the program’s lessons on health, discrimination, sexual relationships, and identity management, all through the lens of the nguzo saba. Having been founded in 1987 at a meeting called by the New York

Urban League of over sixty of “New York City’s highest ranking leaders,” BLCA advocated for public policy around AIDS among African Americans, developed programs, and provided technical assistance and financial advice to community-based groups. While BLCA administered Lifestyles Genesis through a contract with the New

York State Department of Health’s AIDS Institute, GMAD and another group, People of

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Color in Crisis (POCC), would work on the ground as sub-contracting agencies to deliver the program, conducting sessions and recruiting participants. Representatives from

GMAD and POCC would also help craft the curriculum at a planning retreat with BLCA leaders, including Drs. Jerome Gibbs and Richard Dudley, the program’s principal authors.25

The Lifestyles Genesis program meshed well with GMAD’s goal of promoting safer sex practices among black gay men by attending to their psychosocial needs, while the explicitly Afrocentric approach to HIV prevention fit into the group’s use of African symbols, values, and traditions in their programming. Moreover, GMAD leaders saw a dire need for AIDS outreach and education to black gay men. Public health researchers painted a grim picture of black gay men’s sexual practices, with emerging research showing that, while many white gay men had adopted safer sex practices to curb their

HIV risk, their black counterparts had not. A 1989 survey of 952 black gay men from around the country conducted by the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention (NTFAP), a project of the National Association of Black and White Men Together that focused on

AIDS among gay men of color, found that although nearly all of those surveyed reported knowing how HIV was spread and how to protect themselves from it, only slightly more than half reported that they always or nearly always practiced safer sex. The GMAD leadership reasoned that the mismatch between knowledge and behavior stemmed from

25 Black Leadership Commission on AIDS. “Clinicians’ Teaching Guide for the Lifestyles Genesis Learning Series Program,” n.d. Box 8, Folder 22, GMAD Records; Black Leadership Commission on AIDS. “Lifestyles Genesis Planning Retreat Program,” July 1990, Box 9, Folder 1, GMAD Records; “Black Leadership Commission on AIDS Booklet,” n.d., Box 8, Folder 21, GMAD Records.

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two related causes. First, owing to their status as “double minorities,” black gay men suffered from low self-esteem and the belief that their health was beyond their control, and as a result, tended not to use condoms. Second, safer sex had not become normal and expected among black gay men, as it had among their white counterparts. Lifestyles

Genesis, with its emphasis on “identity management” and the nguzo saba, promised to strike an ideal balance between healing individual black gay men’s sense of alienation, and cultivating a sense of communal responsibility to reduce the spread of HIV through condom use.26

The contract with BLCA to deliver Lifestyles Genesis to GMAD constituents also promised to help the latter organization grow into a full-fledged AIDS service organization. Nevertheless, the collaboration did not go smoothly. Elbert Gates, the group’s first executive director, negotiated the agreement with BLCA much as he directed GMAD’s other affairs–without consulting his own board of directors. Unhappy with his single-minded leadership style, the board voted Gates out of office just months before the program was slated to begin. Colin Robinson, who had helped found the group five years earlier, edited the GMAD Calendar, and had been elected to the board in the wake of Gates' departure, took the lead in dealing with BLCA. When BLCA executive director Debra Fraser-Howze failed to fulfill Robinsons’ and the board’s requests for a copy of the contract outlining GMAD’s role in conducting Lifestyles Genesis, they grew

26 Reggie Williams, Steven Feeback, and Daniel R. Minns, “A Descriptive Analysis of AIDS Knowledge, Attitudes, and Risk Behaviors for HIV Infection Among Black Males Who Have Sex with Other Men,” report published by National Task Force on AIDS Prevention, 1990, Box 1, Folder 27, National Task Force on AIDS Prevention Records, San Francisco GLBT Historical Society.

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anxious about the other group’s level of investment to the program. As GMAD’s first

AIDS service contract, the Lifestyles Genesis program put the group in a precarious position. Although Fraser-Howze indicated that the point of contracting with GMAD to deliver Lifestyles Genesis had been to develop the group’s infrastructure, Robinson and the rest of the board worried that, should the program fail, GMAD might not survive the resulting fallout.27

Their fears about BLCA’s commitment to Lifestyles Genesis fed larger concerns about the program. The materials provided by BLCA were “muddled and often incoherent,” and one draft of the curriculum had misspelled most of the nguzo saba, suggesting the authors’ ignorance of the program’s supposed core principles. Although members of GMAD and POCC had attended the Lifestyles Genesis planning retreat and another group, Lesbian and Gay Voices of Color against AIDS and for Life (VOCAL) had offered input on the program at a special meeting arranged by Colin Robinson, none of their feedback was evident in the finished product. Robinson criticized the program’s authors, comprising BLCA staff and an outside consultant, for their “faulty understanding of and scant respect for Black Gay community and culture,” evident in their inability at times “to recognize the fundamental distinction between the terms ‘self-identified Gay men’ and ‘men who have sex with other men.’” Even the program’s title seemed

“euphemistic and problematic,” suggesting that black gay men practiced a mutable sexual

27 GMAD Board of Directors Meeting Minutes, May 9, 1991, Box 4, Folder 14, GMAD Records; GMAD Board of Directors Meeting Minutes, May 19, 1991, Box 4, Folder 14, GMAD Records; GMAD Board of Directors Meeting Minutes, June 20, 1991, Box 4, Folder 14, GMAD Records; Colin Robinson, “Colin Robinson to GMAD Brothers,” April 5, 1991, Box 3, Folder 8, GMAD Records.

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“lifestyle.” The program module on condom use typified the program’s “heterosexist and patronizing” content. In one copy of the curriculum, where the authors instructed, “Latex condoms must be used at all times when having sex,” board member Colin Robinson wrote, “What is sex?” and later, “Because sex = intercourse.” By equating “sex” with penetrative intercourse, which made up only a small part of gay men’s sexual repertoire, the program presented sexual acts less likely to transmit HIV, such as mutual masturbation and frottage, as not sex-y. Meanwhile, other sections seemed to stigmatize homosexually active men as vectors of infection. Where the curriculum warned, “High- risk activities have a high probability of transmitting HIV infection, especially if either partner is a man who has unprotected sex with other men,” Robinson scrawled in the margin, “Focus on risk group vs. simply risk behavior!!!!”28

Moreover, the Lifestyles Genesis authors failed to connect safer sex in theory to empowerment and safer sex in practice. While the curriculum advised, “Once one understands the consequences and is convinced of the necessity to practice safe sex, he becomes empowered and can better advocate for himself by actually practicing safe sex on an ongoing basis,” Robinson doubted that information alone would lead black gay men to modify their sexual behavior, and considered the pathway from knowledge alone to empowerment and safer sex to be a “leap of faith.” Rather than simply provide

28 Gary Paul Wright, “VOCAL – Minutes for 21 August 1990,” Box 6, Folder 38, Robert Garcia Papers, Cornell University Manuscripts and Special Collections; Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, Lifestyles Genesis Draft Curriculum, n.d., Box 8, Folder 21, GMAD Records; Early in the epidemic, AIDS activists had pushed for a shift from a language of “risk groups,” which singled out particular social identities that tended to be already stigmatized, to one of more neutral “risk behaviors.” See Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (Routledge, 1990), 40-41.

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information, in his comments Robinson stressed the “need to MODEL” for participants how to negotiate safer sex with their partners, as well as the kind of positive identity that would empower black gay men to protect themselves against HIV in the first place.

Similarly, where the curriculum instructed, “Convince your self [sic] that condom use is mandatory and… important in understanding the consequences of high risk sexual behavior as it related [sic] to HIV infection,” he remarked, “But this difficult task should be the core of the program,” and later, next to an almost identical statement, “This is what the program should be DOING, not SAYING.” He showed his frustration at both the curriculum and BLCA on the “Strategy for Achieving Empowerment Worksheet.” Where asked to “Identify four (4) means of becoming empowered for HIV positive persons” he answered:

• zap Debra [Fraser-Howze] and BLCA • advocate for better spending of State $ for AIDS • resign from BLCA Commission • start an organization that really advocates for Black people w/ HIV29

Robinson and the rest of the board believed that GMAD could be just such an organization. In late June, the board voted to form an HIV Program Initiatives

29 The “zap” is a protest tactic used in the 1970s by gay liberation and other activist groups such as the , the , and Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH). Zap actions often involved disrupting the normal flow of activity in a target location, using noisemakers, banners, or activists’ bodies to attract attention and take up physical, visual, and aural space. Beginning in 1987, ACT UP chapters have frequently deployed zaps to influence decision makers and draw public attention to issues concerning people living with or at risk for HIV and AIDS. As part of their zaps, ACT UP members have staged theatrical “die-ins,” unfurled banners at the New York Stock Exchange, and flooded the phone banks of pharmaceutical companies, elected representatives, and public health officials. ACT UP/NY, “Phone Zaps,” http://www.actupny.org/documents/PZ.html, accessed November 28, 2012.

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Committee, composed of Robinson, along with veteran members Joe Pressley and

George Bellinger. Two months later, the committee met with representatives from the

AIDS Institute to discuss expanding GMAD’s role in revising the Lifestyles Genesis curriculum. As an alternative to the “learning series” format of four sessions, the committee proposed that the AIDS Institute support GMAD’s effort to incorporate more gay- and sex-positive HIV programming into its ongoing activities. The revamped program would focus not simply on knowledge transfer, but on building a system of social support for black gay men to help them address underlying problems of low self- esteem and alienation, while establishing a community norm around condom use and safer sex. Unlike Lifestyles Genesis, which by design only reached twenty-five men at a time, the committee boasted that their own events regularly drew crowds of 75 to 200, ensuring a much broader impact for the state’s AIDS dollars.30

Although the AIDS Institute at first seemed receptive to the idea to granting

GMAD a larger cut of the Lifestyles Genesis grant, they later balked, and BLCA worked with the department to have GMAD removed from the program. Despite its failure, Lifestyles Genesis represented a turning point for GMAD in its development from an all-volunteer organization to one with paid staff supported by outside funding.

Although GMAD only received a small part of the $40,000 promised by BLCA, the group leveraged their involvement in the program to win a $25,000 grant from the New

York City AIDS Fund to hire staff and outside consultants, and to increase distribution of

30 GMAD Board of Directors Meeting Minutes May 19, 1991; Memo GMAD Board HIV Program Initiatives Committee to NY AIDS Institute, October 10, 1991, Box 8, Folder 19, GMAD Records.

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the monthly calendar. The program also represented the group’s first foray into social services, which would eventually include group counseling and AIDS education programs designed for use by other organizations. One of these, a dramatic video designed to promote condom use, titled Party, encapsulated much of the group’s approach to HIV prevention among black gay men.31

We’re All in This Together

While working with BLCA on Lifestyles Genesis, GMAD also began collaborating with AIDSFILMS, a non-profit film studio, on Party, a thirty-minute video that modeled safer sex behaviors and explored black gay men’s reluctance to adopt them.

Alan Sharpe, a gay black playwright from Washington, DC recently diagnosed as HIV positive, wrote the script for Party with significant input from a committee made up of representatives from GMAD and AIDSFILMS, who sketched out the video's premise, characters, and themes. They wanted to make safer sex seem fun and erotic, to show viewers how to negotiate condom use with their partners, and to address the trouble they saw that other gay men–and especially black gay men–had with maintaining safer sex practices over time. GMAD originally intended Party to serve as the core of an educational program, integrated with the group’s alternative proposal for the Lifestyles

Genesis grant, which would include a safer sex workshop and written guide to be distributed across the country. However, Donald Woods, the executive director of

AIDSFILMS, passed away from AIDS complications in 1992, and funding for the project

31 Colin Robinson, “Colin Robinson Memo to Board of Directors,” February 27, 1994, Box 2, Folder 9, GMAD Records.

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from the New York State AIDS Institute and a handful of other major grant-makers failed to materialize. Still, GMAD produced Party, distributed copies to black gay and grassroots organizations free of charge, and used the tape in their own safer sex workshops.32

In the shooting script for Party, Sharpe editorializes about the significance of the opening shot:

Tight close-up of tapping feet in sweatsocks. Slow pan travels lovingly up a very sexily cut and defined brown body which is barely clad in thin, cotton, Calvin Klein sweats that do very little to conceal the most… voluptuous… evidence of a healthy young body. This is a type of scrutiny ordinarily ignored–or edited out–when an attractive black man is photographed for the American media.33

The text does not appear as dialogue in the video, but still frames the video as part of

GMAD’s mission to address the absence of affirming images of black gay men in

American culture.

Along the same lines, Party showcases diversity among black men who have sex with men, with each of the characters representing a different part of the group’s constituency. Some appear to be solidly middle class. Paul, the protagonist of the film and host of the titular party, works as an airline ticket agent, while supporting characters

32 Colin Robinson, Letter to Fran Barrett,” June 17, 1991, Box 2, Folder 7, GMAD Records; Valyrie Laedlin and Denice Williams, Letter to Colin Robinson, July 5, 1991, Box 2, Folder 7, GMAD Records; “GMAD News 03/01/93,” March 1, 1993, Box 7, Folder 5, GMAD Records; “AIDSFILM/GMAD Steering Committee for African American Gay Men’s Film Meeting Minutes,” May 5, 1992, Box 10, Folder 1, GMAD Records.

33 Alan Sharpe, Party Script, 1992, Box 10, Folder 9, GMAD Records. No copy of the film itself exists in the archive; all references to dialogue and action in Party are taken from the script.

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Aaron, Curtis, and Vernon work as an office manager for a law firm, an advertising executive, and a nurse. Other guests at the Party appear to be more blue collar–Duane works in Curtis’ office building as a security guard, and Kofi speaks in grammatically incorrect English that marks him as less educated than the other characters. The video also presents visual markers of class status–when we see Paul’s boyfriend Bryan in that opening shot, he’s clad in “Calvin Klein sweats,” and when we first meet Antoine, “a sixty-ish grande diva from the old school,” his boy toy, a well-muscled 19-year-old named Steve, carries two “designer shopping bags.” Steve himself wears “overalls, workboots–and little else,” but whether he’s a manual labor or a hustler remains unclear.34

The characters also inhabit their gender and sexual identities in a variety of ways.

Antoine frequently refers to himself as “Ms. Antoine,” and speaks with a flamboyant affect; even his blocking in the script refers to the character with a feminine pronoun.

Another character, Quiana, shares in Miss Antoine’s diva affect. They call one another

“miss thing” and “dear,” although their exchanges have a sarcastic edge. Kofi, on the other hand, appears stereotypically masculine, and feels like an outsider in the group because he’s “not your typical brother ‘in the life.’” According to Joe Beam, this phrase has overtones of both class status and sexuality, “used to describe ‘street life’ (the lifetsyle of pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, and drug dealers) [and] also… to describe the

‘gay life’ (the lives of Black homosexual men and women).35

34 Sharpe.

35 Sharpe; Joseph Beam, Preface to the Introduction, In the Life: a Black Gay Anthology, ed. Joseph Beam (Boston: Alyson Books, 1986), 12.

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The characters also enact their respective sexualities through their different approaches to condom use, at the same time that each of their subplots offers a different object lesson for sexually active gay black men in the age of AIDS. The central conflict of the video revolves around Paul and Bryan’s relationship. They’ve been dating for a month, but haven’t had sex since their first date because Paul insists on using condoms, whereas Bryan doesn’t like them, and says he wants to feel Paul “skin to skin.” At the beginning of “Party,” Bryan storms out of Paul’s apartment over the condom issue, and later gives Paul an ultimatum: if he doesn’t agree to give Bryan some “real loving,” he’ll find someone who will, even if that means leaving the party with another man.36

At the Party, the other characters in the film are busy negotiating their own approaches to safer sex. Miss Antoine, who disappears into the bedroom with Steve immediately after arriving, later “sweeps into the kitchen” in grand diva fashion, feeling

“positively ravenous!” When the others inquire as to Steve’s whereabouts, he replies,

“Ms. Antoine was just browsing, not looking to buy. Young men like that are too expensive… one way or another. Too bad, though. They’re so much safer at that age.”

Quiana presses his meaning, and Antoine replies, “Don’t be obtuse, darling. Ms. Antoine has no desire to become just another square-on-the-Quilt,” but that he did not make Steve wear a condom. Vernon objects that, “in the game of Russian Roulette, it doesn’t matter whether the gun is old or new.” Antoine continues:

My dear boys, one by one I’ve scrupulously relinquished all of my former… diversions. I refuse to deny myself this final, remaining little pleasure. And I’m sorry, but it defeats the entire purpose to make someone

36 Sharpe.

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wear a condom for oral sex… besides which, it tastes terrible–like stale chewing gum.

Vernon counters his obstinacy by suggesting, “be creative, try some honey on it… or strawberry preserves. Maybe dip it in brown sugar.” When Antoine expresses surprise at how “kinky” Vernon is, he replies, “Necessity is the mother of invention. Ever since

Lonnie”–his husband–“tested HIV positive, we’ve had to do some major adjusting.” Still, he says, “In a lot of ways our sex life is more fulfilling and exciting than ever. Maybe since we know that whatever we do now is safe, we can relax and really enjoy ourselves.”37

Here Vernon introduces one of the video’s main themes, that safer sex in all of its forms can actually be more pleasurable than sex without a condom. The following scene shows Curtis and Duane in the stairwell of Paul’s apartment building. Duane introduces

Curtis to frottage or “outercourse”–sexual stimulation without penetration. He tells Curtis that he learned it in the army, where “a lot of guys are trying it cause [sic] it’s safer.”

Curtis replies, “They must’ve been excellent teachers. It’s like you found every erogenous zone in my body–including a few that I didn’t even know I had.” They leave together for Duane’s place, to continue their fun.38

However, not all of the characters are so successful in negotiating safer sex with their partners. In one of the video’s first scenes, Paul’s friend Aaron shows up at his apartment well before the party begins, utterly distraught. He’s just been in the park, where he had unprotected sex with an anonymous stranger. The threat of AIDS had led

37 Sharpe.

38 Sharpe.

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him to be hyper-cautious in his sexual choices. As he tells Paul, “I’ve been so careful for so long… I wouldn’t let anybody touch me. If I couldn’t do it myself–it didn’t get done.”

He’s distressed not only because he risked exposure to HIV and knows he’s going to be anxious for months while he waits for a definitive antibody test result, but also because safer sex has become an important part of his social identity. He tells Paul, “[T]he thing that really gets me is that I knew better. I’m the one who’s always preaching to you guys about safer sex.” Aaron represents the gay man who maintained safer sex behaviors but then “relapsed” into risky practices, but also suggests that abstinence as a safer sex strategy can backfire. His example makes pleasurable but safe sexual activity seems like a reasonable middle ground between unprotected sex and absolute self-denial.39

Toward the end of the video, when Kofi returns to the kitchen after being gone from the party, the others ask where he’s been. He replies that he’s been “kicking it with

Mr. Derrick Davenport in his ‘Benz.” Aghast, the others tell him that Derrick is nicknamed “the Human Torch” because he’s “one of the biggest whores in town.” When

Kofi protests, “the brother is… very important in the community. He was featured in

Black Enterprise,” Vernon quips, “I don’t care if he was featured in the New Testament,

Mr. Respectable-Positive-Role-Model has burned more brothers than the ,” using “burn” in the slang sense of having or giving a sexually transmitted infection. Even

Antoine, who had been cavalier earlier about his own condom use, asks with concern,

“You didn’t do anything… reckless with him, did you?” Kofi asks why one of the others didn’t grab his coat to let him when he left with Davenport, since one of them must have

39 Sharpe.

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seen them go out together. Vernon lays into him, telling him that he’s an “alright [sic] brother and all” but never wants to take responsibility for his own behavior. “Even with something like AIDs [sic],” he says, “you’re the first one to argue that it’s a white man’s plot or the CIA scientists’ latest conspiracy.” Kofi “storms out of the kitchen” and Paul catches up to him to say, “If it seems that everyone was coming down on you in there… it’s just that we care about you and we want you to be safe.” Kofi replies that he feels like he’s on the outside of the group because he’s not “your typical brother ‘in the life,’” to which Paul comes back:

What is ‘typical’? Each of us is different. But we’re all in this together. Aren’t you the one who’s always preaching that black men should support each other, watch each other’s back? That’s all we’re trying to do. We’ve got to help each other stay strong.40

Paul’s speech is the takeaway message of the film, calling back to Beam’s injunction for black men to “ensure our own safety and to administer to our own sick.” In short, for black men to love black men."

I Cannot Go Home as Who I Am

Over the next few years, GMAD leaders built on their successes. The organization continued to grow in size, winning a handful of sizable grants, hiring additional staff and expanding its slate of services. GMAD also took on an increased role in AIDS advocacy, participating in lobbying events organized by New York AIDS

Coalition, an umbrella group of AIDS service providers. Colin Robinson, perhaps more than any other person, shaped the group’s development during this period. Robinson

40 Sharpe.

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became GMAD's managing director in 1992, replacing Gates' successor Joe Pressley, and left his job at GMHC in 1994 to run GMAD’s day-to-day operations full time as executive director. In applications for funding to grant makers and AIDS service contractors, he highlighted consciousness raising and community building as GMAD's unique contribution to the fight against AIDS among black gay men, as the group worked to reduce not only risky behavior, but "the antecedents of risk behavior–issues like identity, self-esteem, and social stability."41

Emerging research about black gay men and MSM validated GMAD’s approach.

One study, funded by the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of

California, San Francisco and published in 1992, found that over half of respondents reported having unprotected anal intercourse within the previous year, while other studies showed the same behavior among only 15-20% of their white counterparts. The following year, the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) used funding from

CDC to survey the HIV prevention needs of gay men and MSM of color, finding that despite widespread knowledge about the virus and modes of transmission, many homosexually active minority men, including African Americans, continued to practice unsafe sex. In the report, USCM pointed out that white gay and minority non-gay organizations often failed to reach black gay men, and called for “more [social] and community support, culturally sensitive approaches, and other activities that do not concentrate only on the individual but create community as well.” USCM further praised

41 “Proposal to Paul Rapoport Foundation,” June 1, 1995, Box 2, Folder 8, GMAD Records. Italics in original.

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GMAD as "the most visible organization for African American gay and bisexual men in

New York City today."42

Several months later, when USCM put out a call for proposals for projects targeting gay and bisexual men of color, Robinson took advantage of the opening. He requested $70,000 for a program to support the Friday Night Forums, the GMAD

Calendar, workshops on condom use and safer sex, and the establishment of an information clearinghouse to refer black gay and bisexual men to culturally competent mental health, medical, and human services providers. Robinson stressed that the target population, who already came to GMAD for "support, empowerment and community," would be involved "throughout the design, development, and delivery of the program,"43 which would "decrease their alienation and increase their participation in health- promoting community activities." In the proposal, Robinson used prose by Black Gay

Renaissance authors to convey the shame and anger that led his clients to practice unsafe sex and kept them from linking up to HIV services offered by other agencies. He quoted from Joseph Beam’s essay, “Brother to Brother,” in which Beam invokes the panoply of black institutions to which he could not truly belong as an openly gay man:

42 John L. Peterson et al., “High-Risk Sexual Behavior and Condom Use Among Gay and Bisexual African-American Men,” American Journal of Public Health 82, no. 11 (November 1992): 1490–1494; GMAD, “AIDS Institute Peer Delivered HIV Outreach and Prevention Initiative Proposal,” June 17, 1994, Box 21, Folder 10, GMAD Records; Colin Robinson, “Colin Robinson Memo to Board of Directors,” February 27, 1994, Box 2, Folder 9, GMAD Records.

43 GMAD, “USCM Collaborative HIV Prevention Grants Proposal,” December 1993, Box 24, Folder 2, GMAD Records.

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I cannot go home as who I am. When I speak of home I mean not only the familial constellation from which I grew, but the entire Black community, the Black press, the Black church, Black academicians, the Black literati, the Black left…. I cannot go home as who I am and that hurts me deeply.44

Robinson similarly quoted from Marlon Riggs' jeremiad against other African Americans for inflicting upon black gay men the same marginalization that they suffered at the hands of white society:

[T]he terrain Black Gay men navigate in the quest for self and social identity is, to say the least, hostile. What disturbs–no, enrages me–is not so much the obstacles set before my path by whites, which history conditions me to expect, but the traps and pitfalls planted by my so-called brothers, who because of the same history should know better.45

USCM awarded the contract, and funding from the New York State AIDS

Institute, the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, and the Henry van Ameringen

Foundation followed, in no small part thanks to Robinson's fundraising acumen and connections within the city's political power structure. Nevertheless, Robinson remained at the head of GMAD for only two years–conflict with the group’s board of directors pushed him away from the organization. Some board members disagreed with Robinson's vision for GMAD as a professionally staffed service provider supported by external

44 Joseph Beam, “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart,” in In the Life: a Black Gay Anthology, 231. Italics in original.

45 Riggs, “Black Macho Revisited,” 390.

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funding, and in August 1995 he returned to GMHC to direct the agency’s HIV prevention programs.46

After Robinson's departure, GMAD struggled through budget woes, staffing issues, and declining membership. Later that year, the group dismissed two staff members due to insufficient funding. In July 1996, the board of directors voted to expel fellow board member Kevin Williams for embezzling $7,500 from the organization. The scandal damaged the group's reputation for members and funders alike. Just six months later, executive director Cary Alan Johnson struggled through a bout of drug abuse, during which he missed appointments on the group's behalf and stole almost $1,000 in petty cash. The board of directors voted to dismiss him immediately. At the same time, the AIDS Institute complained of not receiving progress reports on the GMAD programs they had funded for several years, again damaging the group's credibility with a major grantmaker. By June 1997, the group's membership had fallen to 130 and the mailing list circulation to 800, from highs in 1991 of 300 and 1,200.47 GMAD would recover, continuing to offer support services for black gay men, but never became the expansive agency that Robinson envisioned, nor did the group spark a broader black gay political awakening.

As GMAD went, so too did the Black Gay Renaissance. Essex Hemphill passed away from AIDS complications the same year that Colin Robinson departed for GMHC.

46 Colin Robinson, “Colin Robinson Memo to Board of Directors,” August 4, 1995, Box 2, Folder 10, GMAD Records.

47 Robert E. Penn, “Robert E Penn Memo to Board of Directors,” June 11, 1997, Box 4, Folder 23, GMAD Records.

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Hemphill had edited Brother to Brother, Joseph Beam’s posthumous follow-up to In the

Life, before publishing Ceremonies, his own collection of prose and poetry. Marlon Riggs had died the previous year, also of complications from AIDS, having finished a handful of other documentary films on intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, including

Black Is… Black Ain't, completed after his death by his co-producers. In a little over a year and a half, the Black Gay Renaissance had lost its two biggest icons. Although the writer's collective Other Countries continued to publish anthologies of black gay writing, the deaths of Hemphill and Riggs brought the movement to a close.

Gay Men of African Descent and the larger Black Gay Renaissance traced their political roots to earlier movements–Black Power, gay liberation, and Third World –while looking back further through black history to Africa and traditional cultures to validate their place within contemporary black life. Together, they sketched a picture of their own lives at the intersection of racism and homophobia, and connected these overlapping oppressions to the spread of HIV among themselves and their peers.

Moreover, they blurred the line between movement politics and cultural politics, incorporating art and literature into a broad program of holistic health that connected biological illness to social ills, chiefly black homophobia. They framed their project as no less than a matter of survival; it was, Phill Wilson of the Black AIDS Institute recalls, "as if they were writing for their lives."48

48 Phill Wilson, “Deciding Moment: Together We Are Greater than AIDS,” Back of the Line: the State of AIDS among Black Gay Men in America (Los Angeles: Black AIDS Institute, 2012), 5–6.

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CHAPTER 3

“WE’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A FEW THOUSAND YEARS”: THE NATION OF ISLAM’S AFRICAN AIDS CURE

On July 25, 1990, Kenyan President announced that scientists at a lab in Nairobi had developed a wonder drug: highly effective treatment for people with

AIDS that in some cases appeared to eliminate any trace of HIV from the patient’s system altogether. In a ceremony that “seemed to combine elements of a medical school lecture and a patriotic rally,” Moi introduced the assembled press to Dr. Davy Koech1 of the Kenyan Medical Research Institute (KEMRI). Koech claimed that his drug, Kemron, had given subjects unprecedented relief from the fatigue, opportunistic infections, and dramatic weight loss associated with AIDS, and with no adverse side effects. Although

Koech declined to label his treatment an out-and-out “cure” for the disease, he reported that patients also showed elevated levels of CD4 lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell responsible for immune function that are destroyed as AIDS progresses, and that ten percent of his subjects appeared to “serodeconvert”–showing no signs of infection on either of the blood tests commonly used at the time to diagnose HIV-positivity.

Koech had reported his findings earlier in the year at a press conference in Japan and in the June issue of Molecular Biotherapy, but was disappointed at the tepid response he received from the international scientific community and news media. At the July ceremony, as “choirs sang praises to Kenyan ingenuity,” Koech chastised his European and American colleagues for their “outright skepticism, disbelief, suspicion and

1 Pronounced “Ko-eech.”

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rejection,” comparing himself to Galileo and Edward Jenner, both scientific visionaries misunderstood by their contemporaries.2

Koech’s drug, Kemron, consisted of a small oral dose of alpha interferon, a type of protein produced by the human body as part of normal immune function. Doctors had previously tested injections of alpha interferon, in quantities far larger than those used at

KEMRI, with limited results–certainly nothing on the order that Koech reported. If his claims turned out to be true, his lab had vastly improved on the drugs most commonly prescribed to treat HIV infection. Although zidovudine (AZT) appeared to extend the lives of people once they had developed AIDS, it was expensive and highly toxic.

Moreover, African American AIDS activists questioned whether the drug was effective in treating people of African descent due to the absence of people of color from clinical trials, whereas the Koech trial had been conducted among black Kenyans.3

American and European scientists, however, questioned Koech’s findings.

Previous reports of other “miracle” AIDS treatments later turned out to be dead ends, and ten years after doctors had first reported the mysterious opportunistic infections in sexual networks of gay men in New York and Los Angeles that would later mark the beginning of the recognized AIDS pandemic, the disease continued to confound scientists searching for effective medicines, much less a vaccine or outright cure. Moreover, Koech had

2 “Oral IFN vs AIDS Scores in Kenya; U.S. Trials Next,” Biotechnology Newswatch, April 2, 1990, 1; Davy Koech et al, “Low dose oral alpha-interferon therapy for patients seropositive for human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1),” Molecular Biotherapy 2 no. 2 (June 1990): 91-5; Neil Henry, “Kenya Unveils Drug That is Reputed to Alleviate the Impact of AIDS,” Washington Post, July 28, 1990, A14.

3 Lawrence K. Altman, “New AIDS Experiments Stir Hope and Wariness,” New York Times, April 4, 1990, A22.

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conducted his trial without a control group against which to compare the results observed among patients treated with Kemron, which, according to conventional standards for drug testing, called the validity of his data into question. Following his announcement in April, a study by the World Health Organization showed an increase in CD4 cells that could be attributed to the drug, but the study’s small size and short duration limited its generalizability. Later, when the agency tried to replicate Koech’s findings, its scientists found little meaningful improvement in patients that could be definitively attributed to the drug, and no subjects serodeconverted after undergoing treatment.4

While mainstream national newspapers like the New York Times and the

Washington Post relayed officials’ skepticism, the African American press portrayed

Kemron as a landmark achievement by black African scientists. Over the next seven years, while scientists at the National Institutes of Health insisted that Kemron and similar drugs showed little promise for treating HIV and AIDS, African American news outlets, physicians, and public figures, including the leadership of the Nation of Islam, pushed for a full-scale clinical trial that they claimed would vindicate Koech and his

Kenyan team. They appealed to African Americans’ pride in Africa, as well as to suspicion that the American and European scientific establishment discounted black achievements at best, and at worst had colluded with First World governments to develop the AIDS epidemic to wipe out “undesirable” people around the world. The Nation of

Islam in particular represented Kemron as a “natural” AIDS treatment created by African

4 Lawrence K. Altman, “Africa Study of AIDS Drug Find Immune-Cell Rise,” New York Times, July 4, 1990, A4.

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scientists in keeping with millennia of healing tradition, simplifying the roles of technoscience and multinational pharmaceutical corporations in producing the drug.

What Are They Trying to Say We Did with That Green Monkey?

For African Americans, conspiracy theories about the origin of HIV and AIDS resonated uncomfortably with racist scientific discourses of black hypersexuality, barbarism, and biological inferiority that had historically been used to marginalize people of color in the United States. Early on in the epidemic, most western scientists had come to the consensus that AIDS had originated in Africa. Testing of old blood samples in

Kinshasa and the discovery of a virus similar to HIV in green monkeys there seemed to point to sub-Saharan Africa as the geographic epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. While the

African origin theory has now more or less been confirmed by genetic testing and regression modeling of different strains of the human immunodeficiency virus, the consolidation of medical opinion around the African origins of AIDS long predated such testing processes. The apparent eagerness of white scientists to “blame” the epidemic on

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Africans and people of African descent aroused the ire of many black Americans.5 In his

1989 essay “AIDS in Blackface,” Harlan Dalton, a Yale law professor and member of the

National Commission on AIDS, made clear that many African Americans took the

African origin theory as an affront on black people everywhere:

Were I to go out tomorrow and speak about AIDS to a black audience anywhere in this country, I guarantee you that once the discussion got going, someone would ask about the disease’s origins. The question “Is it true that it started in Africa?” would quickly become “Why do they keep trying to pin it on Africa?” “Why do they keep trying to pin it on us?” and eventually I would be asked the clincher: “What are they trying to say we did with that monkey?6

Contrary to scientific consensus about the origin of AIDS, some African

Americans advanced theories that the AIDS virus had been created as part of a biological warfare program by the United States government. In some versions of this account, the epidemic was the result of medical testing run amok in Africa or Haiti, where the virus had escaped scientists’ control and eventually made its way to the major American cities where it was first detected. In others, the United States government had intentionally created the virus for the express purpose of eliminating “undesirable” populations–gay

5 Some white scholars also pointed out the racist undertones in the African origins theory. For examples, see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 139; Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), 3; Cindy Patton, “Inventing ‘African AIDS,’” in Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990), 80. In any case, Jacques Pepin has recently argued based on genetic differences among HIV types and subtypes around the world, that HIV crossed into the human population from chimpanzees somewhere around Cameroon near the beginning of the twentieth century, probably the result of a hunter who cut himself while butchering a monkey killed for “bush meat.” From that hunter, efforts to eradicate epidemic disease, colonialism, urbanization, civil war, the global trade in blood products, and sex tourism all together transformed a single initial infection into a worldwide pandemic. See Jacques Pepin, The Origins of AIDS (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

6 Harlan Dalton, “AIDS in Blackface,” Daedalus 118, no. 3 (Summer 1989), 212.

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men, drug users, and the “Black underclass.”7 Often, alternative theories about AIDS were discussed in conjunction with other stories about the alleged role of the government in promoting drug use among urban youth.8

According to social science research, such conspiracy theories have circulated widely in African American communities for at least the past two decades. The first such available study, conducted among more than a thousand black churchgoers in five southern cities by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1990, found that 35% believed AIDS to be a form of , 34% believed the virus to be manmade, and

44% believed the government was “not telling the truth about AIDS.” In a 2003 telephone survey of black households, 60% of respondents agreed that “a lot of information about AIDS is being held back from the public,” 50% agreed that “HIV is a manmade virus,” and almost 53% agreed that “there is a cure for AIDS, but it is being withheld from the poor.” Moreover, researchers have found that distrust of medical and scientific authorities closely correlates to a range of behaviors implicated in the spread of

HIV. The 2003 study showed that those who believed in a government conspiracy around the origins of HIV were more likely to avoid condoms as a form of and more likely to have had a larger number of recent sexual partners than their peers.

7 Karen Bates Grigsby, “Is It Genocide?” Essence, September 1990, 76.

8 In the late 1990s, reports that a drug ring in California sold cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled the profits to a guerilla army in Nicaragua circulated throughout the black press. Such stories often mentioned AIDS as another possible conspiracy against African Americans. See Paul Shepard, “CIA Story Fuels Suspicions,” New Courier, October 26, 1996, 1; and Earl Hutchinson, “CIA report fans more conspiracy theories,” Philadelphia Tribune, January 9, 1998, 6A.

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Another, more recent study of HIV-positive African American men taking antiretroviral drugs found that a significant minority–22%–believed “that people who take the new

HIV medications are human guinea pigs for the government, and 17% [believed] that the medications are poison,” and that such beliefs coincided with unwillingness or inability to adhere to an HIV drug regimen.9

Veteran African American AIDS activists still run up against conspiracy theories about the epidemic in their work with black communities. According to Pernessa Seele, the founder and CEO of The Balm in Gilead:

Black people, all over the world, believe that HIV was created to kill them. We may not say it, we may… talk about it in private, but that is a fundamental myth that… wherever you find black folks, behind closed doors we think that somebody created HIV to kill us.10

Rashidah Abdul Khabeer (formerly Hassan) has a strategy for addressing conspiracy theories that she encounters while doing AIDS education, asking, “You think that this is an experiment done by the American government to get rid of minority people?…

Because if you’re having unprotected sex with everybody in the neighborhood, you’re part of the government’s conspiracy. How about that?” While she may flip the

9 Laura M. Bogart and Sheryl Thorburn, “Exploring the Relationship of Conspiracy Beliefs about HIV/AIDS to Sexual Behaviors and Attitudes among African- American Adults,” Journal of the National Medical Association 95, no. 11 (November 2003): 1057-65; Laura M. Bogart, Glenn Wagner, Frank H. Galvan and Denedria Banks, “Conspiracy Beliefs about HIV Are Related to Antiretroviral Treatment Nonadherence among African American Men with HIV,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 53, no. 5 (Apr 2010): 648-55; Laura M. Bogart and Sheryl Thorburn, “Relationship of African Americans’ Sociodemographic Characteristics to Belief in Conspiracies about HIV/AIDS and Birth Control,” Journal of the National Medical Association 98, no. 7 (July 2006): 1144-50.

10 Pernessa Seele, interview with author, October 11, 2012, Richmond, VA.

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conversation around to get an important point across, that she has such a strategy in her toolkit speaks to the popularity of such claims. Similarly, Tyrone Smith says, “people still hang onto that. And my thing is, I don’t give a damn who started it. It could’ve been–

Betty Crocker could’ve did it in a biscuit pan. The shit is here. That’s the thing: it’s here.”11

Significant numbers of African Americans, then, have made sense of the AIDS epidemic at least in part by disagreeing with or questioning the mainstream of scientific opinion and the public health messages produced by the federal government through representatives such as the National Institutes of Health. Such distrust of black communities toward the American medical establishment follows from both contemporary and historical experiences of marginalization. Many African Americans report experience with racism in everyday clinical settings, dealing with doctors and nurses who diagnose and treat them based on stereotypes of black promiscuity, substance abuse, or dependence on welfare. Furthermore, a long history of medical exploitation by white doctors of black bodies as experimental subjects or specimens for posthumous dissection, on top of the economic exploitation of black slaves for production and reproduction under the system of New World slavery, stretches back at least two hundred years.12

In the era of AIDS, the has been perhaps the most commonly invoked touchstone for African Americans skeptical of official AIDS science.

11 Abdul Khabeer interview; Smith interview.

12 Vanessa Northington Gamble, “Under the Shadow of Tuskegee,” American Journal of Public Health 87, no. 11 (November 1997): 1773-8.

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Brought to light and finally ended in 1972, the longitudinal study by the Public Health

Service on the effects of syphilis on the human body stretched over 40 years and according to the CDC’s final count included 624 poor black men in Alabama as subjects.

The men had been told that they were being treated for their “bad blood,” a folk understanding of the cause of syphilis, and although the advent of antibiotics had revolutionized syphilis treatment following World War II, doctors continued to administer largely ineffective treatments to the men, so as not to compromise the study.

The mendacity of the Public Heath Service doctors and their the disregard for the safety and best interests of the test subjects as well their wives and children, showed the willingness of medical authorities, working under the aegis of the federal government, to compromise the health of poor, black Americans through seriously flawed science.13

In addition to the Tuskegee syphilis study, a number of shadowy government plots lay readily accessible in recent memory, especially for African Americans. In 1974,

Attorney General William Saxbe revealed that the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had carried out a fifteen-year program to surveil and disrupt “subversive groups,” including black nationalists and the . The reprinted a memo from the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which stressed the need to discredit and prevent cooperation among Black Nationalist groups, and to prevent the rise of a black “’messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the Black Nationalist movement.” The memo, dated exactly a month before the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4,

1968, identified the civil rights leader as one such figure, leaving readers to connect the

13 Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009).

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dots as to whether the FBI had backed his . Over the following year, a

Senate investigation revealed that the FBI had harassed Dr. King and infiltrated the Black

Panthers in order to “destroy” the party. Throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the

1980s, former Panthers serving prison sentences for earlier convictions sought retrials or release based the COINTELPRO investigation, claiming that they had been framed or that key evidence had been suppressed. Other black leaders, such as Amiri Baraka and

Louis Farrakhan, blamed the program for undermining other groups, including the Black

Arts Movement and the Nation of Islam.14

African Americans thus encountered the AIDS epidemic through a lens of distrust of the American political and medical establishment produced by a layered set of personal and community histories. Anthropologist Patricia Turner has explored AIDS conspiracy theories within the larger context of rumor in African American culture. She places alternative AIDS origins theories alongside other stories involving a

“contamination” motif. According to one popular rumor, the fast food chain Church’s

Chicken and the makers of the soft drink Tropical Fantasy secretly included chemicals in their products intended to render black men impotent. Another linked a string of child

14 Willie Hamilton, “FBI’S Secret Files On Blacks Exposed: Amsterdam News Gets Copies Of FBI Files,” New York Amsterdam News, March 23, 1974, A1; Willie Hamilton, “Rap Brown Seeks FBI Files on ‘Militants’,” New York Amsterdam News), July 27, 1974, A1; Nicholas M. Horrock, “Senate Intelligence Panel Told of F.B.I. Attempt to Discredit Dr. King in 1964,” New York Times, November 19, 1975, A16; John Kifner, “F.B.I. Sought Doom of Panther Party,” New York Times, May 9, 1976, 1; Minister , “On the FBI Crucifixion of ,” New York Amsterdam News (1962-1993), February 10, 1979, 16; Lionel Mitchell, “Baraka Details FBI’s 20 Years of Peeping,” New York Amsterdam News, , 1983, 2; Harold L. Jamison, “Jailed Ex-Panther Was Victim of Plot,” New York Amsterdam News, April 8, 1989, 7.

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murders in Atlanta to CDC tests of a cancer drug in the early 1980s. Ultimately, she argues, such beliefs reflect either the perception or reality of racial oppression, as opposed to merely "pathological preoccupations" of African Americans.15

Folklorist John Roberts has taken a longer view of conspiracy theories in general, framing them within the context of black oral tradition, a "continuous process of creative cultural production historically embraced by people of African descent" through which they cement group bonds and warn one another about "potentially hidden dangers" to both themselves and others in the community. Roberts' take on the performative elements of conspiracy narratives resonates with Robin D. G. Kelley's work on gangsta rap as both

"sort of street ethnography" and a practice of postindustrial "signifying" in which practitioners (re)mix descriptions of social reality with playful textual references in a manner that reflects the hybridity and diversity of urban black culture. African American

AIDS conspiracy theories are perhaps best understood as a set of similarly signifying practices that are nevertheless embedded in their more or less immediate historical context.16

The oral nature of rumor and gossip make them difficult for historians to recover, but black newspapers provide coverage of their circulation in print, and may at least

15 Patricia Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), xvii.

16 John Roberts, “African American Belief Narratives and the African Cultural Tradition,” Research in African Literatures 40, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 112-26; Robin D. G. Kelley, “Kickin’ Reality, Kickin’ Ballistics: ‘Gangsta Rap’ and Postindustrial Los Angeles,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 183-227; Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).

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suggest the outlines of the spoken transmission of conspiracy narratives. As political scientist Cathy Cohen points out, African American newspapers and magazines often physically circulate in spaces of social interaction, as they are passed around churches and barber or beauty shops, or among friends or relatives around a living room coffee table. By virtue of their presence in such situations, black periodicals surely provide the raw material for discussion. Historically, their role has been to promote positive discourse about African Americans that cuts against the (intentionally or not) racist or demeaning depictions found in the white-operated news outlets, or to report on stories important to black communities that are, for whatever reason, left out of the mass-market papers.

Furthermore, like the all-black spaces in which they could be circulated, African

American newspapers served as newsprint “hush harbors” in which black writers could express opinions that would be unwelcome in mainstream “white” papers.17

Out of Africa

The first mention of Kemron in the black press reflects these functions. In July

1990, the New York Amsterdam News reported on the “international news blackout” of reports about Kemron following Moi’s announcement. Reporter Vinette Pryce interviewed radio host Gary Byrd of the local New York City radio station WLIB, which catered to African American listeners. According to the radio host, “the fact that a cure is coming from the very place blamed for bringing the disease, skeptics say, ‘Africa is too primitive to come up with this.” Byrd himself had learned about Kemron from a series of

17 Cohen, 186–97.

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articles in the local gay newspaper the New York Native, according to which a man traveled to Kenya to be treated with the drug and came back free of symptoms. Pryce reported that a fact-finding trip composed of African Americans, including Byrd, had departed for Nairobi to investigate. An unnamed member of the group again stressed the need to “claim” the discovery for Africa, telling Pryce, “we can’t leave it for others to report, otherwise the public may hear that the discovery came by way of Paris.” If the

AIDS epidemic had purportedly come from Africa, then perhaps the continent could be redeemed in producing a cure.18

On the front page of the same issue of the Amsterdam News, Pryce similarly reported on a gathering of “doctors, teachers, nurses, social workers, and hundreds of curious citizens” at Friendship Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where those in attendance hoped to learn about the drug and discuss its significance. Speakers at the event included members of the fact-finding delegation bound for Kenya, among them

Byrd, Dr. Barbara Justice, a New York physician, and Cedric Sandifford, an HIV- positive man who had been the victim of a brutal racially-motivated beating at Howard

Beach four years earlier. There, Byrd and members of the public expressed their belief in the need to “claim the discovery” lest others dismiss Koech’s findings or the role of

African scientists in producing the breakthrough. In his address to the crowd, Byrd discussed the potential economic benefit to Africans and African Americans alike, through “patent, trademarking protection, and investing in the project.” On the other hand, historian John Henry Clarke, “a longtime believer in the wonders of Africa,”

18 Vinette K. Pryce, “’Racist Media’ Silent on Miracle Cure for AIDS,” New York Amsterdam News, July 28, 1990, 10.

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according to Pryce, encouraged the audience to feel a sense of racial pride in Moi’s announcement: “I’m not at all surprised, this is old hat, we’ve been doing this for a few thousand years.” His comments received a standing ovation from the audience and, according to Pryce, “brought hope and inspiration to everyone who felt a part of this amazing discovery.”19

Plans to produce and distribute Kemron, however, quickly became snarled in scientific and legal disputes. A small clinical trial of the drug by the World Health

Organization failed to replicate Koech’s dramatic findings, and scientists discounted his data due to the absence of a control group in the KEMRI study. At a meeting in Geneva two months after Moi’s announcement, scientists from the international group

“concluded that low-dose interferon alpha remains an experimental drug of as yet unproved benefit for HIV infection or AIDS,” noting that more definitive information would be available at the conclusion of a double-blind study underway in the United

States.20

An additional challenge came from Dr. Joseph Cummins, a veterinarian and head of the -based Amarillo Cell Culture Company who had reportedly supplied KEMRI with interferon via Hayashibara Biochemical Laboratories, a Japanese manufacturer. His research on the use of low-dose oral alpha interferon in animals had reportedly inspired

19 Vinette K. Pryce, “Hopes High for Reported Cure for AIDS in Kenya,” New York Amsterdam News, July 28, 1990, 1.

20 Jane Perlez, “In Kenya, a New AIDS Drug Gets Mired in Politics and Financial Disputes,” New York Times, October 3, 1990, A20; Val Hutchinson and J.M. Cummins, “Low-Dose Oral Interferon in Patient with AIDS,” The Lancet (December 26, 1987): 1530-1.

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Koech to pursue the AIDS treatment, and Cummins had been listed as a co-author on the

1990 study in Molecular Biotherapy. When the institute filed a patent application for the treatment, Cummins responded in a letter to Koech, “There is no Kenya [sic] invention involved in this technology,” and that he would take “appropriate legal action to defend

[his] technology.” In fact, Cummins held four U.S. patents on the oral use of interferon- alpha, giving his company exclusive worldwide rights to the treatment. Three years earlier, The Lancet had published his letter reporting the dramatic recovery of a fellow veterinary surgeon from symptoms of AIDS after being treated with oral interferon-alpha from Amarillo Cell Culture. Cummins had also initiated his own small-scale study of oral interferon treatment for HIV-positive patients at a Veterans Administration hospital in

Texas, which was still underway at the time of the KEMRI announcement.21

Neither skepticism from the WHO nor Cummins’ legal challenge, however, discouraged Americans with HIV and AIDS from seeking out Kemron substitutes.

Different versions of oral alpha interferon became popular among “buying clubs,” local networks of people with AIDS who imported prescription drugs not yet approved for sale in the United States and distributed them to members. While the approximately 800 New

Yorkers who had tried the treatment found oral interferon ineffective, buyers in and Fort Lauderdale, who used the same Japanese brand of the substance used to

21 Perlez, “In Kenya;” Amy Goldstein, “Some Dismiss Interferon, Others Praise It,” Washington Post, September 27, 1993, A10.

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manufacture Kemron, touted the treatment’s value. With conflicting anecdotal evidence,

Kemron advocates argued for a large-scale clinical trial.22

While Kemron advocates continued to press for recognition of the drug from regulatory agencies in the United States, some made the pilgrimage from America to

Kenya in search of treatment. In August 1991, a contingent of representatives from the

Nation of Islam, including Health Minister Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad and Abdul Wali

Muhammad, editor of , the group’s official newspaper, accompanied Dr.

Justice and LaShaun Evans, a Washington D.C. activist with HIV, to Kenya to investigate the “swirl of controversy” surrounding Kemron. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, had been an early voice among black religious leaders stressing the danger posed by HIV, as well as a proponent of a genocidal “man-made” theory of virus.

This narrative resonated with the group’s cosmology, espoused by Farrakhan’s predecessor, , in the 1950s. According to Elijah Muhammad, the black race had been the original inhabitants of the earth, until an evil scientist named Yakub created a race of white “ice people” to divide and oppress them. According to Farrakhan, modern-day Yakubs had manufactured AIDS to eliminate people of color altogether.23

On their return from Kenya, the front page of the October 7th issue of The Final

Call declared “AIDS Treatment Found in Africa” in bold letters alongside a photograph

22 Bruce Lambert, “Medical and Racial Debate Follow a Drug Hailed as an AIDS Cure,” New York Times, September 2, 1990, 42.

23Abdul Wali Muhammad, “‘Miracle’ drugs relieve AIDS symptoms,” The Final Call, October 7, 1991, 32; , “Farrakhan Poses Dilemma for African American Commentators,” Homeland (Forrest City, AR), September 15, 1997. All issues of The Final Call accessed at the Reference Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

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of Drs. Muhammad and Justice meeting with Dr. Koech. In eight pages of articles under the heading “Out of Africa: a Treatment for AIDS,” readers learned about Dr. Koech’s path to AIDS research, KEMRI’s difficulties in securing distribution for KEMRON, and frustration at the international scientific community’s apparent silence on the drug’s promise. Again, Kemron’s proponents cited the drug’s African origins as the reason for the lack of news coverage in the United States and Europe. Dr. Justice repeated the earlier claim that western doctors and scientists simply couldn’t countenance the possibility that an effective AIDS treatment, much less a potential cure, had come from

Africa, telling the paper, “If these reports (of Kemron’s success) came from anywhere else, it would have caused a stampede.”24

As part of a three-page interview, Dr. Koech similarly blamed “racial bias” among those who questioned his findings, arguing that although “those who know me as an individual and... know my academic background... know that if it is him he must be telling the truth,” others took advantage of his irregular methodology to discount his results altogether. He explained that although he had set up his clinical trial of Kemron as a double-blind study, the clear difference between those taking a placebo and those taking the drug compelled him to break with scientific protocol and put all participants in the study on a Kemron regimen. Although this decision cast doubt on his findings, Koech insisted, “My responsibility is not to the WHO, it is not to the USFDA, it is to the

24 Abdul Wali Muhammad, “‘Miracle’ drugs relieve AIDS symptoms,” The Final Call, October 7, 1991, 32

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Republic of Kenya and the people of Kenya.... Mainly posterity and the patients that we have will talk for us.”25

Although The Final Call framed Kemron as a “miraculous” AIDS treatment “out of Africa,” Abdul Wali Muhammad informed readers that the drug had been produced in collaboration among Koech’s KEMRI lab, Amarillo Cell Cultures Company, and

Hayashibara Biochemical. However, in his interview with The Final Call, Koech cited only Cummins’ veterinary research as inspiration for the KEMRI clinical trial, and other articles in the issue only mentioned that Cummins’ attempts to obtain a “worldwide patent” on the use of low dose alpha interferon had in part delayed production and distribution of the Kemron, and that Cummins had been present in Kenya when Koech began treating patients with the drug.26

Hayashibara Biochemical, the third collaborator in producing Kemron, had provided the cell line used to produce interferon in sufficient quantities for treatment and manufactured the interferon tablets used in later rounds of KEMRI’s testing. Importing the drug had proven complicated, as the Japanese Ministry of Health stipulated that

Hayashibara’s interferon tablets could only be distributed within Kenya. The Final Call reported that, according to unnamed sources, Hayashibara had shipped the Kemron tablets in falsely marked containers through London and Toronto to avoid detection by

25 “Dr. Koech Leading the Way in AIDS Research,” The Final Call, October 7, 1991, 6.

26 John S. James, “Oral Interferon: Hope or Hype?” AIDS Treatment News 101, April 28, 1990, http://ww1.aegis.org/pubs/atn/1990/ATN10101.html; Naomi Pfeiffer, “The Oral Alpha-Interferon Craze: Still an Experimental Drug,” AIDS Patient Care 5, no. 1 (February 1991): 34-8; Abdul Wali Muhammad, “Controversy Surrounds Kemron Development,” The Final Call, October 7, 1991, 3.

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Japanese authorities. However, when the tablets arrived in Kenya and were sold as

Kemron by Innovative Therapies Ltd., a marketing firm in Nairobi with ties to Cummins and Amarillo Cell Cultures, the company’s directors were drawn up on criminal charges for intentionally mislabeling their product.27

Citing the controversy surrounding Kemron and problems with its distribution, a second Kenyan firm, Medikem International Ltd., teamed up with Roger Wyatt, a disgruntled erstwhile employee of Amarillo Cell Cultures, to produce a second version of low-dose oral alpha interferon under the trade name Immunex. Medikem chief John

Harun claimed that his product, which used a cell line obtained from the pharmaceutical giant Burroughs Wellcome and a different method for stabilizing interferon in the tablet, was potentially more effective than Kemron, because it contained more varieties of alpha interferon than Koech’s version. He also argued that Immunex would be more suitable for widespread distribution. According to The Final Call, Harun and his associates charged that concerns about the shelf life of Hayashibara’s tablets lay behind the controversy with the Japanese Ministry of Health.

The Final Call also ran an interview with LaShaun Evans, who had accompanied the group to seek treatment for her symptoms of HIV infection in Nairobi. She suggested that a conspiracy of silence from the American “AIDS establishment” prevented information about Kemron from being circulated in the United States, speculating, “A lot of people will be out of jobs because Kemron is as effective as it is.” Regarding the origins of the epidemic, she gestured more vaguely toward those responsible. Although

27 Wali Muhammad, “Controversy Surrounds Kemron Development,” 34.

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she knew the man–a friend and former sexual partner–from whom she had contracted the virus and insisted that she bore him no ill will, Evans also told the paper, “I had to come back home [to Africa] to be treated for something they gave me over there, but that’s another story.”28

Evans’ implication of an ominous-sounding “they” back in America as the source of her illness resonated with Farrakhan’s belief that HIV and AIDS had been created by genocidal white scientists. In a cartoon that ran in The Final Call in late 1991, world leaders sit along a long curved table, as though they are at a meeting of the United

Nations. Each has a placard to indicate the country they represent, and each holds up a sign printed with the name of a global commodity. Saudi Arabia’s sign says, “OIL,”

China’s, “TEA,” Cuba’s, “SUGAR,” Brazil’s, “COFFEE,” and the United States’,

“VD”–short for venereal disease. Although the cartoon does not refer to a specific sexually transmitted infection, readers would almost certainly have thought of HIV and

AIDS. An article on the same page listed a host of recent disasters around the world that in combination suggested that the “Fall of America is at hand,” placing the words “AIDS plague” almost directly adjacent to the frame of the cartoon, reinforcing the link between

“VD” and the disease. By then, ten years into the recognized epidemic, scientists had established that HIV spread through sexual contact, and public health officials in the

28 “D.C. Activist Travels to Kenya for Treatment,” The Final Call, October 7, 1991, 32. This article, along with the Koech interview, was quoted liberally in a similar piece in Atlanta Inquirer, an African American newspaper. See Ron Sturrup, “AIDS Sufferers Get New Lease on Life,” Atlanta Inquirer, November 2, 1991, 1.

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United States warned that HIV and AIDS would soon explode into the heterosexual population.29

Upon returning from Kenya, Dr. Muhammad began promoting Kemron and

Immunex around the country as treatments for AIDS. He presented the findings of his trip to an audience of “media and members of the health community” at the group’s

University of Islam in Chicago. Muhammad zeroed in on Koech’s race as the reason for the media “whiteout” of the “miracle” AIDS drugs, saying, “If Dr. Davy Koech was a different complexion by now he’d be known all over the world and probably have a

Nobel Peace prize in medicine.” Muhammad announced his plan to make the drug available by ending the media “whiteout,” educating doctors about Kemron and

Immunex, and staging a campaign to “bring the issue to the attention of the Federal Drug

Administration and other federal agencies.” Sylvia Taylor, an audience member who worked as a health educator at Cook County Jail, agreed with Muhammad’s assessment, saying, “It’s a political and racist reason that we haven’t heard about these drugs.”

Representatives from Kupona Network, a group doing AIDS education with the South

Side’s black community, expressed their enthusiasm about the “tremendous boost” the drug would be for African Americans, some of whom were on complicated regimens of toxic drugs and could not afford the expensive medications imported by buying clubs.30

In his grassroots campaign to educate black audiences about Kemron and

Immunex, Muhammad often stressed the ways in which the drugs fit into an African

29 Cartoon, The Final Call, December 2, 1991, 2.

30 “AIDS activists briefed on treatment from Africa,” The Final Call, October 28, 1991, 2.

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framework of health and healing distinct from modern Western medicine, noting that the drug itself was “natural”–made from interferon produced in the human body’s nasal passages. While this was technically true, inasmuch as clinical interferon derives from proteins produced naturally in animal cells, noted that clinical interferon represented part of a new class of drugs called “biologics,” derived from substances found in the human body but mass-produced through novel manufacturing techniques made possible by genetic engineering. Hayashibara Biochemical, for example, cultivated a line of human cells in the skin of hamsters that had been exposed to a virus in order to stimulate organic interferon production.31

Muhammad also described medical care in Kenya as more “holistic” than in the

United States, in line with the care he provided at his own Abundant Life Clinic.

Muhammad stressed healthy eating, as well as abstention from tobacco and alcohol, for all of his patients, and additionally encouraged some to undertake periods of fasting to improve their health. Similarly, Dr. Justice claimed to put her patients on a regimen of vitamins and herbs. In November 1991, he partnered with Rashidah Hassan and her

BEBASHI for a public forum in Philadelphia on the drug. Hassan stressed that the public, and African Americans in particular, had “a right to demand this drug if it’s appropriate, and to ask questions.” At the forum, Muhammad reworked Kemron’s origin story to amplify Dr. Koech’s role in the discovery, and to portray the drug as the product of naturalistic, even primitive African medicine. He told the audience that after reading a journal article about the use of alpha interferon to cure viral infections in cattle, Koech

31 Sally Squires, “NIH Reverses Controversial AIDS Drug,” Washington Post, November 3, 1992, 6.

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had developed a “crude powder,” which he then “administered to a Kenyan diplomat who was dying from full blown AIDS.” Miraculously, he recounted, the dying diplomat made a quick recovery. Muhammad also suggested that Kemron had been discovered by

African, rather than Western, scientists, claiming that Western medical education teaches

“that you can only treat the symptoms, but not the underlying cause.”32

Dr. Abdul Muhammad’s emphasis on diet and his orientation toward Africa as a health resource for black Americans also fit in with the teachings of the movement’s founder, Master Fard Muhammad, who had told his followers:

Now don’t eat this food [pork]. It is poison for you. The people in your own country do not eat it. Since they eat the right kind of food they have the best health all the time. If you would live just like the people in your home country, you would never be sick anymore.33

Fard Muhammad had also seen food as a possible source of contagion, telling his followers not to eat pork because it “was created by God to attract the diseases and germs which the white man traditionally carries and wants to transmit to Blacks with the aim of poisoning them, in order to weaken their race.” Through the 1990s, The Final Call similarly educated readers about the importance of proper diet and the dangers of excess body fat, reprinting excerpts from Elijah Muhammad’s series of

32 Lisa Ely, “AIDS Treatment Drug Reports 90% Success Rate,” Chicago Citizen, April 12, 1992, 16; Sherry Stone, “Kenyan Researchers Find Possible AIDS Cure,” Philadelphia Tribune, November 5, 1991, 5A.

33 Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 149, quoted in Anthony B. Pinn, The African American Religious Experience in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 101.

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books, in which he advocated a vegetarian diet of fresh fruits and vegetables, abstention from alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, and consumption of only one meal per day.34

While Muhammad’s tour failed to attract the interest or attention of the mainstream newspapers, the black press continued reporting on the possibilities of

Kemron and Immunex. The Final Call, along with Baltimore’s Afro-American and a variety of local papers, published reports about the skepticism of federal health organizations, and Black Entertainment Network’s program “Our Voices” aired a discussion of oral alpha interferon. Audrey Gadzepko of the suggested there was some truth to Muhammad’s claim of a media “white-out” when none of the local health authorities she surveyed about Kemron and Immunex had heard of the drugs. While Gadzepko noted that the AIDS Research Advisory Council of the National

Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease had issued a statement that research studies had not supported any claims about the effectiveness of oral interferon in treating symptoms of AIDS, she repeated Muhammad’s insistence that his own trial had produced measurable results, and informed readers that he was “in the process of documenting and tabulating his findings.” Although Muhammad had been “rebuffed by the media and most of his fellow doctors,” Gadzepko noted, the FDA had approved hundreds of investigational studies of drugs thought to be effective for treating AIDS, and that a handful of pharmaceutical companies were experimenting with forms of interferon for

34 Gilles Kepel, Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe, trans. Susan Milner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 30 in Pinn, 102; Louis Farrakhan, “Weighing Properly Mentally and Physically,” The Final Call, October 7, 1991, 20; Elijah Muhammad, “Many Ailments Can Be Cured,” The Final Call, June 8, 1994, 28; Elijah Muhammad, “Meat is against Life,” The Final Call, April 1, 1997, 28.

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that purpose. To at least some readers, Muhammad must have seemed an embattled voice in the wilderness, squaring off against powerful state and corporate influences that forestalled an effective, inexpensive medication for ideological and economic reasons.35

Similarly, Cincinnati’s Call & Post reported on a presentation on Kemron at the

University of Cincinnati’s African American Cultural and Research Center by Aaron X, another Nation of Islam representative. Aaron X stressed the drug’s origins both in Africa and in the human body, asserting that Japan had mass-produced the drug for use in Kenya because the latter country was too “poorly developed… economically” for the task. He also argued that AZT, ddI, and ddC, the drugs most commonly prescribed to treat the symptoms of AIDS, were highly toxic and less effective than Kemron and that for patients who had previously been treated with AZT, Kemron would be ineffective.

Although the article’s author did not endorse the claim that AZT, ddI, and ddC “[sped] up the process toward death,” and in fact quoted a clinical researcher from the University of

Cincinnati disputing that point, he also did not cite any authorities repudiating the Nation of Islam’s claims about Kemron’s efficacy. In fact, anyone who happened to glance at the front page of the newspaper emblazoned with the headline, “African Treatment of AIDS

Deliberately Overlooked,” would have little doubt as to the author’s position.36

In promoting Kemron as a “natural” AIDS treatment and alternative to the expensive medications sold by major drug companies, Muhammad drew on attitudes that

35 Audrey Gadzepko, “Out of Africa: New AIDS drug said to work miracles,” Indianapolis Recorder, May 23, 1992, A2.

36 Ovie H. Mitchell, “African treatment of AIDS deliberately overlooked,” Call & Post (Cincinnati, OH), May 28, 1992, 1A.

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resonated with African Americans outside the Nation of Islam. A 1997 article in

Positively Aware magazine criticizing the use of alternative remedies by African

Americans with AIDS drew sharp rebuke from members of the Washington, D.C. AIDS service organization Us Helping Us, a Washington, D.C. black gay men’s AIDS service organization for black gay men. Both Reverend Kwabena Rainey Cheeks, who had been profiled in the piece, and Us Helping Us executive director accused the magazine of misrepresenting their organization’s approach to HIV therapy, which included “holistic therapies as a complement to drug therapy and an important factor in the quality of life for people living with HIV/AIDS.” According to Cheeks and Simmons, the article’s author had wrongly singled out African Americans for having “used holistic therapies to stay alive while science developed more effective and less toxic drugs.”

Pointing out the magazine’s many drug advertisements, they charged that the article would “benefit profit-driven pharmaceutical companies who have no interest in researching natural medicines because natural substances [cannot] be patented and therefore no profit can be made.”37

However, by April 1992, Muhammad and the Nation of Islam had acquired exclusive distribution rights for Immunex, Medikem’s alternative to Kemron, and therefore did hold a financial stake in the success of a clinical trial of oral alpha interferon. In August, the Nation of Islam held a press conference to announce its findings on Immuviron (the new trade name for Immunex) from a study conducted

37 Reverend Kwabena Rainey Cheeks and Ron Simmons, Letter to Positively Aware, October 5, 1997, Box 10, Duncan Teague Papers [unprocessed collection], Auburn Avenue Research Library, Atlanta, GA.

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among Muhammad’s Abundant Life Clinic HIV Alternative Treatment and Research

Network. A week earlier, the National Medical Association, an African American physicians’ group, joined the Community Constituency Group of the National Institute of

Allergy and Infectious Disease’s (NIAID) AIDS Clinical Trial Group (ACTG), NIAID’s

AIDS Research Advisory Committee, and the Multicultural AIDS Coalition, a non-profit advocacy group, in calling for clinical trials to confirm Muhammad’s results. The following month, the Multicultural AIDS Coalition (MAC) joined the effort to get a clinical trial of Kemron underway. Barbara Gomes-Beach, the organization’s executive director, told the , “This issue has become a political football. We would really like to know why. Is it because the drug comes from Africa and the positive studies done were done by an African[?]” In implicit contrast to the Nation of Islam, which held the distribution rights for Kemron in the United States, she stressed her group’s neutrality: “We are not marketeers but we are advocates for those who have tested HIV positive.” Rochelle Rollins, research director for MAC, similarly framed the fight for a clinical trial as an issue of concern for people of color, telling the Banner she hoped that “NIAID will not be deaf and blind to the needs and concerns of our communities.”38

In October, representatives from the NMA and the NIH met with oral alpha interferon supporters, including Dr. Abdul Muhammad, Dr. , Dr. Wilbert

Jordan of King Drew Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, and Dr. Keith Crawford of the

38 “Speaker Says Drugs Available for AIDS Cure,” Sacramento Observer, April 22, 1992, B2; James Bolden, “War on AIDS: Nation of Islam Draws Battle Lines on Deadly AIDS Virus,” , August 20, 1992, A4; Leslie A. Murdock, “AIDS Group Pushes for Kemron Testing,” Bay State Banner, September 17, 1992, 19.

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Kemron Action Committee, in Washington D.C. to discuss the possibility of a clinical trial. Although unable to travel to the meeting, from afar Dr. Koech criticized reports by the AIDS Research Advisory Committee and the Department of Health and Human

Services disclaiming any positive effects of oral interferon. He maintained that the committee had lumped different versions of oral alpha interferon treatment together, and that his drug, Kemron, produced no side effects and was superior to all other known treatments.39

Two days later, the NIH Office of AIDS Research and NIAID announced that they would move forward with large-scale testing of the drug, assisting Kemron advocates in designing a clinical trial. Although a report released the previous April on twelve existing studies of the drug had not recommended its use on the grounds that

KEMRI’s findings had not been replicated, its “underground” use moved government scientists to conduct an official clinical trial in the interest of public safety. Jack Killen, a

NIAID official who had previously criticized the Kenyan team’s findings on the drug, told the Washington Post, “It seems that large numbers of individuals are opting to take low-dose interferon and declining to take therapy that, from our perspective, has been proved beneficial in good, sound clinical trials.”40

Conscious of the need for racial sensitivity, government scientists also signaled that black physicians would be included in planning the trials. Malik Shabazz, reporting

39 Malik Shabazz, “NMA to Hear need for Drugs,” Afro-American Star, October 24, 1992, A1;

40 Warren E. Leary, “U.S. Will Sponsor AIDS-Drug Trials,” New York Times, October 29, 1992, B12; Squires, “NIH Reverses”.

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for the Afro-American Red Star, noted that NIH was responding to “huge criticism from the African American community who felt that NIH was attempting to wrongfully discredit KEMRON.” Dr. Barbara Justice pushed this plan further:

We will be expanding that research to include researchers and physicians of color…. Those are tax dollars being used for research, we are 49 percent of the population of the United States that is so affected (by AIDS), yet our researchers, our scientists, our nation, our concerns have not been addressed to date.41

Victor Zonana, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledging the agency’s desire to “build bridges” with “a large segment of the

African American community,” called the decision to undertake the Kemron trial

“political, but good political.”42

Dr. Wayne Greaves of told the Washington Post that his and other black institutions had come under fire from black community leaders in the past for not supporting the effort to initiate a clinical trial. The Post acknowledged that the Nation of Islam had been the driving force behind the campaign for a Kemron trial, and noted that Muhammad’s Abundant Life Clinic operated Perankh Laboratory, which held the exclusive rights to market Immuviron. Mark Smith of the Kaiser Family Foundation dismissed the claim that race had played a factor in the drug’s initial rejection by U.S. scientists, but admitted that the reaction to Kemron had been different from previous trial

41 Malik Shabazz, “NIH, NMA Agree on AIDS Trial,” Afro-American Red Star, October 31, 1992, A1.

42 Shabazz, “NIH, NMA”; Amy Goldstein, “A D.C. Clinic’s Controversial Rx for AIDS,” Washington Post, September 27, 1993, A1.

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treatments: “Most of us doing this work for a while have seen these drugs come and then unfortunately go. There has continued to be a residual skepticism about this drug.”43

Announcing further details about the upcoming trial the following spring,

Muhammad once again touted the promise of “a product produced by Black people” and located the drug within the history of science in the African Diaspora: “I think that historically Black physicians and scientists have always been in the forefront…. This is just one further example in what I call the tradition of Imhotep, George Washington

Carver, Ronald McNair and Charles Drew.” At the same time, he moderated his rhetoric on the white scientific community, telling the Philadelphia Tribune that the Western doctors had rejected the results of Koech’s original Kemron study not out of explicit racism, but because “it came from what was considered an unorthodox source, community-based people in Kenya.” He also stressed the necessity of running the trial through black clinics and medical schools, since distrust of white doctors might keep

African Americans from enrolling to begin with, and because “for these results to be verified for the Black community, trials must be done at Black institutions.”44

Muhammad also highlighted that funding for AIDS services in Washington, D.C. had not kept pace with the changing demographics of the epidemic. He criticized the local AIDS office for giving almost a third of its budget to the Whitman Walker Clinic,

43 Squires, “NIH Reverses”.

44 Benjamin Dudley, “New AIDS Medicine to Be Called Immuviron,” Afro- American Red Star, April 3, 1993, A1; Denise Clay, “FDA to Test AIDS Drug Introduced by Nation of Islam,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 4, 1993, 1A.

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serving the gay and lesbian community, and identified by the Afro-American Red Star as a “White run clinic.” The paper reported:

[T]he lack of an equitable distribution of funding for AIDS research and treatment to clinics and facilities serving people of color in the District has virtually facilitated the mobilization and organization of some 14 area community organizations to form a united front and demand their share.

Muhammad claimed that his own clinic’s results had been discounted in part because of his demand that funding for AIDS services be shifted to institutions serving African

Americans, as people of color made up an ever-greater share of new AIDS cases.45

Muhammad likely referred to an incident months earlier, when an internal investigation showed that Caitlin Ryan, the chief of Washington D.C.’S AIDS agency, had “improperly intervened” to block Abundant Life Clinic’s application for a grant to run an AIDS education campaign because she believed the clinic did not have the

“expertise” to do so. Muhammad had been successful, however, in securing $213,000 in grants from the District to provide a range of services for people with AIDS. An AIDS social worker with the Veterans Administration in Northwest Washington testified to

Abundant Life Clinic’s appeal among black veterans: “His holistic approach to care, his

Afrocentric approach, is what my [clients] are looking for.” Indeed, Muhammad continued to tout the drug as an “African” cure, and said that his rising profile was part of a plan to bring interferon to people of color with AIDS in the United States and across the world. He told the paper, “I am literally out to save the world.”46

45 Gwen Gilmore, “Dr. Muhammad: ‘Treatment Works,’” Afro-American Red Star, September 11, 1993, A1.

46 Goldstein, “A D.C. Clinic’s Controversial Rx.”

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Although he claimed that half of the patients at his clinic were gay or bisexual,

Muhammad attracted attention for his remarks on racial antagonism and homosexuality.

In a 1992 speech, he said that “In the very nature of this people that we call Caucasian is a hatred for the black people and murder for them and a lust for their blood,” and claimed

Israel as a member of an international genocidal AIDS conspiracy. Regarding homosexuality he had said, “Homosexuals up on the schoolyard passing out condoms to your sons…. They’re trying to convince even intelligent people that now there’s three sexes. And when you accept that, you are accepting death.” Muhammad’s religiosity also attracted attention, especially as he sought tax-exempt status for the clinic. Although patients interviewed by the Washington Post contended that the doctor did not foist religious values on them, the newspaper noted that portraits of Elijah Muhammad hung on the walls of the clinic’s waiting room, and quoted fellow Kemron supporter Dr.

Wilbert Jordan as saying, “He [Muhammad] greets you in the name of Allah.”47

However, Muhammad’s trial ran into a series of problems. The doctor blamed

NIH for postponing the start date in order to entertain outside objections. He claimed,

“It’s the same double standard. They make us jump over every hurdle and dot every I before we are heard.” He pointed out that AZT and ddC had been used prior to clinical trials for those drugs. Although Muhammad and others in his national network had been legally treating patients with oral alpha interferon for years, the Abundant Life Clinic and the Nation of Islam stood to profit handsomely from FDA approval for the substance to be prescribed as a treatment for AIDS. For Muhammad, this did not suggest a conflict of

47 Goldstein, “A D.C. Clinic’s Controversial Rx.”

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interest. Instead, the Nation’s financial stake in Kemron/Immuviron fit well in line with

Farrakhan’s mandates for African Americans to forge a path of economic self-reliance and cooperation among people of color worldwide. In The Final Call, the Nation of Islam leaders exhorted readers to economic autonomy for the race with headlines such as “We

Must Depend on Allah and Ourselves,” “Unity: the Key to Black Economic Success in the 90s,” and “White Brutality Must Force Black Self-Determination.”48

When the trial finally got underway in 1996, Muhammad told the Afro-American

Red Star, “It can truly be said that it is the first clinical trial that is our very own.” The study, however, was short-lived. Soon thereafter, Congressman Peter King of New York placed Muhammad’s Abundant Life Clinic under investigation, the same day that the IRS placed a tax lien on the clinic, crippling its ability to treat patients. A year later, in June

1997, the NIH terminated the clinical trial, pointing to low enrollment and retention. Dr.

Beverly Austin, medical officer for the Opportunistic Infections Research arm of the agency, told the Afro-American Red Star that the end to the study did not preclude future research on oral alpha interferon, but noted, “that will have to be determined by the

(pharmaceutical) companies.” Muhammad blamed the IRS for the poor outcome, telling the Red Star, “The day after the trials were open the IRS… attacked us… and the same with Dr. Barbara Justice in New York and Dr. David Jordan in [Los Angeles] whose funding was dried up and kept the enrollment low.” Dr. Jordan blamed NIH for assigning

48 Gwen Gilmore, “Kemron trials delayed again,” Afro-American Red Star, August 6, 1994, A1; “White Brutality Must Force Black Self-Determination,” The Final Call, June 29, 1992; Louis Farrakhan, “We Must Depend on Allah and Ourselves,” The Final Call, January 25, 1993, 20-1.; “Unity: the Key to Black Economic Success in the 90s,” The Final Call, January 25, 1993, 31.

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the study to the Division of AIDS Treatment Research Institute (DATRI), which was scheduled to shut down in 1998, although Dr. Bill Dunkin of the Therapeutic Research

Programs at NIH insisted that the future of DATRI had no bearing on the demise of the

Kemron study. Still, Jordan maintained, “They never really wanted to do the study in the first place.”49

Although Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad and his colleagues from the Nation of

Islam may seem to make for unlikely AIDS activists, their messages about medical genocide, media racism, economic inequality, and holistic medicine resonated with at least some African Americans beyond the group’s membership. Their inflated rhetoric may make the Nation and Kemron seem easy to dismiss from the history of AIDS treatment politics, but their overall goal of securing a clinical trial for oral alpha interferon puts them on par in some ways with ACT UP and others who sought and secured a place at the table in the AIDS drug trials and approvals process.50

Ultimately, the Kemron/Immuviron clinical trial coincided with the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapies. This new class of drugs, introduced in 1997, revolutionized the treatment of HIV and AIDS, and are widely credited with turning the disease that had once been a nearly immediate death sentence into a relatively manageable, chronic condition. However, the circumstances surrounding the premature

49 Gwen Gilmore, “560 Sought for Kemron Trials: HIV positive?” Afro-American Red Star, April 27, 1996, A13; Desiree Allen Graves, “IRS Stifles Abundant Life Clinic,” Afro-American Red Star, September 7, 1996, A1; Gwen Gilmore, “Kxemron Trials Ended,” Afro-American Red Star, June 28, 1997, A1.

50 Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of California Press, 1996).

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end of Muhammad’s study, including Peter King’s Congressional investigation and the

IRS’ tax lien against the Abundant Life Clinic, appeared to many African Americans to play out according to a script of the abuse of black leaders by powerful white political institutions.

The Kemron story also points to one way in which African Americans engaged the idea of AIDS in relation to its geographical origins and their own place within the

African Diaspora. For the Nation of Islam and other Kemron supporters, an African cure based on principles of holistic healing would serve as a rebuke to scientific theories that, in their view, merely reproduced racist tropes to pin the blame on black people for a deadly sexually transmitted illness. Aiming to subvert the “geography of blame” that located the epidemic’s origins in sub-Saharan Africa, they instead looked to the continent looked to the continent for a cure.

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CHAPTER 4

“THERE IS A BALM IN GILEAD”: AIDS ACTIVISM IN THE BLACK CHURCH

“Where is the church?” Pernessa Seele asked herself one day in 1989.1

In her new job at Harlem Hospital, the thirty four-year-old immunologist saw the swath that AIDS cut through the neighborhood. Harlem residents accounted for less than

1.5 percent of New York City’s population, but close to 8 percent of its people with

AIDS, and the overwhelming majority of those were African American. Some—junkies and gay men—fit the profile of the CDC’s early “risk groups.” But Harlem Hospital also admitted large numbers of women and infants with AIDS. Regardless of how they had contracted the virus, Seele noticed, her black patients with AIDS suffered and died without any kind of support from the single most important institution in the African

American community: the black church.2

Religion had been the center of Seele’s life growing up during the 1950s and 60s in Lincolnville, South Carolina, a small all-black town founded by ex-slaves after the

Civil War. In Lincolnville, churches served as hubs for networks of mutual support, providing “whatever was needed, good or bad or indifferent” to the community, and serving as “the first line of defense” when someone fell ill or died. According to Seele, the church leveled differences in status among members, and served as a refuge from life

1 Pernessa Seele, interview with author, October 11, 2012, Richmond, .

2 Laurie Goodstein, “Harlem Effort Against AIDS Opens With Prayer,” The Washington Post, September 11, 1989, A12.

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under Jim Crow. For African Americans in the South, she says, “whether you were a doctor or a janitor, you had to sit in the back of the bus. But when you walked into church you were somebody.”

Historically, the black church had also stood in the vanguard during struggles for voting rights and civic equality. But in the context of AIDS in Harlem, where over 90% of people with the disease were black, churches had abdicated all of these roles and responsibilities. Seele recalls that people who lay dying with AIDS “wanted someone to sit by their bedside, hold their hand, and pray and be present with them,” but their

“family wasn’t coming, the church wasn’t coming.” Pastors seemed to have abandoned people with AIDS because the disease was associated with gay men and drug users, exposing lines of social division within the church. And whereas churches had often taken the lead on a host of social and political issues in the past, now they seemed unwilling even to comfort people who lay dying from a disease of the abject.3

Then Seele had an idea: she would gather the neighborhood’s faith leaders together for a week of prayer and education about AIDS. Not that Harlem’s churches and mosques were oblivious to the disease—pastors, with their intimate insight into personal issues of sickness and death, knew that they preached on Sundays to HIV-positive parishioners and at the funerals of young men and women who had died from AIDS, although ashamed families often blamed the premature death on “cancer.” Imams, whose mosques included many former injection drug users who had kicked their habits in converting to Islam, also saw their congregations devastated by the growing epidemic.

3 Seele interview.

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However, as Seele realized, religious leaders shied away from talking about a disease closely associated with homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and drug use. Seele believed that, by couching AIDS education in prayer, she could offer pastors and imams a way to talk about the disease, and so bring the black religious community into the fight against

AIDS.

Seele made phone calls and went through the neighborhood, knocking on doors and saying, “Hi, I’m Pernessa Seele, and we are having a Harlem Week of Prayer. And

‘we’ was me. And Thee. Me and the Lord was having a Harlem Week of Prayer for the

Healing of AIDS.” Seele tailored her message to Harlem’s religious gatekeepers, emphasizing a program of prayer and healing with “education… in the backdrop.” She believed that, through prayer, Harlem’s ministers would find the resolve to “be bold and speak truth to power” with their congregations. Thus prepared, they would learn about the disease, bringing accurate information and an open mind back to their churches. “If we can get people praying for AIDS,” she reasoned, “we can get them to do other things.”4

The first Harlem Week of Prayer married elements of a church revival with more prosaic efforts to educate black faith leaders, including workshops on HIV transmission, treatment, and pastoral care. On Sunday, September 10, 1989, nearly a hundred black clergy, including Christian ministers, Muslim imams, Native American shamans, Yoruba priests, and Ethiopian Hebrew rabbis, gathered “to walk around Harlem Hospital like the folks walked around Jericho and blow the walls down.” After an opening prayer, Seele

4 Seele interview; Goodstein, “Harlem Effort”.

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recalls, “all of us African Americans with our different cultures and communities [were] walking around Harlem Hospital singing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ saying our prayers in Arabic, saying our Yoruba prayers and messages.” Outside the hospital, faith leaders addressed the community. Bishop Norman Quick of the told the crowd that he would have to leave the service early to conduct a funeral for thirty five-year-old man who had died of AIDS, the son of two members of Quick’s church.

“The biggest thing we can do for our people is to get it out in the open,” he continued,

“It’s all right to acknowledge that you have someone in your family who has contracted

AIDS.” Seele remembers Quick’s address as a “revolutionary moment” because of his stature among Christians in Harlem, and because he had previously rejected people with

HIV and AIDS as sinners. Quick’s willingness portended the sea change in community attitudes about the disease that Seele hoped to bring about, which might in turn lead the neighborhoods’ churches and mosques to more developed HIV prevention programs and political advocacy around the epidemic. As Wafaa El Sadr, the hospital’s chief of infectious diseases and Seele’s boss, told the press, “The idea is to open up these churches for the word AIDS.”5

Over the next few years, the Harlem Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS grew, doubling the number of churches involved to two hundred by 1991. As her program’s notoriety grew, Seele began receiving attention from others around the country who wanted to replicate the model. She re-christened her event as the Black Church

5 Shirley Levine Vernick, “Ministering in the Age of AIDS,” Harvard AIDS Letter, December 1992, Box 75, Folder 5, Gay Men’s Health Crisis Records, New York Public Library; Seele interview; Goodstein, “Harlem Effort”.

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Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS to reflect the program’s growing reach. In 1992,

Seele incorporated a new non-profit group, The Balm in Gilead, to extend the work of the

Harlem Week of Prayer throughout the year. She drew the name for the new group from a verse in the book of Jeremiah, as well as an African American spiritual by the same name. for both physical and spiritual healing contained in both verse and song fit well with the group’s mission, as they aimed to mend rifts within the church in order to make headway against a deadly epidemic.

With her professional background in immunology and personal involvement in the black church, Seele presented an ideal figure to bring meaningful HIV prevention messages to African Americans by bridging the worlds of science and faith. At the same time, she used her position to reform attitudes within the black church that stood in the way of AIDS advocacy. To combat stigma and silence in black churches surrounding both the epidemic and sex itself, The Balm in Gilead offered liturgical and technical resources that acknowledged the presence of sexuality, including homosexuality, in the congregation. Seele also leveraged support from the federal government to expand The

Balm in Gilead’s model to churches throughout the United States, then to the Caribbean and Africa. In the early 2000s, the organization set up programs in five African countries before establishing a permanent second headquarters in Tanzania. Throughout this process Pernessa Seele, as the leader and public face of The Balm in Gilead, argued that the church served as the focus of social life for disparate peoples throughout the African

Diaspora, and thus her organization’s approach to HIV prevention would work in Dar es

Salaam as well as it had in Harlem. Working through black churches, Balm in Gilead tried to reshape the boundaries of blackness by making churches more welcoming to gay

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parishioners and people with HIV and AIDS, and by promoting a more open discussion of homosexuality. At the same time, Balm in Gilead sought to, according to Seele,

“bridge” the African Diaspora in the context of a deadly pandemic that devastated black communities around the world.6

The Love That Dare Not Preach Its Name

In bringing the black church to the fight against HIV and AIDS among African

Americans, Seele sought to mobilize the largest and most influential social and cultural institution in African American life and to tap into the church’s tradition of political activism. According to the University of ’s National Survey of Black

Americans, around the time that the Harlem Week of Prayer began, almost 70% of

African Americans reported belonging to a church. As the first autonomous black institution in the United States, the church served as a source of tremendous pride and incubated political leaders, from the first black officials elected after the Civil War to

Martin Luther King and his lieutenants in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Churches also provided education, health care, and material aid to members in need, on top of the social pleasures and spiritual comfort of fellowship. However, traditions

6 Aisha Satterwhite, “Nigeria,” Balm in Gilead, December 6, 2002, cached by Wayback Machine February 18, 2004, http://web.archive.org/web/20040218031628/http://www.balmingilead.org/special_featur e/journey/nigeria_1.asp; The Wayback Machine is a “bot” that periodically stores (“caches”) versions of websites on the Internet Archive’s server, making them easily accessible for the future. Using the Wayback Machine, historians can view cached versions of a page, tracking changes to it over time, or view pages that have since disappeared. The Wayback Machine main page can be viewed at http://archive.org/web/web.php.

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notwithstanding, most black pastors avoided talking about AIDS; most of those who did condemned people with the disease as mortal sinners whose wicked behavior had brought a plague down from God himself. For the black church, the association between the epidemic and homosexuality, which sat “among the worst of all sins,” put AIDS activism from the pulpit beyond the pale.7

The church’s central role in African American politics, as well as its vexed relationship with sexuality, is as old as the church itself. The roots of the modern black church lie in the independent denominations founded by free African Americans tired of segregated worship, as well as the “invisible institution” of slave churches that offered solace in stories of Hebrew bondage and exodus, and of the trials and resurrection of

Jesus Christ. Although slaves resisted their masters’ efforts to wield Christianity as a form of social control, many nevertheless adopted the conservative Baptist faith of the planter class. During the first half of the twentieth century, they then carried this conservative theology to cities in the North and West as they fled Jim Crow for work in

Rust Belt factories and in war production centers during World War II. Throughout the

20th century, churches stood at the center of struggles for black political rights, premising

7 Mindy Thompson Fullilove and Robert E. Fullilove, “Stigma as an Obstacle to AIDS Action,” American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 7 (April 1999): 1117–29; Andrew Billingsley and Cleopatra Howard Caldwell, “The Church, the Family, and the School in the African American Community,” The Journal of Negro Education 60, no. 3 (July 1, 1991): 427–440; More recently, the Pew Research Center has reported that African Americans are “significantly more religious than the general population,” with the percentage of African Americans who report that religion is “very important in their lives,” that they attend church at least once a week, and that they pray on a daily basis being at least fourteen points higher than those percentages for the overall population of the United States. See Pew Research Center, “A Religious Portrait of African- Americans,” Pew Research Religion and Public Life Project, January 30, 2009, http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/a-religious-portrait-of-african-americans.

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claims for civic and social equality on their “respectability,” that is to say, their ability to conform to the standards of middle class society. In part, respectability politics emerged as a reaction to images of black sexual disorder that pervaded American culture and society, from the rapacious ex-slaves of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to the collapse of the nuclear family and “tangle of pathology” that then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel

Patrick Moynihan highlighted in his eponymous 1965 report. Churches, as the central institutions in most black communities, thus pushed members to act as racial exemplars, proving that they deserved political rights by adhering to the moral strictures of middle class culture.8

Black gay and lesbian ministers today recall churches from their youth that saw homosexuality as incompatible with Christian worship. As a “deeply, deeply spiritual” same gender-loving young woman in the Church of God in Christ, Reverend Yvette

Flunder lacked even the language to describe her desire for other women. Since “there were no words for it [her sexuality], not in our community,” she married a man “who was struggling with the same kinds of issues… and I guess we figured that we would cancel each other out in some way.” Her husband later died of complications from AIDS, and

Flunder herself went on to found Ark of Refuge, a San Francisco ministry for people living with HIV and AIDS. Darlene Garner, who later became co-chair of BWMT for

Education in Philadelphia and a reverend in Metropolitan Community Church, had been very active in the Baptist church in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, but left for

8 Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, updated edition (Oxford University Press, 2004); Eric C. Lincoln, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Duke University Press, 1990); Cohen.

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Washington, DC in her early twenties after coming out to her family as a lesbian. To explain Garner’s departure, her great aunt told friends at church that Garner was a prostitute who had skipped town after stealing money from her pimp, because “being a prostitute was, to her, far preferable than telling anyone I was a lesbian.” The aunt covered over Garner’s lesbian identity not because of the church’s stance on homosexuality, but out of concern that members of her own social circle would disapprove. For Curtis Wadlington, BEBASHI’s first program director, AIDS activism carried both social and spiritual consequences. When word about his work with

BEBASHI got around, “people in the church stopped talking to me. Churches that I preached at for years, I couldn’t preach at no more. You know, ‘You messing with them faggots and that AIDS stuff.’”9

Even though most black churches approached homosexuality with an attitude somewhere between tacit disapproval and open hostility, gay men attended Sunday services and often played key roles in black churches. Many congregations relied on black gay men, who served as organists and choir directors, to produce a religious experience for churchgoers every Sunday. Even as churches relied on their creative energies, black gay men occupied an “open closet,” trading their silence about sexual matters for membership in the flock. As Reverend Renee McCoy of Harlem’s gay-

9 The mainstream Church of God in Christ (COGIC) does not ordain women, but Flunder found a leadership role as assistant pastor at Love Center Ministries, a relatively open-minded Bay Area offshoot of the denomination. From there, she split off to form Ark of Refuge, and received a Doctor of Ministry degree from San Francisco Theological Seminary. Yvette Flunder, phone interview with Monique Moultrie, February 28, 2011, http://lgbtran.org/Exhibits/OralHistory/Flunder/YFlunder.pdf; Darlene Garner, phone interview with Monique Moultrie, October 27, 2010, http://lgbtran.org/Exhibits/OralHistory/Garner/DGarner.pdf; Wadlington interview.

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inclusive Metropolitan Community Church commented, “If Black lesbians and gay men are willing to check their sexuality at the door of the church, and come bearing gifts of talent, there are relatively few problems.” However, as AIDS researchers Robert and

Mindy Fullilove observed in a 1999 study of AIDS stigma in the black church, "[t]he homosexual man is cast out of the church, whether he stays or not." In an interview with

Pernessa Seele, who ran focus groups for the Fulliloves’ study, one participant recalled,

“I used to hear ministers say they were going to find them a real sissy to play music in their church.” The ministers’ willingness to “forget the so-called theological issues in order to enhance their pocketbook” struck many black gay men as cruel and hypocritical.10

The effect of religious homophobia on black gay men in the age of AIDS also registers in the life and work of black gay writers. In Craig Harris’ short story “Cut Off from Among Their People,” part of Joseph Beam’s In the Life, Jeff attends the funeral for his lover, who has passed away from an AIDS-related illness. The lover’s family has cut him out of arrangements for the service, held in a Harlem mortuary because “a big church funeral would be both inappropriate and unnecessary.” The AME minister who delivers the sermon, “simply dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and maroon necktie” rather than his vestments, tells the family and friends of the deceased represents the “fulfillment of a prophesy.”11 Citing Old Testament scripture, he continues:

10 McCoy quoted in James Tinney, “Why a Black Gay Church?” in In the Life, 73; Fullilove and Fullilove.

11 Craig G. Harris, “Cut Off from Among Their People,” in In the Life: a Black Gay Anthology, ed. Joseph Beam (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1986), 65.

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There’s no cause to wonder why medical science could not find a cure for this man’s illness. How could medicine cure temptation? What drug can exorcise Satan from a young man’s soul? The only cure is to be found in the Lord. The only cure is repentance, for Leviticus clearly tells us, “…whoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people.”12

Afterward, the undertaker gives Jeff a ride to the internment on Long Island, since no one in the family offered to take him. Once in the hearse, the undertaker tells Jeff that he has also recently lost a lover to AIDS, and that he sees cases like their own all the time:

“tearless funerals, the widowed treated like non-entities, and these ‘another faggot burns in hell’ sermons.”13

Essex Hemphill’s funeral, nine years after the release of In the Life, sadly echoed

Harris’ story. In the introduction to the 2000 edition of Ceremonies, Hemphill’s last literary collection, Charles Nero described the irony of his friend’s death from AIDS complications, and his contested legacy. Hemphill’s mother, a devout Christian, claimed that her son had “given his life over to Christ” in the final month of his life. The minister she selected for the funeral inveighed against homosexuality in his sermon at the service for her son, who had once written, “When I die,/honey chil’,/my angels/will be tall/Black drag queens.” Before his death, Hemphill had arranged for his papers to be donated to

New York Public Library, which houses the papers of Gay Men of African Descent and

Other Countries, as well as those of Joseph Beam and other black gay writers. The library

12 Harris, 66.

13 Harris, 67.

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tried to contact the family to no avail; Nero feared that they had destroyed the papers in an attempt to erase Hemphill’s sexuality from family memory.14

Black churches were not alone in condemning homosexuality or interpreting the advent of AIDS as God’s punishment for homosexual behavior. Conservative white preachers did the same, as did Jesse Helms on the floor of the .

However, while the 1970s and 1980s witnessed a resurgence of evangelical Christianity throughout most segments of the American public, churches remained far more influential among African Americans than among their white counterparts. Furthermore, owing to the demographics of the AIDS epidemic in black America, where the epidemic included much larger numbers of women and heterosexual men, black churches likely included far more people with AIDS than their white counterparts, given most churches’ opposition to homosexuality. Thus, the black church came under fire from some corners not only for promoting the homophobia that forestalled an effective public response to the epidemic, but for failing to care for those of its own, straight men and women as well as gay men, who had become ill or passed away.15

Moreover, the Fulliloves and some other social scientists argued that the church’s stance on homosexuality increased black gay men’s risk for HIV. Just as leaders of Gay

Men of African Descent and others in the Black Gay Renaissance argued that the invisibility of black gay men in American culture led them to sexual and drug-using

14 Charles I. Nero, “Fixing Ceremonies: An Introduction,” in Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies (San Francisco, Cleis Press, 2000), xi-xxiii; Essex Hemphill, “The Tomb of Sorrow,” in Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, ed. Essex Hemphill (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991), 75-83.

15 Inrig.

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behaviors that put them at increased risk for HIV, critics of the black church connected cultural alienation to psychosocial factors driving the epidemic in black communities.

Theology notwithstanding, the church played a central role in the lives of African

Americans, including black gays, as the pathway to spiritual salvation, as well as the center of social life. Some left the church, either by will or force, and dealt with the rejection and loss of community through sex and drug use. Whether or not black gay men remained active in the church, researchers argued, low self-esteem stemming from such profound existential rejection made them less likely to protect themselves from HIV by using condoms and clean needles. The ambivalent attitudes of fellow churchgoers, combined with damning messages from the pulpit about the sin of homosexuality, perpetuated the spread of HIV through their “lasting and deep impact on the self-worth of

[church-going] MSM.”16

Seele realized that the church’s enormous influence among African Americans offered a slew of opportunities to chip away at the spread of HIV in black communities.

Ministers, given their moral authority, could lead from the pulpit by encouraging black men and women alike to recognize and reduce their risk for HIV, especially when that meant bringing sexuality into the church by, for example, distributing free condoms. By changing sexual norms among the laity, The Balm in Gilead could help churchgoers support one another in practicing safer sex. Campaigns targeted at both pulpit and pews could push black churches to welcome people with HIV and AIDS as full members of the

16 Jeffrey Lynn Woodyard, John L. Peterson, and Joseph P. Stokes, “‘Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord’: Participation in African American Churches Among Young African American Men Who Have Sex with Men,” Journal of Pastoral Care 54, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 451–60.

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congregation. In turn, churchgoers would feel more comfortable with getting tested for

HIV and, if positive, with disclosing their serostatus to sexual partners, reducing the virus’ spread. Church-based HIV education could also reach congregants who had sex with other men but were not otherwise reached by other efforts because they either did not identify as gay or bisexual, or did not participate the gay social networks where many forms of outreach took place. On the other hand, reducing homophobia by encouraging churches to embrace gay congregants would reduce the stigma associated with AIDS as a

“gay disease.” Finally, given the prevalence of mistrust among African Americans for the medical establishment, the church could serve as a trusted source for scientific information about the disease and its transmission. Aside from changing attitudes about

HIV and AIDS, the church could offer infrastructure for education, testing, and counseling in communities where few such resources existed.

To Heal the Sin-Sick Soul

Pernessa Seele selected the name for her new organization based on divine insight. While riding her stationary bike one morning in her apartment:

[T]here was a book–I don’t know where this book came from–there was a book on my bookshelf called Balm in Gilead by [Sarah Lawrence] Lightfoot, who was a nurse at Harlem Hospital. And I’m saying, ‘What am I going to call this organization?’ And the spirit said, ‘The Balm in Gilead.’ And I said, ‘That’s a stupid name. How’s anybody going to know what we do if we call it the Balm?’’ I’m just talking to myself in my apartment, ‘That don’t make no sense.’ And I said, ‘Okay,’ I’m talking to the spirit now, ‘If you think I should call it The Balm in Gilead, fine, but that sure don’t make no sense to me.”17

17 Seele interview.

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As she later explained on her organization’s website, the phrase comes from both biblical scripture and an African American spiritual. In the Old Testament, the prophet Jeremiah asks, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” referring to, in Seele’s words, “a land that was ravaged by plagues, poor health care, racial discrimination, , ruthless treatment of women and violence.” A slave spiritual answered the question–“There is a balm in Gilead”–with an added layer of New Testament meaning, that the balm of

Christ’s love will heal “the sin-sick soul.” Through the song, she wrote, “Our ancestors… gave instructions to go, teach and to take responsibility for each other.” “So,” Seele says today, “you have a question, you have an answer, and you have the hands that make the work and the activity, make it happen.”18

During The Balm in Gilead’s early days, Seele received help and support from some of the gay white men who had been among the first to respond to the epidemic a decade earlier. Rodger McFarlane, the executive director of Broadway Cares/Equity

Fights AIDS, a major AIDS fundraising and grant-making organization based in New

York’s theater community, gave Seele office space and a salary. Len McNally of New

York Community Trust, a public interest funding group, coached Seele in grant writing.

After she submitted an initial proposal “full of all this Jesus, religious conversation,”

Seele says, “Len McNally brought me into his office and said, ‘You cannot write no grant like this…. [laughing] And he taught me how to write a grant, and New York Community

18 Seele interview; Pernessa Seele, “AIDS, Spirituality and the African American Church: A Call for a Greater Response,” Balm in Gilead, cached by Wayback Machine August 18, 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/20000818174053/http://www.balmingilead.org/resources/spir ituality.htm.

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Trust gave us our first grant.” As Seele recalls, their support anchored the fledgling organization as she made the transition from work at Harlem Hospital to the non-profit sector: “[T]hese are all gay white men in New York, the founders of Gay Men’s Health

Crisis and the founders of the movement… and they kind of called me and said, ‘Hey, let me help you out here.’”19

Even before the Harlem Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS became The

Balm in Gilead, Seele’s efforts attracted high-profile attention. In December 1991,

Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger honored Seele for her work in establishing the Harlem Week of Prayer. Reporting on the award, the New York Amsterdam News noted that Seele’s event had also garnered endorsements from Archbishop Desmond

Tutu, , the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Imam Warith

Deen Muhammad, son of the late Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Seele’s ability to organize the diverse religious community in the long-time capital of African

American culture around a contentious, life-and-death issue had won her acclaim.20

Within a few years, The Balm in Gilead had grown to include two paid staff in addition to Pernessa Seele, although as the founder, Seele remained the organization’s public face and spokesperson. In 1993, The Balm in Gilead launched a national Black

Church Day of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, an annual day of AIDS-themed worship in black churches around the country, using the Harlem Week of Prayer as a model. Even as The Balm in Gilead developed a national profile, Seele maintained professional ties in

19 Seele interview.

20 “Harlem AIDS Prevention Group Is Honored by Ruth Messinger,” New York Amsterdam News, December 21, 1991, 8.

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Harlem, serving as the vice president of Harlem Congregations for Community

Improvement (HCCI), an interfaith neighborhood revitalization group, for which she developed and managed social services and public health programs. By 1994, when Seele left HCCI, The Balm in Gilead could claim to be “the only organization addressing HIV prevention that has been endorsed by every major national African American church denomination and caucus.”21

Broad support from black religious leaders allowed Pernessa Seele to present The

Balm in Gilead as an ideal partner to public health officials, given the organization’s ability to bridge the gap between science and faith. Seele, who had worked at Sloan-

Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University before landing at Harlem Hospital, married her understanding of “black folks’ relationship to the church… to Jesus or

Mohammed or whoever they’re calling on… [and] the power of prayer” to her background in immunology to bring accurate medical information about HIV risk and transmission to black faith communities, through prevention programs grounded in sound public health practice. The Balm in Gilead also benefited from Seele’s professional contacts; faculty at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health served on the organization’s early board of directors, and helped write grants and design programs.

21 The Balm in Gilead, “The Black Church Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Education Kit Funding Proposal,” and Pernessa Seele, “Pernessa Seele CV,” Grant 09500543, Reel 7637, Records, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York, italics in original.

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Joyce Moon Howard, Angela Aidala, and Robert Fullilove, all members of Mailman’s faculty, served as program evaluators for Balm in Gilead.22

Public health officials, for their own part, saw value in supporting The Balm in

Gilead. On February 28, 1994, President ’s Office of National AIDS Policy and The Balm in Gilead together convened a conference of fifty-six black clergy from nineteen denominations at the White House for a conference, the African American

Clergy Summit on HIV/AIDS. Later that year, CDC also directly promoted The Balm in

Gilead’s Black Church Week of Prayer model, sponsoring a workshop in late 1994 at

Emory University in Atlanta for black HIV prevention leaders from six cities. Such partnerships arose from an increasing emphasis within the public health profession on cultural competence in health education, as well as a federal mandate for greater cooperation between community-based organizations and state and local health departments in the fight against AIDS. Beginning in 1993, CDC required that all state, territorial, and local health departments receiving federal HIV prevention funds cooperate with affected communities in responding to the epidemic. Although CDC let each health department determine the contours of the “shared responsibility” between public health officials and community representatives, the agency emphasized the importance of “a sound basis in behavioral and social science and… an accurate assessment of the epidemiology of the current and projected future HIV epidemic,” as well as the need for

“[d]ifferences in background, perspective, and experience… in the planning process.”

22 Seele interview; The Balm in Gilead, “CDC National Partnerships for HIV Prevention Funding Proposal,” August 7, 1998, The Balm in Gilead office files, Richmond, Virginia.

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Agency officials recognized that such partnerships would allow officials to tap into “the strength and resourcefulness of affected communities” while allaying fear and mistrust of government health programs.23

The White House’s Office of National AIDS Policy also saw the African

American Clergy Summit as an opportunity to deepen cooperation between the federal

AIDS bureaucracy and the black religious community. The ministers signed “The African

American Clergy’s Declaration of War on HIV/AIDS,” which pointed to the church’s

“long and distinguished tradition of leading its people to light in times of great suffering,” while acknowledging that the church “has been too long negligent on the most pressing subject of AIDS/HIV.” The clergy promised to “wage a war on fear and ignorance of

AIDS/HIV” through prevention and education programs, as well as “consciousness-

23 Ronald O. Valdisseri, Terry V. Aultman, and James W. Curran, “Community Planning: A National Strategy to Improve HIV Prevention Programs,” Journal of Community Health 20, no. 2 (April 1995): 87–100; CDC, National Center for Prevention Services, Division of Sexually Transmitted Diseases/HIV Prevention, “Guidelines for Health Education and Risk Reduction Activities,” wonder.cdc.gov, April 1, 1995, http://wonder.cdc.gov/wonder/prevguid/p0000389/p0000389.asp; Janet Wise reported findings from her study of attitudes among black church leaders, conducted at the Revival of the African American Faith Community for the Protection and Healing of AIDS in Statesville, North Carolina, an event modeled on the Black Church Week of Prayer. Wise did not indicate whether organizers of the Revival attended the Emory workshop, nor did she name the other cities represented there. Elsewhere, Pernessa Seele mentioned that the Black Church Week of Prayer model had been replicated in Boston, Birmingham, and Albequerque, but whether organizers from these cities attended the Emory training is also unclear. See Janet Marie Bell Wise, “Changing Clergy and Lay Leader Attitudes About HIV/AIDS: The Effectiveness of AIDS Education” (Ed.D., North Carolina State University, 1997); and The Balm in Gilead, “About The Balm in Gilead, Inc.,” Grant 09500543, Reel 7637, Ford Foundation Records.

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raising sermons about AIDS prevention and compassion for all, regardless of sexual orientation, drug dependency, or lifestyle choices.”24

The White House summit and declaration marked a significant improvement in black church leaders’ willingness to use their influence to combat HIV and AIDS, as well as The Balm in Gilead’s growing national influence. However, ministers’ desire to address HIV and AIDS from the pulpit would only take them so far; The Balm in Gilead also needed to train faith leaders on how to incorporate messages about the disease into their ministry. The Harlem Week of Prayer included educational workshops for clergy who wanted to develop AIDS programs at their churches, but the Day of Prayer’s much larger scale called for a different form of clergy education. Two years later, The Balm in

Gilead published Who Will Break the Silence?, a book of prayers and liturgies that outlined what “consciousness-raising” worship in black churches might look like in the context of HIV and AIDS.

Jesus Is Alive and Living with AIDS

As with the Harlem Week of Prayer, the Black Church Day of Prayer and Who

Will Break the Silence? stressed the power of prayer as an avenue for the “healing of

AIDS.” The Balm in Gilead’s programs framed prayer not as “the waving of a magic wand” that would bring an end to the devastation wrought by HIV and AIDS, but as an

24 W. Steve Lee, “Memo to , et Al.,” February 23, 1994, Digital Library, Clinton Presidential Library, http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/assets/storage/Research%20- %20Digital%20Library/rascosubject/Box%20003/r_612956-aids-1994-3.pdf; “The African American Clergy’s Declaration of War on HIV/AIDS,” February 28, 1994, Box 75, Folder 5, Gay Men’s Health Crisis Records, NYPL.

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integral part of an individual’s or community’s relationship with God, one that could bring “support, insight and guidance.” Through prayer, congregations could come to realize the ways that people living with AIDS had been marginalized within the community, or find the resolve to make AIDS services a part of the regular ministry.25

With Who Will Break the Silence?, The Balm in Gilead aimed to make the black church into a “safe space” for people with HIV and AIDS, as well as for gay people, who were closely identified with the disease. The book thus reflected the group’s anti-stigma approach to the epidemic. In a 1995 letter of support for The Balm in Gilead’s grant proposal to the Paul Rapoport Foundation, an anti-homophobia advocacy group, Colin

Robinson of Gay Men of African Descent praised the group for “help[ing] open many doors which had been closed to any possibility of healing discussions about homosexuality within the Black Church,” as well as for its “unique ability to attract ecumenical African American religious leadership,” which “has long been an pivotal point of consciousness change in African American communities.” Robinson’s organization had conducted workshops for the Harlem Week of Prayer; that same year the group presented sessions on black youth and HIV, and HIV prevention programs for black gay men.26

To translate the approach that Robinson described into a textual resource that could be easily used by churches around the country, The Balm in Gilead convened a

25 The Balm in Gilead, Who Will Break the Silence?: Liturgical Resources for the Healing of AIDS (New York: The Balm in Gilead, 1995), 12.

26 Gay Men of African Descent, “AIDS Institute Peer Initiative Monthly Report October 1995,” October 1995, Box 22, Folder 6, GMAD Records.

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group of eight men and women, referred to only as “the Prayer Group,” including people with AIDS, “biblical scholars, poets, musicians, heterosexuals, lesbian and gay persons” to write Who Will Break the Silence? The authors highlighted scripture that stressed

God’s universal love and Jesus’ advocacy of the poor and sick, thus reframing the church’s rejection of gay and HIV-positive members as sin, and turning the logic of

AIDS stigma in the church on its head. The book also included partial transcripts of the

Prayer Group’s exegetical conversations, which explained the group’s scriptural readings and legitimized their efforts by showing the authors’ deep knowledge of the Bible and church history. The transcripts also served a pedagogical function, “reveal[ing] some of the challenges, growth and healing experience by the Prayer Group,” similar to the experiences participating churches might find through their own participation in the Day of Prayer. Out of their Bible study and conversations, the group produced both a set of prayers and outlines for entire services showing that the black church could “break the silence” on AIDS, sexuality, and drug use.27

In her introduction to Who Will Break the Silence?, Pernessa Seele put the group’s work in the tradition of other “silence breakers” throughout history, from to , Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. She thus claimed the fight against HIV and AIDS as a black political issue, on par with earlier struggles against slavery, segregation, and disfranchisement. Others in the Prayer Group similarly tied their

27 The Prayer Group’s exegetical conversations were included in the original 1995 edition of Who Will Break the Silence?, but disappeared from the 2010-2012 edition. Otherwise, the prayers and liturgies in the two versions are almost identical. The Balm in Gilead, Who Will Break the Silence? (The Balm in Gilead, 2010-12), http://nationalweekofprayerforthehealingofaids.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/2013- NWPHA-E-Worship-Book.pdf; Balm in Gilead (1995), 13; Balm in Gilead (2010-12), 6.

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work to struggles throughout black history. Discussing a passage from Jeremiah, one discussant protested that the imagery of dance and praise in the verse seemed disconnected from the gravity of the epidemic, in which “babies are dying faster than they’re living now, and mothers are sicker than they’ve ever been.” Another member of the group pointed out that the roots of the church itself lay in another period of immense hardship, “in slavery times, times when women are being raped and used… we had to rejoice. The other option is death.”28

For the Prayer Group, the title of Who Will Break the Silence? carried multiple meanings. Silence could be an impediment to leveraging the church’s power and influence to address AIDS in the community when it meant “denial and ignorance and fear and isolation.” For the Prayer Group, the answer to the question came from Mark

1:29-39, in which, they summarized, “the disciples hunted for Jesus and brought Jesus back to all the people.” Just as the disciples had spread the Gospel throughout their known world, the Balm in Gilead could interpret the Gospel in the context of the AIDS epidemic for all people, regardless of the stigma of disease, sexuality, or addiction.

However, silence could also carry a positive connotation and function of “the listening silence.” This “active silence” could mean listening to others in the congregation, as with the testimony of people with HIV and AIDS, or it could be the silence of meditation and prayer. In this context, the title could refer to the end of

28 Balm in Gilead (1995), 3, 86-87.

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reflective prayer, after which churches and their members would translate the “Spirit of

God” they received into action against the epidemic.29

Who Will Break the Silence? includes two prayers based on Genesis 9:8-17, in which God sets a rainbow in the sky after the Great Flood to symbolize his covenant with

Noah and “every living creature.” Here, the rainbow represents hope in a time of great hardship, calling on the congregation to acknowledge the severity of the epidemic, and to accept the church’s gay members. In one prayer, the pastor recites, “In the midst of the storms of our lives, God sets a rainbow,” and then in the next line, “In the midst of the pandemic of HIV and AIDS, God sets a rainbow.” The parallel between “the storms of our lives” and the pandemic establishes the disease as a problem for the entire congregation, regardless of individuals’ HIV status. At the end of the prayer, the entire group responds, “We remember God’s covenant with all,” underscoring the theme of an inclusive church. In the second prayer, “For Safe Space,” congregants ask the “God of the healthy and God of the sick,… God of the gay and God of the straight,… God of the sober and God of the addicted,” for an end to silence, “so that the healing of HIV and

AIDS may begin.” The “safe space” for which the prayer asks is one “free from our judgments of others and ourselves,” in which people are “free to live without requiring lies of each other.” The rainbow, as a symbol of gay culture since the 1970s, also represents the acceptance of gay congregants. One of the sample services outlined in Who

Will Break the Silence? instructs church leaders to distribute rainbow ribbons or stickers for everyone in attendance to wear, and to hang a rainbow banner at the front of the

29 Balm in Gilead (1995), 13, 69.

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sanctuary. The significance of incorporating a symbol of gay identity so thoroughly into the service could not have been lost on the Prayer Group; two members noted the importance of the rainbow as a symbol for “our community.” However, they agreed that the rainbow also symbolized inclusiveness, or “the universality of God’s care.” Placed both at the beginning of the sample service, the rainbow and the covenant–with “all of the earth, all creatures, with no exceptions”–would provide a “spiritual foundation” for the church’s AIDS ministry.30

The authors of Who Will Break the Silence? carried forward the theme of healing through prayer. They saw prayer as a “fulcrum” around which “demons” of denial, homophobia, and judgment could be cast out from the community. Thus, “Prayer of a

Black Gay Christian”:

God, I’m tired of our ways being hidden, of our rights being disregarded. You may know me and love me but my church is hiding the truth. God, you know that I am gay, but my church doesn’t want to admit it, and I’m tired of waiting. The youth are fainting; ignored, we feel powerless, and we are weary. Not only does out strength need to be renewed, God, we need some changes. We need some changes now.

In the conversation about Isaiah 40:21-31 that produced “Prayer for a Black Gay

Christian,” the Prayer Group addressed the sense of powerlessness among people who had been “denied membership, denied access, denied leadership roles, denied period” in the church, and the “transference” through which such people might perceive rejection from the church as rejection from God. However, in the context of the epidemic, black

30 Balm in Gilead (1995), 70-71; Balm in Gilead (2010-12), 11, 13.

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gays and others affected by HIV in the church were “learning new ways to move beyond that powerlessness into being powerful, and giving voice is one of them.”31

The Prayer Group also offered prayers that framed HIV and AIDS as an illness that had not just infected individuals, but the entire church, the community as a whole– even Christ himself. While prayers such as “Personal Prayer in the Midst of a Church

Living with AIDS” invited congregants to meditate on their individual role in creating a

“safe place” within the church, they also constructed a sense of collective struggle against the epidemic. People with AIDS could be less easily ostracized from a church understood to be “living with” the disease. On the other hand, “A Prayer to Celebrate Healing” highlighted specific people with AIDS, putting them in a biblical context: “O God of

Abraham, Sarah and Hagar/O God of Jesus and Mary Magdalene/O God of Arthur Ashe and Magic Johnson/O God of Mother Hale and her children.” The prayer later reinforced the sense of unity and inclusion of those who had been stigmatized, thanking God for

“the privilege of coming before your throne as family, not divided between those who are sick and those who are well, not divided between those who are addicted and those who are recovering, not divided between straight and gay.”32

One liturgy featured a series of short skits demonstrating denial of the severity of the epidemic among African Americans. Characters dismissed grim statistics as “another racist plot to make us look bad,” eschewed condoms, or shifted the blame for AIDS and other community problems onto drug dealers. In each case, a member of the congregation

31 Balm in Gilead (1995), 82-84.

32 Balm in Gilead (2010-12), 18, 27.

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was to interrupt their dialogue by walking across the altar, holding a sign that read, “Jesus is Alive and Living with AIDS.” The Prayer Group wrote in the introduction to Who Will

Break the Silence? that the image of a little girl with such a sign running to the front of the sanctuary had come to them during their prayer and discussion, an example of the

“ways in which we heard the Spirit of God speak to our group.” The Prayer Group might have reasoned that they could soften such a controversial message, whether interpreted to mean the literal Christ himself or the church as his living embodiment, by ascribing it to a divine revelation.33

Despite the rather radical content of Who Will Break the Silence?, the book’s format, with prayers presented both individually and as part of complete services, held open the possibility that churches would avoid more controversial passages. The ways that churches received and used Who Will Break the Silence? is difficult to measure.

However, as of 2013, the book had been sent to around 36,000 individual congregations.

Furthermore, although the exegetical conversations were dropped from the 2010 edition of Who Will Break the Silence?, the prayers and services remain almost entirely unchanged, suggesting that they have not met with significant opposition from participating churches.34

In the middle of the 1990s, a new class of HIV drugs radically altered the meaning of HIV infection, particularly in the United States and other countries where a relatively high proportion of people with HIV and AIDS could afford the expensive

33 Balm in Gilead (1995), 12-13; Balm in Gilead (2010-12), 54.

34 Cary Goodman, Balm in Gilead executive administrator, e-mail to author, August 12, 2013.

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medications. As we will see in the next chapter, these new drugs, called protease inhibitors, contributed to the waning of the most visible forms of AIDS activism in the

United States. As the new drugs took some of the urgency out of domestic activism, some turned their attention abroad to the epidemic raging in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, the second Clinton administration’s efforts to develop diplomatic and trade relationships with African nations brought policymakers’ attention to AIDS in Africa.

Again, as we will see, the advent of protease inhibitors and the Clinton administration’s desire for free trade policies intersected to put “global AIDS” at the front and center of national conversations about the disease. Amid this growing interest, Seele and The Balm in Gilead leveraged their experience working with black churches in the United States to broaden their efforts “from the villages of Harlem to the villages of Africa.” As they modified programs to fit both the religious beliefs of African churches and the reality of the epidemic there, Seele and The Balm in Gilead nevertheless based their claim on the essential similarity of people of African descent all over the world.35

Black People Do Black Church All Over the World

In 2001, The Balm in Gilead secured a cooperative agreement with CDC to replicate its training and education in sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic raged nearly out of control. Over the next five years, the organization worked with faith leaders in Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe to develop HIV prevention programs and AIDS services through the countries’ churches and mosques. The Balm in

35 The Balm in Gilead, Final Report: Cooperative Agreement #U62/CCU220997- 03-3 (New York: The Balm in Gilead, September 2005), The Balm in Gilead office files.

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Gilead’s international effort grew in part from Pernessa Seele’s belief that religious experience united black people around the world. As early as 1995, in an essay in

Anglican Theological Review, Seele framed HIV among African Americans as part of the larger epidemic within the “African global community.” The epidemic had reached crisis proportions among black people worldwide because “African peoples, regardless of nationality,” by and large suffered from “sub-standard living conditions under which sickness and disease are more apt to spread,” lack of health care, and inadequate education. She argued that, sexual contact being the primary mode of transmission among

African and African-descended peoples, “we must be able to talk about sex with our children and face realities concerning their level of sexual activity… examine our own sexual behaviors and put to rest the vestiges of sexual myths.” At the same time that she highlighted the common causes of epidemic HIV among black people around the world,

Seele pointed to a solution. The church, as “the cornerstone of the African global community” and “the only institution that has the ability to mobilize the masses and disseminate appropriate information,” the church would have to use its power to educate people about HIV transmission and provide comfort and care to those who had already become infected. Quoting the hymn from which her organization took its name, she concluded that, if religious leaders accepted their role in fighting the AIDS epidemic, the church could “indeed be the balm ‘that heals the sin-sick soul.’”36

At the same time, The Balm in Gilead’s growing profile attracted attention from around the African Diaspora. In a report submitted to the Ford Foundation in 1998, the

36 Pernessa Seele, “The Church’s Role in HIV/AIDS Prevention,” Anglican Theological Review 77, no. 4 (1995): 550.

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organization reported receiving requests for assistance in establishing church-based HIV prevention programs from throughout Africa and the Caribbean. The Balm in Gilead planned to apply for funds the following year to develop relationships with groups abroad, in part through a “state-of-the-art” website, and to plan a series of meetings for black religious leaders from around the world.37

Seele’s interest in taking The Balm in Gilead overseas intersected with a broader shift in interest toward “global AIDS” in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In his address for World AIDS Day in 1998, President Bill Clinton highlighted the number of children orphaned by AIDS worldwide, and commissioned Sandra Thurman, his AIDS policy advisor, to undertake a fact-finding mission to research the impact of the epidemic on sub-Saharan Africa. In her report, Thurman told the White House that AIDS had taken on the region’s “fragile health care systems,” including traditional support networks based on family and village ties. She also stressed the disease’s potential to wipe out “decades of progress on a host of development objectives,” including life expectancy and professional development. Moreover, the prevalence of HIV among military officers and government officials threatened to undermine political stability in the region, making

AIDS a security concern as well as a public health issue. Finally, sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic was already “entrenched,” portended developments elsewhere,

37 The Balm in Gilead, “Programmatic Three Year Strategic Plan, 1998-2000,” Grant 09601141, Reel 8074, Ford Foundation Records.

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particularly and the post-Soviet republics of Eastern Europe and Central , where HIV was also rapidly spreading.38

The Balm in Gilead also received federal support under President George W.

Bush, who sought to expand the role of faith-based organizations in providing social services as part of his “compassionate conservative” platform. His President’s

Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a $15 billion, five-year initiative for HIV treatment and prevention targeted to sub-Saharan Africa, drew criticism for allegedly funding evangelical Christian organizations with little experience in either Africa or

AIDS prevention. However, Pernessa Seele credits President Bush for “really help[ing] the world understand why faith was important to the AIDS epidemic.” Her admiration was mutual; Bush invited her to join First Lady Laura Bush during the 2006 State of the

Union address, during which he lauded Seele for her organization’s work.39

38 Sandy Thurman, “Report on the Presidential Mission on Children Orphaned by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa: Findings and Plan of Action,” July 19, 1999, Digital Library, Clinton Presidential Library, http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/assets/storage/Research - Digital Library/Reed- Subject/98/647386-aids-policy-1.pdf.

39 Amy E. Black, Douglas L. Koopman, and David K. Ryden, Of Little Faith: The Politics of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiatives (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004); Seele interview; Teresa Lyles Holmes, “In State of the Union, President Bush Pledges to Work with African American Churches to Address HIV/AIDS,” Balm in Gilead press release, February 1, 2006, cached by Wayback Machine February 7, 2006, http://web.archive.org/web/20060207225735/http://www.balmingilead.org/press/releases/ release_state_union.asp. The Supreme Court of the United States struck down some of PEPFAR’s more controversial requirements in the 2013 with a 6-2 decision in Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International. See Elias Groll, “The Public Health Trends Behind the Supreme Court’s PEPFAR Decision,” Foreign Policy Blogs, June 20, 2013. http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/20/the_public_health_trends_behind_the_su preme_court_pepfar_decision.

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In building the new Africa HIV/AIDS Faith Initiative, The Balm in Gilead used models they had developed for African Americans. From their perspective, stigma around the disease, along with “health beliefs and practices in general,” were similar enough that

“the African American community provided a frame that could definitely be used in an

African context.” The groups, they believed, shared a deep investment in spiritual beliefs and religious institutions, as well as linked histories of “slavery, apartheid, colonialism, racism, health disparities, poverty and now the pandemic of AIDS.” African churches in sub-Saharan Africa cut across social lines to reach a large number of people representing a cross-section of society, just as they did “within Black communities globally.” Like their counterparts in the United States, black African churches and faith leaders established the moral values and social norms for their communities, positioning them to influence both the behaviors that spread the virus from person to person, and the stigmatizing attitudes about HIV that allowed people to think of AIDS as a problem only of the abject.40

In Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, The Balm in Gilead representatives planned to bring leaders from different denominations together to form national offices that would coordinate faith-based AIDS efforts in their respective countries. The leaders of The Balm in Gilead worried that, without national direction,

“local faith-based HIV programs [would] become fragmented efforts that are often stigmatized for their work.” Just as they had gained endorsements of major black churches in the United States, The Balm in Gilead worked to establish an HIV/AIDS

40 The Balm in Gilead. Final Report.

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desk in the national offices of the major denominations in all five countries. By winning support from national religious leaders, they argued, the organization could “establish a spiritual consciousness that every local church or mosque would become involved in some type of AIDS programming because it is the right (spiritual) thing to do.” To challenge popular belief in each country that AIDS represented a person’s sinful behavior, they tried to substitute an alternative morality, that ostracizing people with the disease or ignoring the epidemic meant abrogating one’s religious duty. Moreover, national faith leaders who had been trained by The Balm in Gilead “to speak intelligently about HIV disease issues… not from a place of fear and stigma, but from a place of compassion and facts” could in turn train local priests and imams, magnifying the organization’s efforts throughout each country. Using this “train-the-trainer” model, The

Balm in Gilead could help deliver information about AIDS to a large number of people using relatively few resources.41

In early 2002, The Balm in Gilead convened representatives from the governing national bodies of major religious denominations in each of the five countries for a conference in Tarrytown, New York, twenty miles north of Manhattan. African Catholic,

Protestant, and Muslim leaders met with the president of the Caribbean Council of

Churches, officials from leading African American denominations, and representatives from CDC and the Gates Foundation to discuss the impact of AIDS in their home countries, and develop strategies for addressing the epidemic based on conditions on the

41 The Balm in Gilead, Final Report. For more on the “train-the-trainer” public health educational model, see Rebecca A. Orfaly et al, “Train-the-trainer as an Educational Model in Public Health Preparedness.” Journal of Public Health Management Practice (November 2005): S123–S127.

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ground. The Balm in Gilead also hoped to secure the cooperation of their African guests, who would return to the governing bodies of each denomination to cement their partnership in the Faith Initiative.42

Following the Tarrytown meeting, The Balm in Gilead sent a delegation that

April to tour the five Faith Initiative countries, assessing both existing programs and each denominational office’s capacity for future initiatives. According to a travelogue by

Aisha Satterwhite posted on The Balm in Gilead’s website, during the trip Pernessa Seele highlighted the connections between African Americans and Africans. At a worship service in Youpougon, Côte d'Ivoire, Seele told the congregation:

I love the worship experience of Black people. We are joined by our faith, our belief in God, and by our praise. We praise God alike. We sing alike. Even though we are singing in different languages, we are saying the same things. Black people do Black church all over the world.

She compared the present experience with HIV and AIDS to the scourge of slavery in the past, recounting the role that the African Methodist Episcopal Church had played in the lives of African Americans. Although Seele spoke through a translator, Satterwhite wrote, “the congregations were incredibly responsive and understanding often before the translation was even completed” because they “felt what Pernessa was saying” and understood that, “just like in days of old, the church must be at the forefront in the response to HIV/AIDS.”43

42 The Balm in Gilead, Final Report.

43 Aisha Satterwhite, “Together Let’s Fight against AIDS [Côte d’Ivoire],” Balm in Gilead, cached by Wayback Machine December 6, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20021206150915/http://www.balmingilead.org/special_featur e/journey/journey_1.asp.

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In Nigeria, where The Balm aimed to bring Christians and Muslims together to address the country’s emerging AIDS epidemic, Seele similarly drew parallels between black communities in the United States and those in Africa: "Harlem and any other black community in the U.S. looks just like Nigeria. There is a church on every corner.” She referred to herself as an “Ibo woman,” highlighting her own likely ancestral ties to the country, where Ibo-speaking people had been enslaved centuries earlier before being shipped to colonies across the Atlantic, including Seele’s birthplace the South Carolina

Lowcountry. Despite the separation, of time and space between “the African American faith community [and] their brothers and sisters in Nigeria,” Seele insisted that they could come together to fight HIV and AIDS through the church, because even though “We don't know each other, we don't speak the same languages,… we love the Lord.” The

Nigerian hosts also appeared to share Seele’s sense of kinship with their visitors from the

United States. Satterwhite reported that at an Anglican reception in Lagos, “throughout the singing and the speech-making, the phrase ‘welcome home’ was often heard.”44

Seele also framed the epidemic as a singular challenge to black communities around the globe, stemming from similar forms of oppression experienced by people of

African descent, whether in Nigeria, Negril, or New York. “This epidemic is 100% preventable and 100% out of control in black communities everywhere,” she lamented.

Perhaps with a mind to those who denied reports of the epidemic as misinformation, she continued: “There is nothing wrong with us. There are conditions we've been living with–

44 Aisha Satterwhite, “We Cannot Fold Our Hands [Nigeria],” Balm in Gilead, cached by Wayback Machine December 6, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20040218031628/http://www.balmingilead.org/special_featur e/journey/nigeria_1.asp.

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poverty, denial, miseducation, no education, limited resources, and no resources–that help keep this disease spreading.” She also warned audiences that black people the world over had “confused our theological and religious beliefs with . HIV/AIDS will not be stopped by our beliefs. We respect these beliefs, but this will not save our brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers. Education will.”45

At the end of the delegation's visit to Côte d'Ivoire, Methodist, Catholic, and

Pentecostal leaders held a press conference with the Balm in Gilead to announce their intent to address the epidemic through their ministry. To signify their intent, they signed

“The Cote d'Ivoirean Clergy's Declaration of War on HIV/AIDS,” a document almost identical to “The African American Clergy's Declaration of War on HIV/AIDS” signed at the White House in 1994. Aside from switching out statistics on AIDS among African

Americans for those on the epidemic in Côte d'Ivoire, the second document eliminated references to “sexual orientation” and “drug dependency,” such that the clergy vowed to preach consciousness-raising sermons about AIDS prevention and compassion for all, regardless of lifestyle choices.” The change reflects the nature of AIDS in Africa, where heterosexual sex accounts for much more HIV transmission than it does in the United

States, as well as the African churches’ conservative views on homosexuality.46

45 Satterwhite, “We Cannot Fold Our Hands”.

46 Satterwhite, “Together,” italics added; Public health data on HIV transmission, which relies on reported behavior, also likely under represent the extent of homosexual transmission in Africa because of the verboten nature of gay life there. For critiques of scientific knowledge and discourse about patterns of HIV transmission in Africa, see Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS, (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Globalizing AIDS, (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2002).

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At Chishawasha Seminary outside of Harare, Dr. Randall Bailey of Atlanta's

Interdenominational Theological Center led students in a bible study centered on scripture in the context of AIDS. He told students, “Our theology silences us and doesn't allow us to acknowledge that we have options” in using biblical principles to stem the rising tide of the epidemic. Reversing the moral stigma and judgment of people with

AIDS back onto the church, he continued, “Abandoning people is a sin. We’ve missed

God if we turn our backs on people.” He implored the seminarians to advocate for people with AIDS, invoking Jesus’ example of “being in solidarity with those whom no one wants to be in solidarity with.” A priest at St. Leo’s Church in Lagos, Nigeria conveyed a similar message in his sermon, referencing Matthew 25:40 as he chastised those who would ignore or condemn people with HIV and AIDS. “That person who is infected could be Jesus,” he preached, “Show them hatred, ridicule, and contempt, and you are doing it to Jesus.”47

The trip also highlighted the vulnerable position of women and youth in the epidemic, as well as their resilience. Each stop included a church where women and youth performed to the delight of the Faith Initiative team, who praised their “warm singing and vibrant dancing.” The Balm in Gilead delegates also visited organizations tasked with helping women and children left widowed or orphaned by the epidemic, and heard the stories of women left with nothing when husbands died of AIDS and in-laws seized their possessions and, often, their children as well. At a consultation in Tanzania,

47 Satterwhite, “Making a Way Out of No Way [Zimbabwe],” Balm in Gilead, cached by Wayback Machine December 6, 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20021206112824/http://www.balmingilead.org/special_featu re/journey/zimbabwe_1.asp.

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South African Reverend Maake Jonathan Masongo lamented the lack of women and youth present. “How can we discuss breaking the silence,” he asked, “when those who are being silenced aren't even at this forum?”48

The Balm in Gilead built on the relationships forged at the Tarrytown meeting and through the delegation to Africa, establishing HIV/AIDS coordinating offices in the headquarters of participating faiths in each country. Office staff in each country would oversee their denominations and dioceses AIDS awareness, testing, and home care programs, connecting The Balm in Gilead to local churches and mosques throughout the five Faith Initiative countries. Using funds from the CDC contract, they hired a director, program coordinator, and program evaluator for each office, and in March 2003 brought them all to New York City for a six-week training course in the skills necessary to run a public health non-profit organization, including program development, strategic planning, and grant writing. During the course, trainees traveled down to Washington DC to meet with members of Congress and administration officials, promoting the value of faith- based organizations in the fight against AIDS. As Dr. Saleem Farag of Zimbabwe told

American policymakers during the visit, “I have seen NGOs come and go, and the government doing nothing. But the faith community has stayed.”49

48 Aisha Satterwhite, “Victory is Certain If We Join Hands Together [Tanzania],” Balm in Gilead, cached by Wayback Machine December 6, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20021206112439/http://www.balmingilead.org/special_featur e/journey/tanzania_1.asp; Satterwhite, “Making a Way”.

49 AIDS Action, “Religious and Faith Community Leaders from Five African Countries Visit D.C.,” aidsaction.org, cached by Wayback Machine July 6, 2003, http://web.archive.org/web/20030624033036/http://www.aidsaction.org/communications/ articles/balm_in_gilead/index.htm.

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The Balm in Gilead’s International HIV/AIDS Faith Advisory Board, composed of religious representatives from each of the five African countries plus the United States, reframed religious morality not in terms of proscriptions on individuals’ sexual behaviors, but in terms of the church’s mission of advocacy for social and political justice. “A Theological Call to Action,” a manifesto for the Africa Initiative released after the board’s first meeting in 2004, drew together scripture from both the Bible and the

Qu’ran to support a religious intervention against AIDS. In “Call to Action,” the board pointed to structural and systemic factors perpetuating the epidemic, including “poverty and migratory patterns relating to economic and political conditions,… famine and war, as well as the search for a better quality of life.” However, they noted, faith leaders tended to focus more on individual actions than the large-scale processes that provided the context for personal choice. Although “social choices should not lead persons to sin,” they argued, “another religious and moral… imperative exists in the promotion of social conditions which support persons in making responsible choices.” Without jettisoning faith leaders’ role as moral guides for their congregations, the board called on pastors and imams to address the social determinants of health perpetuating the epidemic as part of their moral and ethical calling.50

During the CDC funding period, The Balm in Gilead also helped revise, reprint, and distribute Helpers for a Healing Community, a pastoral care manual for HIV and

AIDS originally published in 1994 by Map International, a Christian organization

50 The International HIV/AIDS Faith Advisory Board of The Balm in Gilead, “A Theological Call to Action,” Balm in Gilead, cached by Wayback Machine September 5, 2004, http://www.balmingilead.org/programs/africa2004/images/white_paper_english.pdf.

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focused on improving the health of people living in poverty worldwide. The book was intended to help African Christian ministers address the epidemic among their congregations by providing a scriptural and theological framework for pastoral care. As in Who Will Break the Silence?, Helpers stressed the church’s moral obligation to provide for the sick and suffering, despite the tremendous stigma of AIDS. The book offered a way for pastors and lay counselors to “re-read the biblical story, not as a source of divine punishment, but as a source of sacred healing, in light of HIV/AIDS.” According to

Helpers, too many church leaders and congregations had focused on portions of the

Bible, such as Deuteronomy and Leviticus in the Old Testament, which presented disease as a punishment for sin. The authors proposed that the New Testament gospels of

Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which describe Jesus’ ministry to the ill, offered more appropriate resources for pastors and lay leaders ministering to people with AIDS.

Helpers repeatedly pointed to Jesus Christ’s injunction to show kindness and compassion to “the least of these” as an instruction for churches to counsel and care for people with

HIV and AIDS.51

Echoing the way that Who Will Break the Silence? redefined AIDS as a disease of the entire church, Helpers framed stigma and discrimination against people with AIDS as illnesses of which the church itself needed to be healed. The authors aimed to challenge pastoral counselors to consider whether “our own illnesses of stigmatization and

51 Map International and The Balm in Gilead, Helpers for a Healing Community: A Pastoral Counseling Manual for HIV/AIDS, 3rd ed. (Nairobi, Kenya: Map International, 2004), http://www.balmingilead.org/downloads/resources/Helpers For A Healing Community - Pastoral Counseling Manual - Intro -Table of Contents-Parts 1-2-3- 4.pdf.

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discrimination around HIV/AIDS define us as ‘affected,’” framing pastoral counseling itself as a process of healing for the church as a whole.52

The authors of Helpers also framed AIDS ministry as the expression of traditional

African values in a Christian context. Information, such as the knowledge that AIDS was not a divine punishment, would not by itself change behavior, but might impel churches to include people with HIV and AIDS in their fellowship, when delivered in a context that tapped in to common values. The authors presented the value of community, the “key to understanding the African continent and Diaspora view of being” as one framework through which they could deliver information about AIDS. “Communal life,” they wrote,

“is a single entity, the lung through which we breathe, filled with religious and moral obligation, and without which every person ceases to be.” They listed examples, mixing

African proverbs, such as the Zulu saying, “a person is a person because of people” with quotes from Sojourner Truth–“I feel the power of a nation within me”–and Martin Luther

King Jr.–“all people are interdependent.” For the authors, such expressions of communal values were “key to understanding the African continent an Diaspora view of being.” The

“mutual and reciprocal presence” of African tradition, captured in the Bantu word ubuntu, was also compatible with Christian tradition, which “broadly defined, professes to be a community of presence.” In this context, “our willingness to be present with those who suffer and are violated, who are oppressed and demeaned,” represented “a form of the Christian commitment to be present to one another in and out of pain, through sickness and in health, from this life to the next.” AIDS ministry thus lay at the

52 Map International and The Balm in Gilead.

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intersection of African communal tradition and Christian community, doubly compelling pastoral counselors to minister to those with HIV and AIDS.53

The authors of Helpers also pointed to biblical prophets as people who had been

“enabled to see spiritual realities that other could not or would not see.” Through such stories, the book offered Helpers a way to see themselves as spiritual leaders who could reveal the truth of God’s ministry to those who ostracized and alienated people with HIV and AIDS. If a congregation took issue with AIDS ministry, the pastor or lay counselor could take comfort in seeing their work as of a piece with that of Moses, Jeremiah, and

Deborah, each of whom had been a “mouthpiece for God” despite having “no special genius, elite status, or innate talent.” A Helper should also “look to the prophetic model of Jesus and his disciples… in the execution of his/her ministerial duties.” Pastoral counselors, embodying the role of prophet, should not only speak the word of God, but also act, taking care of social and medical, as well as spiritual, needs both “among their own people and beyond the confines of their fellowship.”54

Although the authors of Helpers encouraged pastors to discuss “God’s beautiful gift of love and sexuality,” they considered heterosexual sex within marriage to be the only form of sexuality worthy of approval. Whereas Who Will Break the Silence? marshaled scriptural resources to encourage black churches to accept gay parishioners, the authors of Helpers avoided any direct mention of homosexuality. The book referred obliquely to those who had contracted HIV through “ungodly acts,” including sex with an

53 Map International and The Balm in Gilead.

54 Map International and The Balm in Gilead.

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HIV-positive man or woman, without differentiating among different sexual activities that might expose a person to the virus. Instead, the authors advised that the goal of pastoral counseling for people with HIV should be to achieve repentance and redemption, and to help people avoid risky behaviors in the future. The book offered no specific advice on how to counsel men who had contracted HIV through sex with other men, or how to help gay men reduce their risk for HIV and AIDS. Moreover, even as Helpers instructed, “healing, not condemnation, is the goal of pastoral counseling,” the guide distinguished the innocent infected from those who had contracted the virus through

“irresponsible behavior.” Repeated references to Matthew 25:40, which instructs

Christians “to offer sensitive and compassionate help…, ‘to the least of these,’ [italics in original],” establishing that people with HIV, or at least those who had contracted the virus through sinful living, represented the lowest of God’s creatures.

In Africa, The Balm in Gilead faced some of the same challenges in mobilizing churches and mosques against HIV and AIDS as in the United States. Moral and theological conservatism, particularly around “human sexuality, responsibility, vulnerability and mortality,” led Christians and Muslims alike to see AIDS as divine punishment for violating the laws of God or Allah. In all five countries, The Balm in

Gilead found a general lack of awareness about AIDS; in Zimbabwe in particular, they found a “tremendous lack of information regarding AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases and basic human anatomy.” Civil war broke out in Côte d’Ivoire within months of the delegation’s 2002 visit, leading to a travel warning for Americans and closure of the CDC country office, crippling efforts there to implement a work plan. Nevertheless,

The Balm in Gilead pointed to the formation of the Coalition of Religions Against AIDS

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of Côte d’Ivoire (CORAS-CI) as evidence of some success. More importantly, however, lack of funding crippled The Balm in Gilead’s efforts. The initial contract had been small, just $500,000 to build AIDS education and prevention systems in five countries, including staffing the national offices. In a final report to CDC in 2005, the group lamented that only CDC-Tanzania had continued its cooperative agreement with The

Balm in Gilead. Without funding to support each national HIV/AIDS office and its staff, they reported, “the successes of this initiative are slowly disappearing.”55

Today, The Balm in Gilead maintains an office in Dar es Salaam, which coordinates the organization’s ongoing efforts to address the AIDS epidemic there through the country’s churches and mosques. Seele regrets, with some bitterness, that the other four countries “totally ignored the vast amount of money and tremendous work that had been put in and said, ‘Nah, we’re going to do something else,’ because they could.”

The CDC office in Côte d'Ivoire, for one, elected to focus efforts on HIV among sex workers, which would have been difficult, if not impossible, to do through the country’s churches and mosques. Nevertheless, Seele maintains, “when you see these particular countries talking about interfaith work around health issues, it really began with The

Balm in Gilead.”56

As The Balm in Gilead worked through the black church in the United States to combat the spread of HIV among African Americans, they also expanded the boundaries

55 The Balm in Gilead, “Final Report.”

56 Seele interview.

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of African American identity through the resources they offered to black churches in the

United States, including gay-affirming prayers and scriptural readings. Turning to the fight against HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, Balm in Gilead also reconfigured the place of African Americans within the African Diaspora, highlighting connections between the epidemic in black America and the one in the “AIDS Belt” of sub-Saharan

Africa, as well as the potential for churches to help turn the tide of new infections in both places. In so doing, the group promoted a notion of essential blackness, arguing to federal funders and faith partners in the United States as well as in Africa that interventions would work in Harare as they had in Harlem. Government funders had their own interests in promoting the organization’s work, and in global AIDS more generally, framing the pandemic alternately as an international security concern and an opportunity to demonstrate the efficacy of compassionate conservatism and faith-based social programs on the world stage. At the same time, with the Africa HIV/AIDS Faith Initiative, The

Balm in Gilead claimed Africa as a site for humanitarian intervention by African

Americans, as opposed to the source of pride that newly independent African nations had offered to many African Americans in the previous decades of postwar decolonization.

While The Balm in Gilead couched their international work in the salience of ancestral ties among people throughout the African Diaspora, others offered alternative sources of affinity in the fight against global AIDS. As part of a transnational movement for HIV treatment access throughout the developing world, beginning in the late 1990s

ACT UP Philadelphia based their activism on class rather than race. While the group had made a point since the middle of the decade to recruit new members from the city’s working class and poor black communities, they based their activism on behalf of people

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in sub-Saharan Africa not on common ancestry, but on a shared membership in a global underclass, connecting the struggles of mostly poor African Americans to those of

Africans for whom new, expensive life-saving medications remained far out of reach.

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CHAPTER 5

“STOP MEDICAL APARTHEID FROM PHILADELPHIA TO SOUTH AFRICA”: ACT UP PHILADELPHIA AND GLOBAL TREATMENT ACCESS

On April 16, 2000, over 10,000 anti-globalization activists gathered in

Washington, DC for “A16,” a massive demonstration timed to coincide with meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Those who took to the streets of the nation’s capital saw the march and sit-ins as a follow-up to the “Battle of ” six months earlier at the meeting of the World Trade Organization, which turned violent when police clashed with protestors, resulting in millions of dollars in property damage and hundreds of arrests. Both demonstrations targeted meetings of international financial organizations. Their policies, the protestors argued, enabled multi-national corporations and global business conglomerates to exploit human and material resources of developing countries, and to further enrich the world’s wealthiest people and nations.1

The A16 protestors included a contingent of over 1,000 ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) activists from Philadelphia. Most were, by the group’s own account,

African American and poor, many of the, recovering from drug or alcohol addiction and infected with HIV. Among them was John Bell, a black, HIV-positive recovering drug addict who had been a member of ACT UP Philadelphia since 1997. He marched alongside Asia Russell, a white woman who had joined the group in the early 1990s as a teenager. As they had at the WTO meeting in Seattle, protestors occupied key

1 Michael J. Bayly, “A16,” Faces of Resistance, March 2006, http://www.cpinternet.com/~mbayly/facesofresistance3.htm.

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intersections to disrupt traffic and delay the IMF and World Bank meetings. Asia Russell told Darrell Moen, a Japanese-American anthropologist documenting the demonstration with his video camera, that ACT UP Philadelphia was there “locking down to a giant image of the glutton IMF… to call for unconditional debt relief to save the lives of people living in poverty who are being killed by the policies of the IMF.” Both the IMF and

World Bank required debtor nations, particularly in Africa, to adopt strict fiscal austerity measures in order to receive loans. This diverted funds away from education and health care, a policy known as “structural adjustment.” When combined with the exorbitant price of medications for HIV and AIDS-related opportunistic infections, structural adjustment policies put treatment out of reach for the majority of people with HIV/AIDS worldwide. As another ACT UP demonstrator explained, “I’m fortunate to have contracted AIDS here in America where I have access to the medication. But what about the people who don’t?”2

By the end of the 1990s, most chapters of the once-powerful AIDS activist group

ACT UP had disbanded. At its height, the founding New York chapter had drawn crowds in the hundreds to its weekly meetings. By 1997 attendance had dwindled to a tenth of that size. ACT UP Philadelphia, on the other hand, grew in size through the late 1990s and early 2000s, mostly by recruiting poor people of color affected by HIV and AIDS, and had replaced ACT UP/NY at the head of the movement. During this time, remaining

ACT UP chapters became increasingly involved in a movement for affordable HIV/AIDS treatment in the developing world. As part of a larger movement of global treatment

2 Darrell Moen, video transcript, “Breaking the Bank: Mobilization for Global Justice,” May 2000, http://dgmoen.net/blog/free4alll/video_trans/025.pdf.

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activists, ACT UP Philadelphia’s ability to mobilize large numbers of people–many of them HIV-positive African Americans–for protest actions proved decisive in winning victories for global treatment access. On its face, the story seems improbable. Why would mostly poor, HIV-positive Philadelphians–many of them black–bother protesting the

International Monetary Fund when they themselves faced their own daily struggles to stay clean, find housing, and get medications?

ACT UP Philadelphia used political education through teach-ins and workshops to organize people from the city’s impoverished, predominantly black neighborhoods to advocate for access to health care and HIV prevention in their communities. Locally and regionally, the group opposed policy schemes that seemed to favor corporate profits over patient health, including Pennsylvania’s switch to Medicaid managed care and the privatization of medical care in New Jersey state prisons. At the same time, they challenged global trade and financial institutions that, they argued, exacerbated the

African AIDS epidemic by putting the interests of First World lenders and multinational pharmaceutical companies ahead of sound public health practice. ACT UP Philadelphia thus “linked the local to the global,” framing these campaigns as part of the same fight against rising economic inequality and public policy that strengthened private industry at the expense of social welfare, even as they co-opted the language and technological infrastructure of a globalized business and political culture.

The campaign for global access to HIV treatment won remarkable successes;

ACT UP Philadelphia takes at least partial credit for George W. Bush’s Presidential

Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a massive funding package for the fight against HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, although the program only partially

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fulfilled the goals of global treatment activists. African Americans in ACT Philadelphia located themselves, through activism, as part of a global community of people with AIDS within a transnational underclass of peoples among whom the spread of HIV was a function of structural inequalities that mapped onto the global color line. By emphasizing the ways that marginalization grounded in class as well as in race perpetuated the epidemic “from South Africa to Philadelphia,” they reframed their affinity with sub-

Saharan Africans not so much in terms of diasporic identity, but in a shared relationship to systems of global political and commercial power.

ACT UP Philadelphia Still Does

From 1987 to 1993, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) combined direct action protest tactics with savvy policy work to focus public attention on the AIDS epidemic and to secure new, more effective treatments for people living with the disease.

Thanks to its dramatic tactics and some remarkable successes, ACT UP came to represent the most visible example of AIDS activism in the United States. The group comprised more a loose conglomerate of local affiliates than an organized network, although chapters sometimes worked together on large regional or national campaigns, sharing tactics, rhetoric, and even a certain “uniform” of white shirt, jeans, and army boots.3

ACT UP proved most successful at achieving its goal of “drugs into bodies.”

When the group formed in 1987, only one drug—AZT—had been approved for the treatment of AIDS in the United States. Though at least somewhat effective, it was highly

3 Raymond A. Smith and Patricia D. Siplon, Drugs into Bodies: Global AIDS Treatment Activism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006).

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toxic and extremely expensive. One of ACT UP’s primary goals was to expand the range of treatment options available to people with AIDS and to ensure that those options would be affordable. By educating themselves about research protocols and the complex drug approvals process, members gained access to regulatory bodies such as the AIDS

Clinical Trials Group. Thus, they opened up the research process to make experimental drugs available to people with AIDS before they had been approved for commercial sale.

Altogether, they effectively shortened the amount of time needed to bring new AIDS drugs onto market, and pushed along rapid advances in the development of new antiretrovirals, culminating in the celebrated protease inhibitors and combination therapies that became available in the middle of the 1990s. The new drugs promised to completely alter the meaning of HIV infection by changing it from a death sentence into a chronic, manageable disease. Like older AIDS drugs, the protease inhibitors stopped

HIV from replicating in a patient’s bloodstream by blocking a key enzyme. When used with those older drugs in what became known as combination therapy or the “AIDS cocktail,” protease inhibitors brought the amount of HIV (or “viral load”) in many patients’ systems down so low that it became undetectable, though the patients remained

HIV-positive.4

As antiretroviral drugs became more affordable, AIDS activism seemed to wane.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times elegized the group on its tenth anniversary, noting in the headline, “ACT UP Doesn’t Much, Anymore.” Many members had passed away, unable to take advantage of the new drugs they had helped bring to market. Other

4 Smith and Siplon; Lawrence Altman, “Scientists Display Substantial Gains in AIDS Treatment,” New York Times, July 12, 1996, A1.

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veterans had become part of the very structures they once railed against, a process that began during the group’s heyday when members made inroads into the NIH and FDA.

Core members of the Treatment and Data Committee had split off to form the Treatment

Action Group, which focused on streamlining the drug approvals process and improving pharmaceutical research. Others had taken jobs with advocacy groups such as the

National Minority AIDS Council and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

In the shift Bruni saw AIDS activist tactics maturing “from the attention-getting temper tantrums of a child to the more seasoned, reasoned perspective of an adult.” Even for those who remained committed to an outsider status, Democratic President Bill Clinton provided a less ready target than his Republican predecessors. According to ACT UP/NY veteran Ann Northrop, “When you get someone in office who’s smarter about the rhetoric, it can take some of the steam out… You’re attacking a marshmallow instead of a brick wall; that does change the dynamic entirely.”5

Julie Davids, who had been a member of ACT UP Philadelphia since 1990, similarly recalls that the group felt “rudderless” after Bill Clinton’s inauguration in early

1993. As at least some of the movement’s goals had been accomplished, the Philadelphia chapter found that their earlier “crisis-oriented, fast-moving” modus operandi no longer made sense. Instead, the group turned toward “more sustained campaigning,” with “an eye toward both winning stuff and building up [its] internal power.”6 A handful of new

5 Frank Bruni, “ACT UP Doesn’t Much, Anymore; A Decade-Old Activism of Unmitigated Gall Is Fading,” New York Times, March 21, 1997, B1; Carey Goldberg, “How Political Theater Lost Its Audience,” New York Times, September 21, 1997, sec. 4, 6.

6 Julie Davids, interview with author, September 28, 2012, New York, NY.

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members brought some of the impetus for the shift. In 1994, Paul Davis came to ACT UP

Philadelphia, having previously worked as a community organizer on the West Coast with the Seattle Tenant’s Union. He settled in West Philadelphia, the city’s activist epicenter, where he and Davids shared “Not Squat,” a group house at 49th Street and

Baltimore Avenue with Asia Russell, who had joined ACT UP Philadelphia in 1993 at age seventeen, and would later drop out of the University of Pennsylvania to focus on activism. Two years later, Davis and Davids “recruited” Kate Krauss, a veteran of ACT

UP Golden Gate who had worked on campaigns to increase funding for California’s

AIDS Drug Assistance Program and to change policies around AIDS care at Kaiser

Permanente, one of the state’s largest HMOs. Krauss had grown increasingly frustrated with what she describes as deep-seated racism and sexism in San Francisco’s ACT UP chapters, but found both her new neighborhood and ACT UP Philadelphia to be stimulating–first, because of its deep tradition of activism and community organizing, and second, for its openness to addressing racial diversity.7

As part of their effort to build the group’s “internal power,” Davids and other

ACT UP Philadelphia leaders began to seek out new members from low-income communities of color–particularly African Americans–that had been disproportionately affected by HIV and AIDS. Philadelphia’s AIDS Activities Coordinating Office reported in September 1995 that African Americans, who accounted for about 40% of the city’s

7 Lawrence Goodman, “Send Bohos, Nuts, and Addicts,” Philadelphia Magazine, November 2001, cached by Wayback Machine June 16, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20020616161122/http://www.phillymag.com/Archives/2001 Nov/actup_1.html; Kate Krauss, interview with author, September 4, 2012, Philadelphia, PA; Housing Works, “Global Go-Getters,” Housing Works AIDS Issues Update, April 4, 2008, http://www.hwupdate.org/update/2008/04/global_gogetters.html.

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population, made up 59.4% of AIDS cases reported between 1981 and September 1994, but 68.5% of cases reported between September 1994 and September 1995. At the same time, whites made up 30.5% of cases reported in Philadelphia up to September 1994, and

20.1% of cases reported during the following year.8 Of those African Americans diagnosed with AIDS in the first nine months of 1995, 53.8% reported intravenous drug use as a risk factor. With the brunt of Philadelphia’s AIDS burden shifting toward the city’s black community, where intravenous drug use played a major role in perpetuating the epidemic, Davids and her colleagues aimed to remake ACT UP Philadelphia, a group associated primarily with white gay men, into one composed of and responsive to poor people of color. Representatives of the group visited addiction recovery houses throughout the city doing teach-ins about the epidemic and “connecting the issues that the people in those houses [faced]… poverty and substance abuse and lack of access to resources and lack of access to healthcare and mental health care… linking that to the problems of the AIDS epidemic,” and encouraging residents to turn out for a protest action or attend one of ACT UP Philadelphia’s weekly Monday night meetings.

According to Val Sowell, a white queer woman involved with ACT UP Philadelphia since 2000, the group was and continues to be especially effective “where the rubber

8 AIDS Activities Coordinating Office, AIDS Surveillance Quarterly Update, September 30, 1995, Box A-5430, Folder 80-17-2.1, Philadelphia City Archives; Philadelphia’s racial demographics quoted from 1990 census in Philadelphia Department of Public Health, “Philadelphia Resident Birth, Death, Disease and Population Data by Health District, by Neighborhood, and by Census Tract,” 1991, Accession Number 4763, Folder 80-5.2, Philadelphia City Archives.

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meets the road,” using political education in the form of teach-ins both to mobilize large numbers of people for individual actions, and to bring new core members into the group.9

To further build ACT UP Philadelphia’s representation from the city’s communities of color, in 1996 Julie Davids and fellow member Jeff Maskovsky developed Project TEACH (Treatment Education Activists Combating HIV), a peer- education program for people with HIV and AIDS. In some respects the program, founded “on the belief that people have a right to know about their own bodies and to determine their own health care,” mirrored ACT UP tactics from the late 1980s and early

1990s, when HIV-positive translated self-education into advocacy, challenging popular notions of people with AIDS as powerless “victims.” Similarly, Project TEACH aimed to educate low-income people of color, including many recovering from drug or alcohol addiction, about HIV treatment, putting them on a more equal footing with their doctors and enabling them to represent the interests of HIV-positive poor people of color in policy discussions–“to go toe to toe with the experts.” The eight-week course also introduced students to AIDS activism. According to Sowell, who also served as Project

TEACH’s office assistant, the program connects people with AIDS to needed services, but also helps them “see the bigger picture and to see that stuff wasn’t just handed down from on high for our benefit but that it was fought for and we have to continue to fight to keep it from being taken away.” As one of their assignments in the eight-week course,

9 Val Sowell, interview with author, June 15, 2013, Philadelphia, PA.

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students attended an ACT UP demonstration for what Sowell calls an “activist inoculation.”10

Project TEACH also offered some material incentives, however meager. Class sessions included a free lunch and subway tokens, and program graduates received a

$150 stipend. Some went on to lead installments of the program around the city, earning only $8 an hour, while others went to work for Philadelphia FIGHT, the AIDS service organization that housed Project TEACH. John Bell, a straight black man who had come to Project TEACH through One Day at a Time, a drug treatment service organization, helped create TEACH Outside, a version of the TEACH curriculum tailored to people leaving jail or prison, and TEACH In/TEACH Out, a similar program for those still incarcerated. While Bell and some others found jobs at Philadelphia FIGHT, Project

TEACH’s parent organization, many found that without an advanced degree, they could only advance so far in an AIDS service industry that had by then become thoroughly professionalized.11

As the first Project TEACH graduates made the jump to ACT UP Philadelphia, some found the group attractive, but intimidating. John Bell recalls that when he first came to Monday night meetings, “Rebecca Ewing, Asia Russell, Paul Davis, Julie Davids would say things, but they would say them fast, and they would say them sharp, and they

10 Sowell interview.

11 Stanya Kahn, “TEACH the People” HIV Plus 7, February 2000, www.aidsinfonyc.org, cached by Wayback Machine September 20, 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/20000920005615/http://www.aidsinfonyc.org/hivplus/issue7/r eport/positive.html; “John Bell 1946-2012,” Philadelphia FIGHT, accessed July 7, 2013, http://fight.org/about-fight/fights-history/john-bell/.

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would say them under their breath, and I didn’t get it… that bothered me.” According to

Bell, after he approached Julie Davids about it, she raised the issue at the next meeting, insisting over the objections of another member, “It’s important that we usher other people in, so therefore they have to understand what’s going on, if they’re going to take on the work.”12

New African American members who came to ACT UP Philadelphia through

Project TEACH later on found the group more welcoming. Waheedah Shabazz-El, a black Muslim woman and former postal worker, tested positive for HIV while she was briefly incarcerated on a drug charge in the early 2000s. Bell, by then working for

Philadelphia FIGHT, visited Shabazz-El in prison to make sure that she would be linked to Project TEACH when she was released. Shabazz-El, who expected to die at any moment, felt comforted to meet someone like Bell, who had been living with HIV for some time. At Philadelphia FIGHT and Project TEACH she found “an instant extended family” that supported her as she dealt with her diagnosis and tried to find a way to tell her biological family about her diagnosis. As Shabazz-El moved into ACT UP

Philadelphia, she found the group’s consensus model of decision-making attractive, particularly since she felt disempowered by her HIV status. She recalls:

It felt so fair. And being infected with HIV, I just kind of felt like someone had done me dirty, somebody had done me wrong, you know? So I get to this place where people are practicing diplomacy, using the method of consensus for decision-making, and making sure everybody was heard.… And it felt good.13

12 John Bell, interview with Pascal Emmer and Puck Lo, n.d., Philadelphia, PA.

13 Waheedah Shabazz-El, interview with author, June 5, 2012, Philadelphia, PA.

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ACT UP Philadelphia’s changing membership also stemmed in part from changes to We the People, another of the city’s AIDS advocacy groups. According to David Fair, who headed up We the People from 1991 to 1996, the group had been initially populated by mostly white gay men after its founding in 1987, until a drop-in center operated by the group began to “[attract] a lot of street people, a lot of homeless people, and they were generally people of color,” leading to “this culture shock, this culture clash between black gay people and white gay people.” As the group’s membership began to tilt toward low- income gay people of color, We the People began offering direct services, providing meals and a place to shower to a membership that grew to include over five thousand clients, comprising “predominantly black gay men, and a lot of homeless people.” The group also became known for activism on issues pertinent to poor people of color with

AIDS, including a campaign calling on the city to provide more public housing for people with AIDS and a hunger strike to prevent the closing of Betak, a nursing home in the Germantown neighborhood of Northwest Philadelphia that served poor people with

AIDS at the end of their lives.14

By the late 1990s, however, We the People became integrated into the city’s

AIDS planning and service structure. As it did, the group lost much of the oppositional stance that marked the housing campaign and the Betak hunger strike. We the People and

ACT UP Philadelphia had worked together on campaigns in the past, and Project TEACH had operated a class out of We the People West, the group’s satellite location in Mantua,

14 Fair interview; We The People Living with AIDS/HIV of Philadelphia, “Current Programs and Activities,” cached by Wayback Machine July 7, 1997, http://web.archive.org/web/19970707112335/http://www.critpath.org/wtp/current.html.

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a mostly black working-class West Philadelphia neighborhood. As We the People fell away from direct action, some members decamped for ACT UP Philadelphia, which now stood as the city’s pre-eminent AIDS activist organization.15

As ACT UP Philadelphia’s membership shifted to include more and more African

Americans, many of them recovering from addictions or recently released from prison, the group’s tactics changed as well. When Donna Shalala, Bill Clinton's Secretary of

Health and Human Services, visited a church in the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr,

ACT UP Philadelphia planned to protest her appearance. Before that, the group had lobbied the administration to lift a ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs with some apparent success. Rumors circulated that Clinton would soon lift the ban.

Instead, Shalala announced that although such programs reduced new HIV infections without encouraging drug use, the federal ban would remain in place. Hence, the secretary's visit offered an excellent opportunity for ACT UP members to vent their frustration and call attention to the needle exchange issue. ACT UP Philadelphia–as well as ACT UP New York–had famously targeted the over opposition to condom use during the late 1980s and early 1990s. When the church opposed a plan to distribute condoms in Philadelphia schools, a hundred members of ACT UP Philadelphia gathered at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul on Logan Square to protest

Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua’s service for people affected by AIDS. During

15 Davids interview; In his doctoral dissertation on We the People, Project TEACH co-founder Jeff Maskovsky blames changes at the organization–and its ultimate decline–to the neoliberal state’s ability to silence dissent through co-optation, interpellating poor people with AIDS as “consumers” of health services. See Jeff Maskovsky, “‘Fighting for Our Lives’: Poverty and AIDS Activism in Neoliberal Philadelphia” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Temple University, 2000).

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Bevilacqua’s homily, which reiterated Pope John Paul II’s position of “unconditional love” for people with AIDS, ACT UP member Paul Champion sprinkled condoms at the prelate’s feet, shouting, “These will save lives–your morals won’t.”16

ACT UP Philadelphia initially planned a similar action for Shalala’s visit, which would feature a talk on the theme, "Are we our brothers' keepers?" but risked alienating new members. John Bell recalls that Paul Davis proposed, “When she says the word

‘brotherhood,’ we’re going to shout her down.” Bell balked at the idea: “I [said], ‘Oh my

God. You can’t do that.’ I said, ‘You can’t ask African Americans, who are in recovery, to raise their voice in nobody’s church, and expect them to help you again.’” Instead, the group stood up in unison during Shalala’s speech, turned their backs, and whispered,

“Donna Shalala, you killed my brother. Donna Shalala, you killed my sister.”17 Some held signs with the names of friends–intravenous drug users–who had died. Joyce

Hamilton, an African American woman who had joined the group a few years before, moved into the aisle to confront Shalala, telling the secretary that she herself had contracted HIV by sharing needles. In an announcement circulated to local activists, the group also framed the demonstration in terms that would resonate with African

Americans and invert the rhetoric of black community leaders who compared needle exchange programs to past instances of medical experimentation on people of color,

16 Mark Fazlollah, “A Protest at AIDS Service; Condoms Taken to Archbishop,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 19, 1991, B1; Richard Barnes, “Needle Exchange Programs Provoke Huge Controversy,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 5, 1998, 1A.

17 Bell interview; Mary Stuart Petty, “Divine Interventions: Art in the AIDS Epidemic” (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2000).

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saying of the administration’s refusal to fund needle exchange programs, "This is

Tuskegee. This is genocide."18

ACT UP Philadelphia had to reconsider other protest tactics as well. Civil disobedience remained an important part of the group’s toolkit, but members who had previously been incarcerated might not be able to risk arrest. According to Waheedah

Shabazz-El:

[T]here has to be a difference because the face of AIDS has changed, and in reality, we know that for people who are dark and people of color, we can’t take the same risk and chances as someone in the corporate world would take with their rights and things like that. A lot of the people we take to march with us very well may be on probation or parole. Very well may not be able to be arrested and be able to just get out on a misdemeanor. It may be something more serious. So we have to do things a little smarter, a little different, because we’re in a different time and yeah, the face of AIDS has changed and people understand that.19

ACT UP Philadelphia, historically a direct action and advocacy group, also took on some elements of an AIDS service organization. As with Project TEACH, they began offering food and subway tokens at both Monday night meetings and teach-ins around the city, in order to attract lower income and homeless people who might be at risk for HIV.

According to Earl Driscoll, a white recovering drug user who began attending ACT UP

Philadelphia meetings in the early 1990s after picking up clean syringes from the group’s needle exchange program, frames these small material incentives a gateway to activism:

“Someone could come for two tokens and a piece of a hoagie and some iced tea… and by hearing what they hear when they’re there become an advocate and become someone

18 ACT UP Philadelphia, “People with HIV to Protest Donna Shalala in Pennsylvania,” 1998, quoted in Petty, 104.

19 Shabazz-El interview.

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active.” Still other HIV-positive people might come to the group looking for help in getting access to medicine or housing. Shabazz-El recalls that for people struggling with both HIV and poverty, ACT UP could serve as an important link to needed services in a holistic framework linking psychological well-being, physical health, and financial stability:

What mattered was, did you have access to go with what you needed? Did you have the support of psychological and social services to go with the medication that you were getting, and could you afford the medicine?… Did you have stable, affordable housing?… Were you able to get your medication? What were the barriers that would prevent you from staying on medication? Was it because you couldn’t afford it?20

Some ACT UP Philadelphia members felt ambivalent about the new approach, which they saw as a case of white activists with organizing experience manipulating recovering drug users and formerly incarcerated people of color from the city’s poorer neighborhoods. By offering food and subway tokens, did white members with access to greater resources exploit disempowered people’s basic needs to promote a political agenda, or did they simply recognize that many in the communities most affected by

AIDS struggled just to get by? In particular, some within the group believed that ACT UP

Philadelphia’s tactic of working through the city’s recovery houses might be seen as coercive. According to Kate Krauss,

[T]here are a lot of ways of thinking about that. One of them is that you are manipulating these people that don’t really have a choice in some cases. If they’re in a recovery house, they have to do what the recovery house head tells them to do. There are a lot of–and so are you manipulating them? I think there is a case to be made that you are. And then there is another case to be made that sometimes that could be that person’s first–especially in some situations like recovery houses where if you’ve had a bad few years you might not have done something positive.

20 Shabazz-El interview.

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You’re in the recovery house, you’re still in recovery, you’re still in active treatment so you may not have done anything good in this world for a really a long time, and to help a cause that you believe in, which a lot of people do here, even if you’re… required to do it, it’s sort of interesting.21

Roy Hayes, a black gay recovering drug user from West Philadelphia’s “Black Bottom” neighborhood and longtime ACT UP Philadelphia member, also sees the recruiting tactic as a problem when “[this] person, if they don’t go on ACT UP demonstration they’ll get thrown out of the house. That should not be. These people should want to go and fight for the cause, [because] they really feel something.”22

At times, ACT UP Philadelphia seemed to fall short of its goal of community organizing and political education among the city’s poor and disfranchised residents. In notes from a group discussion held just before a demonstration and lobbying session in

April 1999, members said that they wanted to “deepen involvement with some of the groups we work with, rather than just doing turn-out for protests.” They also noted that people who took part in actions complained of never finding out what happened as a result, suggesting a disconnect between the people planning the actions during Monday night meetings and those who turned out to implement them.23 Similarly, John Bell recalls that, at least early on, the purpose of the demonstrations seemed unclear to some new members:

[I]f a newspaper reporter comes up to Paul Davis and asks him why he’s at a demonstration and this person in this recovery house, this African-

21 Krauss interview.

22 Roy Hayes, interview with author, June 7, 2012, Philadelphia, PA.

23 “Lessons learned from recent demonstrations, with suggested remedies,” ACT UP Philadelphia Subject File, Subject Files Collection William Way Community Center Archives, Philadelphia, PA.

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American who’s come from Philadelphia, he should be able to say the same thing that Paul says. And if that doesn’t happen, then there’s a mistake somewhere along the line.24

Still, ACT UP Philadelphia proved adept at “build[ing] the leadership of people living with HIV, particularly those of color.”25 Waheedah Shabazz-El praises earlier leaders such as Paul Davis and Julie Davids, because “they would take you to a certain point and then they would step back. Because I was taught early on from them that a good organizer works themself out of a job… you build leadership as you go.” She credits ACT UP with not only helping her overcome her “internal stigma” about her HIV status, but with enabling her “to speak truth to power, and to still be able to come home and talk to my peers and meet them where they were, until they were able to come and speak to power with me.”26

By 1999, ACT UP Philadelphia’s website advertised a membership of “over half people of color and over half people living with HIV,” partly as a result of “bridges built over the years” to We the People, One Day at a Time, and Project TEACH. At the top of the page, under the headline “JOIN ACT UP and come kick butt with us,” the group claimed to be “stronger and more effective than ever,” though they also acknowledged that the landscape of AIDS activism in the United States as a whole had shifted dramatically: “More than ever, ACT UP stands almost alone in its use of empowerment-

24 Bell interview.

25 Sowell interview.

26 Sowell interview; Shabazz-El interview.

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based grassroots organizing, aggressive non-violent direct action tactics, and its analysis of the AIDS epidemic as a political crisis that can be solved.”27

HealthChoices Is Neither

The protease inhibitors that debuted in the middle of the 1990s promised a new lease on life for people with HIV–or, at least, for those who could afford them. While some gay men began to consider their “post-AIDS lives,” poor people living with HIV, including a disproportionate number of African Americans, faced a more difficult situation. Growing costs for Medicaid, the public health insurance program for poor and disabled Americans, fed into a bipartisan political vogue to “end welfare as we know it.”

As the Clinton administration signaled support for changes to welfare systems at the state level, people with AIDS and their advocates worried that changes to Medicaid systems and a contracting social safety net could leave some without health insurance. Gaps in treatment for people with HIV could hasten the development of the virus and render the new drugs ineffective for an individual’s future course of treatment, exacerbating the

27 ACT UP Philadelphia, “Projects,” cached by Wayback Machine February 18, 1999, http://web.archive.org/web/19990218065238/http://www.critpath.org/actup/projects.html.

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impact of the disease on poor communities, including a disproportionate number of people of color.28

Philadelphia’s AIDS community faced precisely this problem under Pennsylvania

Governor , elected in the 1994 mid-term elections on a wave of support for

Republican candidates. As part of a larger package of welfare reform, Ridge planned to move all of the state’s Medicaid recipients into health maintenance organizations, or

HMOs. He planned to roll out the managed care plan, called HealthChoices, in waves.

Counties in the southeastern corner of the state, including Philadelphia, would make the switch first, with others following suit over a period of several years. State officials and

HMO representatives argued that the HMO system would concentrate resources in preventive medicine for Medicaid recipients, cutting down on the number of people using emergency rooms for basic care, a trend widely cited to explain rising health care costs.

ACT UP and other Philadelphia AIDS groups, on the other hand, argued that since the state would pay a flat rate per patient and medical care for people with AIDS involves expensive tests and treatments, HMOs would discourage people with AIDS from enrolling in their programs. Those who did make it onto the plans, ACT UP argued,

28 For discussion of “the end of AIDS,” see Andrew Sullivan, “When Plagues End,” New York Times, November 10, 1996, sec. 6. p. 52, and Eric Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (Harrington Park Press, 1998); cf. Lisa Duggan, who links Sullivan’s post-AIDS vision of gay politics to the emergence of Clintonian neo-liberal consensus in “Equality, Inc.” in The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 43-66; Both Mary Petty and Jeff Maskovsky offer views of changes to health care and AIDS activism during the mid/late 1990s in their respective dissertations. See Petty and Maskovsky.

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would receive substandard care, since “HMOs use a variety of tactics to reduce care, and therefore, save money.”29

With the HealthChoices campaign, ACT UP Philadelphia sought not only to ensure continuous care and access to medication for Medicaid recipients with HIV, but also to challenge the privatization of public services and retrenchment of the welfare state. They criticized Governor Ridge–“welfare cuttin’ frat guy”–for lowering corporate taxes while reducing welfare benefits through a reform package that eliminated Medicaid for 250,000 Pennsylvanians and mandating work requirements for those who retained coverage. The group's also opposed New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman's plan outsource medical care for the state's prison system to Correctional Medical Services

(CMS), a St. Louis-based firm, and protested a New Jersey state law requiring prisoners in the state to pay for their own health care. Gregory Dean Smith, a black gay ACT UP

Philadelphia member imprisoned in New Jersey on a twenty-five year sentence for attempted murder after allegedly biting a Camden County Jail guard on the hand, posted a newsletter, "Tales from Beyond the Wall," on the group's website. He criticized CMS for unreliable delivery of HIV drugs, since the company shipped medications from

29 ACT UP Philadelphia, “Resisting HealthChoices: Two Years of Activism in Southeastern PA,” April 1997, cached by Wayback Machine July 7, 1997, http://web.archive.org/web/19970707132413/http://www.critpath.org/actup/hchoices.htm .

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Oklahoma, such that they often arrived late or not at all. Because of the need for strict adherence with an HIV drug regimen, Smith wrote, "[CMS] is killing the inmates."30

ACT UP Philadelphia also criticized President Bill Clinton for his position on welfare reform. The president, they argued, had given Ridge the opportunity to shrink the state’s health coverage for welfare recipients by shifting it to the private sector in directing the Health Care Finance Administration (HCFA), which authorized changes to

Medicaid at the state level, to “provide ‘flexibility’ to the states to conduct

‘experiments’” with the public insurance program. They put Ridge’s policy moves in the context of the president’s proposed changes to welfare at the federal level; whereas

Clinton had “once campaigned against Gingrich-ite ‘orphanages,’” he “now feels that government commitments to support the poor and the sick can be replaced by good photo opportunities for ‘volunteerism.’” At one point during the HealthChoices campaign, the group gathered outside Philadelphia’s Democratic Party headquarters in Center City to encourage the president to deny Ridge’s proposed reductions to Medicaid and welfare, which required federal approval. They brought along an oversized papier-mâché model of a human spine, intending to give the president a backbone with which to stand up to the

30 ACT UP Philadelphia, “Resisting HealthChoices”; Terry Pristin, “Protesting Law on Prison Care,” New York Times, March 1, 1996, New Jersey Edition, B1; Chris Mondics and Andrea Knox, “N.J. Will Privatize Prison Clinics,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 29, 1995, sec. Local South Jersey, S1; Gregory Smith, “Prisoners with AIDS are under Attack,” ACT UP Philadelphia, June 1997, cached by Wayback machine December 24, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20021224223521/http://www.critpath.org/actup/Project 2.htm.

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Pennsylvania governor. As Julie Davids told City Paper, “He just let Michigan gut its safety-net system. We don’t want that to happen here.”31

Direct action for the HealthChoices campaign began in late 1995, when ACT UP

Philadelphia joined with We The People and One Day at a Time for the “Thousand

Grinch March” on the state Capitol rotunda during Ridge’s Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. Although Paul Davis insisted that the groups just wanted to "sing some carols" and "make clear that AIDS doesn't take a holiday," the governor canceled the ceremony so as not to, in his words, "subject hundreds of children… to ACT UP's crude, harsh demonstrations." Over the next few months, ACT UP and a "coalition of AIDS activists, recovery and homeless programs, hospital owners and workers, women's groups, and welfare rights organizations" sent "hundreds of bus loads of demonstrators" to Harrisburg to oppose Ridge's welfare reform bill. The state legislature eventually approved the law, but through meetings with the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, ACT UP and their allies won a handful of significant concessions. The state promised to hold

HealthChoices HMOs to a standard of care for HIV, and to ensure that people with the virus would be able to choose a provider experienced with HIV and AIDS, since studies showed that those whose doctor treated others with the disease lived twice as long as those who saw an inexperienced physician. However, ACT UP quickly grew frustrated as the Ridge administration “worked overtime, along with the HMOs, to make it as difficult as possible for actually getting [sic] an experienced HIV provider.” Benefits counselors

31 Daisy Fried, “Spinal Tap,” City Paper, June 20, 1996, http://archives.citypaper.net/articles/062096/article032.shtml. ACT UP Philadelphia also used this tactic in a demonstration against HHS Secretary Donna Shalala in 1997. See Petty.

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hired by the state to staff a HealthChoices hotline did not advise people with HIV of their right to select a specialist as their primary doctor, nor could they provide a list of eligible practitioners. Thus, in order to take advantage of the state's concessions to ACT UP

Philadelphia and its allies, Medicaid recipients with HIV would already have to know their rights under the new plan, as well as have a particular specialist in mind. A phone survey conducted by the AIDS Law Project found that none of the HealthChoices HMOs could refer callers to HIV-experienced doctors, and that operators treated Spanish- speaking callers poorly by hanging up, putting them on hold, or making racist insults.

Bernadette Dasher, an HIV-positive mother of three, reported to the Inquirer that the

DPW and the HMOs "told me I'd just have to figure it out for myself."32

ACT UP Philadelphia responded accordingly. In November, the group staged a short march from Washington Square Park to the Liberty Bell, with tombstone-shaped posters and a die-in to represent the predicted effect of HealthChoices. Weeks later, on

December 1st, the group took advantage of press coverage for World AIDS Day to draw attention to their campaign with an action they called “Day Without Health Care,” a play on the “Day Without Art” that AIDS activists had started in the late 1980s to call attention to the epidemic by highlighting the devastation wrought on arts communities. In the past ACT UP Philadelphia had commemorated World AIDS Day by covering the

“LOVE” sculpture in JFK Plaza with a black shroud. For Day Without Health Care, they draped the Center City home of Feather Houstoun, head of the state's Department of

Public Welfare, with a twelve-foot banner with the word “RAGE” spelled out in the

32 Huntly Collins, “Plan’s Options Unclear to AIDS Patients,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 6, 1997, B1.

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configuration of the “LOVE” sculpture and the message, "HealthChoices is neither–

People with HIV/AIDS need real choices!"33

Less than two weeks later, 300 protestors from ACT UP and many of the city's

AIDS service organizations gathered at the local HCFA office in a last-ditch effort before the January 1st deadline to pressure the agency to withhold its waiver of Medicaid rules.

Without a waiver, the state would be unable to begin HealthChoices that February as planned. The protestors succeeded in shutting down the intersection of 36th and Market for an hour, leading to twenty-six arrests, including those of the executive directors of thirteen local AIDS service organizations. Nevertheless, HCFA approved the

HealthChoices waiver over New Year's weekend, ACT UP claimed, "to minimize press scrutiny." According to ACT UP Philadelphia, when the February deadline arrived for the first round of managed care enrollment, welfare recipients “[lost] their doctors by the hundreds,” while “DPW admits that there were more… recipients with HIV than it thought.” Others faced problems under HealthChoices as well. Disabled in Action of

Pennsylvania, a statewide disabled advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against the state when

HMOs assigned wheelchair users to doctors without ADA-compliant offices, or failed to provide information in Braille to blind clients. However, for people with HIV, the consequences of interrupted medical care went beyond inconvenience, insult, or embarrassment. The new AIDS “cocktail” could become ineffective for a particular

33 Petty; Julie Knipe Brown, “Activists Want Enormity to Strike Home,” Philadelphia Daily News, December 2, 1996, 3.

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patient if a delayed prescription or a doctor’s inexpert oversight interrupted the treatment regimen.34

In spite of the problems exposed by the switch to HealthChoices in Southeastern

Pennsylvania, the Ridge administration continued with its plan to roll the program out for the rest of the state. At first, at Pennsylvania’s annual HIV conference and through the group’s website, ACT UP Philadelphia encouraged other local activists across the state to organize against the program’s implementation. However, as expansion of HealthChoices began to seem inevitable, the group shifted its goals away from stopping statewide rollout to improving care within the program for people with HIV and AIDS. Another demonstration at the capital rotunda in Harrisburg–two years after Ridge canceled his tree-lighting ceremony–focused on per capita reimbursement rates, also called

“capitations,” for people with HIV and other chronic illnesses. ACT UP Philadelphia charged that the state rolled out HealthChoices with higher rates in other cities without comparably raising reimbursements for Philadelphians. Joyce Hamilton summed up the group’s outrage over the higher reimbursements offered in other parts of state: under the free market logic of HealthChoices, with “no such compensation in Philadelphia, HMOs

[in the city] have a financial incentive to provide less care.” At a demonstration the following March, where members carried coffins and a twenty-foot tall Grim Reaper puppet with Ridge’s face, John Bell addressed the capitations issue and Ridge’s Medicaid

34 ACT UP Philadelphia, “Resisting HealthChoices”; Jim Smith, “Suit: Pa. Giving Inadequate Medical Care to Disabled,” Philadelphia Daily News, June 4, 1997, 31.

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“experiment” in terms that echoed Tuskegee, telling the Philadelphia Tribune, “We don’t want to be the guinea pigs because our lives are at stake.”35

Working with other agencies on the HealthChoices campaign, ACT UP

Philadelphia achieved some important goals, guaranteeing access for people with HIV and AIDS to a specialist as their primary doctor, along with coverage for viral load testing, protease inhibitors, and the HMOs' acceptance of standards of care for people with HIV infection. The campaign also strengthened the group's connections with One

Day at a Time and We the People, both of which would be key to the ongoing shift in

ACT UP's membership. In the coming years, the group would rely on One Day at a Time to fill buses for protest actions all over the region, and ACT UP would come to supplant

We the People as the city's primary activist group for people of color with HIV and AIDS several years later, as the group became subsumed within the city’s AIDS services bureaucracy before disappearing altogether.36 Over the course of the campaign, African

Americans with HIV–particularly those in addiction recovery programs–joined ACT UP

Philadelphia in growing numbers precisely because the group agitated around an issue pertinent to poor people of color affected by the disease. Joyce Hamilton, who joined the group after seeing a HealthChoices demonstration, recalled in a 1998 interview, "When I saw them I said, 'wow! These people are fighting for people with the virus.'" She went on

35 Julie Davids, “Philly AIDS Protest, Wednesday at Noon,” sci.med.aids, March 3, 1998, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/sci.med.aids/Le7CjI1UgBo/xJLOG7rNqygJ; Huntly Collins, “AIDS Protesters Say State Falls Short on Medicine, Money,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 5, 1998, B3; Richard G. Barnes, “Protesters Take a Stand for Better AIDS Program,” Philadelphia Tribune, , 1998, 2A.

36 Davids interview.

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to say that because of the group's changing membership and visible work with people of color, "I don't think people think of it as a white gay organization anymore."37

We View AIDS as a Global Problem

Motivated by contacts made with other activists at international conferences, following the HealthChoices campaign, ACT UP Philadelphia turned toward advocacy for access to HIV and AIDS treatment in the developing world, particularly in sub-

Saharan Africa. Contact among activists at international AIDS conferences and through the Internet spurred calls for “global treatment access.” The group’s new work also built on the HealthChoices campaign, as ACT UP Philadelphia drew new members from the city’s black community, and strengthened ties with the recovery houses that helped turn out hundreds of people for demonstrations. The core issue remained the same–ACT UP

Philadelphia sought to broaden access to new medicines among those who could not otherwise afford them, while also challenging the underlying public policies that restricted access in the first place.

In the summer of 1996, during the weeks leading up to the eleventh annual

International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, while the American media reported on the promise of protease inhibitors and the “AIDS cocktail,” AIDS activists who planned to attend the conference grew angry at the drugs’ prohibitively high cost. The expensive new treatments would be out of reach for the developing world, where the vast majority of people with HIV and AIDS lived. During the Vancouver conference, ACT UP/NY

37 Joyce Hamilton, interview with Mary S. Petty, 17 March 1998, Philadelphia, PA, quoted in Petty, 90-1.

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awarded “golden urns” to those “drug companies, public officials, and organizations whose policies and actions are hastening the deaths of people with AIDS.” Recipients at

Vancouver included Abbott Pharmaceuticals, manufacturer of the protease inhibitor

Norvir, and Hoffman Laroche, maker of the protease inhibitor Invirase. In his address at the conference’s opening ceremony, Eric Sawyer, a white gay lawyer and ACT UP/NY co-founder who had been living with HIV since at least 1981, charged that “genocide continues against poor people with AIDS, especially those from developing countries, by

AIDS [p]rofiteers who are more concerned about maximizing profits than with saving lives… The greed of AIDS profiteers is killing impoverished people with AIDS.” He ended his speech with a chant of “Greed Kills, Access for All!” Asia Russell of ACT UP

Philadelphia echoed Sawyer’s remarks in a press release:

Some people are doing very well on those therapies…. However, those people represent a very small fraction of the 19 million people on this planet who are living with HIV. The prices being charged for combination protease inhibitor therapy leaves millions of people with HIV for dead. Public health systems worldwide will be bankrupted. 38

On the last day of the conference, a group of several hundred representatives from Brazil and other Latin American countries marched past the pharmaceutical companies’ booths chanting, “Lower the price.” In their “Brazilian Manifesto,” circulated at Vancouver, the

38 ACT UP/NY, “ACT UP Protests @ Opening Ceremony,” July 7, 2000, http://www.actupny.org/Vancouver/openingday.html.

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protesters argued that “scientific advances [should] provide benefits for the majority rather than perpetuating existing inequalities.”39

International conferences like the one in Vancouver allowed US AIDS activists to meet and interact with people doing similar work around the globe. ACT UP/NY veteran

Karin Timour reported on Vancouver for thebody.com, a website for people with HIV and AIDS, where she wrote in glowing terms about the “Community Forum,” three days of networking and workshops for people with AIDS held before the conference. She reflected that “living there was like being in the midst of a huge, HIV-positive United

Nations.” Similarly, ACT UP Philadelphia members shared experiences and made friends with people infected with or affected by AIDS from all over the world. Waheedah

Shabazz-El describes meeting a nurse from a Kenyan village whose patients had no food and shared their medications with family members because they could not afford enough for everyone. For Shabazz-El and other ACT UP Philadelphia members, meeting people with AIDS from around the world who lived in extreme privation cultivated a sense of

“obligation to not turn our heads because of what we have here.”40

39 Eric Sawyer, “Remarks at the Opening Ceremony,” ACT UP/NY, http://www.actupny.org/Vancouver/sawyerspeech.html, accessed 8 March 2013; Eric Sawyer, “An ACT UP Founder ‘Acts Up’ for Africa’s Access to AIDS” in Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk, From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (Verso, 2002), 96; ACT UP/NY, “AIDS Activists Denounce AIDS Profiteers at Opening of International AIDS Conference,” ACT UP/NY press release, 7 July 1996, http://www.actupny.org/Vancouver/openingday.html, accessed 8 March 2013; “Brazilian Manifesto,” ACT UP/NY website, http://www.actupny.org/Vancouver/Brazil.html, accessed 8 March 2013; Karin Timour, “11th International Conference on AIDS: Activist Perspective,” Body Positive, September 1996, http://www.thebody.com/content/art30254.html.

40 Timour; Shabazz-El interview.

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The issue of global inequality and HIV treatment drew international attention the year after the Vancouver conference when South Africa amended the Medicines and

Related Substances Act (Medicines Act). The amendment to the existing law authorized the country’s health minister to increase access to HIV drugs patented in the U.S. and

Europe in two ways: first, by purchasing them from countries that produced them at low cost, a practice known as “parallel importing,” and second, by allowing domestic firms to produce their own inexpensive generic versions, a practice known as “compulsory licensing.” Seeing the law as a major threat to profits in the developing world, a group of thirty-nine drug manufacturers sued the South African government in early 1998. The

South African government insisted that the amendment to the Medicines Act fell well within the World Trade Organization’s agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of

Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which allowed member nations to pursue measures like parallel imports and compulsory licensing in cases of national emergency. The HIV incidence in South Africa, which stood at over ten percent in 1997 and was rising quickly, seemed to fit that bill. Nevertheless, the Clinton administration intervened on the pharmaceutical companies’ behalf, with Vice President threatening trade sanctions against the country in his role as the US chair of the US-South Africa

Binational Commission. In April 1999, the office of the US Trade Representative,

Charlene Barshefsky, placed South Africa on the 301 Watch List of countries whose trade practices were being scrutinized to determine whether to initiate or continue sanctions.41

41 Patricia D. Siplon, AIDS and the Policy Struggle in the United States (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002).

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At the same time, President Bill Clinton had thrown his support behind the

African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a bill promoting free trade between the

US and a number of African nations, but which made no mention of the AIDS epidemic.

ACT UP Philadelphia criticized the bill on its website under the headline, “Fight AIDS in

Sub-Saharan Africa!” for failing to address AIDS in the region despite the epidemic’s enormous economic and public health implications, for subjecting participating countries to the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment policies, which would divert funds from education and health care, and for violating those countries’ sovereignty by dictating economic policy according to business interests in the global North. The bill, which they elsewhere referred to as the “African Re-enslavement Act,” would provide growth and opportunity not to Africa, but to “multinational oil, pharmaceutical, mining, and other corporations… who would gain the most from it.”42

Instead, ACT UP Philadelphia urged support for Representative Jesse Jackson Jr’s alternative HOPE (Human Rights, Opportunity, Partnership, and Empowerment) for

Africa Act, which would cancel sub-Saharan Africa’s US debts and authorize countries there to pursue compulsory licensing and parallel imports. In April 1999, just as

Barshefsky added South Africa to the 301 Watch List, ACT UP Philadelphia sent eleven buses, along with three from ACT UP/NY, to Washington DC for a demonstration and lobbying session to support the HOPE Act. There they joined Jackson, along with labor

42 ACT UP Philadelphia, “Fight AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa!,” cached by Internet Archive January 22, 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/20000226005445/http://www.critpath.org/actup/Project1.html ; Julie Davids e-mail to COMM-ORG listserve, April 13, 2000, http://comm- org.wisc.edu/pipermail/colist/2000-April/000644.html.

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and environmental groups, for a march to the offices of Pharmaceutical Research and

Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), an industry lobbying group, carrying signs that read, “Human Rights, Not Corporate Rights,” and, “Just Say No to Drug Lobbyists.”43

Jackson further courted grassroots support from AIDS activists, writing an editorial for the HIV-positive lifestyle magazine POZ, in which he highlighted the impact of foreign debt and structural adjustment on health care and education, and called for a “global village-type approach, with the United States leading the way.”44

Julie Davids recalls first hearing about AGOA in 1998, while attending the

Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Chicago. During the conference, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network talked to her over breakfast about the connections between their respective movements, telling Davids “that the spread of HIV in part could be because of incursions into the rainforest, and it also could be that possible cures were being lost because of loss of biodiversity.” During the meeting, he also told her about AGOA, “this bill that was like NAFTA for Africa.”45

Around the same time, ACT UP Philadelphia members also began receiving e-mails that described horrific conditions in sub-Saharan Africa: morgues in Zimbabwe that stayed open around the clock to handle the sheer volume of dead bodies, HIV-positive men in

South Africa having sex with virgin girls in hopes that they would be cured of the virus, and ill-equipped clinics that could offer people with AIDS “little more than a bottle of

43 ACT UP/NY, “Protesting Congressional African Trade Bill,” April 1999, http://actupny.org/actions/africaaction.html, accessed 7 April 2013.

44 Jesse Jr. Jackson, “Keep HOPE Alive,” POZ, July 1999, http://www.poz.com/articles/216_10387.shtml.

45 Davids interview.

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aspirin.”46 John Bell credits Asia Russell for putting the issue of AIDS in Africa on the

ACT UP Philadelphia agenda one week, but recalls that at first he rejected the idea: “I said that I’m a Vietnam veteran, I have problems with that, being in America. I’m an

Afro-American, living in America. I have problems with that. I don’t want to hear about any Africa, AIDS in Africa.” However, he continues, “She began to teach me and when she taught me, she taught the room and everybody jumped on the same page.”47

Through founding member , ACT UP Philadelphia also had

Internet connections global AIDS activism going back to the early days of cyberspace.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a lifelong social justice activist, began using online bulletin board systems in 1992 to disseminate the information he had previously published in Critical

Path, his fax-based AIDS treatment newsletter. Soon, Kuromiya began offering free dial- up Internet access in the Philadelphia area. At the time of his death in May 2000, he provided free web hosting to nearly a hundred AIDS and social justice groups, as well as hosted e-mail for ACT UP Philadelphia members. If the global treatment access movement was “becoming more and more a network of allies who communicate by e- mails, teleconferencing, and listservs,” as Kate Krauss told The Village Voice in 2001,

Kuromiya’s technology activism laid the groundwork for ACT UP Philadelphia’s turn toward anti-globalization politics and advocacy on AIDS in the developing world.

Kuromiya, who had studied under renowned futurist Buckminster Fuller, signaled his own broad perspective on the epidemic in the banner for Critical Path and later his

46 Goodman, “Send Bohos, Nuts, and Addicts”.

47 Bell interview.

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website, critpath.org. Kuromiya adapted his mentor’s Dymaxion Projection, a map of the earth in which all seven continents appear as a single chain of landmass. The map captured the sense of connection that Kuromiya sought to foster through Critical Path because, he explained, “We view AIDS as a global problem.”48

Others shared ACT UP Philadelphia’s broad perspective. In early 1999, radical physician Alan Berkman and Eric Sawyer, whose Vancouver speech about “AIDS profiteers” had electrified conference goers, founded Health Global Access Project

(HealthGAP) with help from ACT UP Philadelphia members Julie Davids, Asia Russell,

Paul Davis, and Jose de Marco. Later that year, Sawyer testified before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Governmental Reform in a hearing entitled “What is the U.S.

Role in Combating the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic?” He spoke about the dramatic improvements in health that he had enjoyed since beginning combination therapy, but also his remorse at being among the two percent of people with AIDS that could enjoy the benefits of the new drugs. He contrasted his own story with that of his friend

Auxcillia Chimusoro, a Zimbabwean woman with HIV who started projects in her village for AIDS widows and orphans after losing her husband and child to the disease. Although she developed symptoms of her HIV disease a decade later than Sawyer, he outlived her,

48 Siplon, AIDS and the Policy Struggle in the United States, 119; Critical Path AIDS Project 1, no. 1, November 1989, Critical Path Subject File, Subject Files Collection, William Way; Critical Path AIDS Project, “Our Name and Logo,” cached by Wayback Machine April 16, 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/20000416190529/http://www.critpath.org/docs/namelogo.htm

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thanks to his access to life-saving treatments. “[S]he’s dead today, and I’m alive,” he told the committee, “And that’s wrong.”49

Gore’s opening moves in the 2000 presidential election provided ACT UP

Philadelphia, working through HealthGAP, with the opportunity to draw public attention to their cause. When the vice president launched his campaign at a rally in his hometown of Carthage, Tennessee on June 15, 1999, members of AIDS Drugs for Africa interrupted his speech with airhorns and chanted, “Gore is killing Africans–AIDS drugs now!” The following day, at a similar event in the early primary state of New Hampshire, five protestors, including Paul Davis, unfurled a banner behind the vice president that read,

“Gore Kills, AIDS Drugs for Africa.” Demonstrations at Gore campaign events and at the office of the United States Trade Representative continued throughout the summer and into the fall, including demonstrations in Philadelphia and Washington DC that drew up to a thousand protestors, many of them mobilized by ACT UP Philadelphia. The protests worked–in September, Gore and Barshefsky announced that they had reached an agreement with South Africa leaving the terms of the Medicines Act in place and clearing the way for the government to pursue parallel imports and compulsory licensing.

Moreover, at the WTO meeting in Seattle that December, President Clinton promised,

“the United States will henceforward implement its health care and trade policies in a

49 Eric Sawyer, testimony to Subcommittee on , Drug Policy, and Human Resources of House Committee on Governmental Reform, July 22, 1999.

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manner that ensures that people in the poorest countries won't have to go without medicine they so desperately need.”50

ACT UP Philadelphia proved integral to the HealthGAP campaign to change US trade policy toward South Africa. The early actions in Tennessee and New Hampshire used the Gore camp’s publicity efforts to get sound-bite ready slogans in front of news cameras, but the demonstrations in Philadelphia and Washington, thanks to large contingents of protestors from ACT UP Philadelphia, showed the global treatment movement’s potential for mobilizing larger direct action campaigns. Although the New

York Times and ACT UP Philadelphia disagreed about the size of the crowd at a large protest that took place outside a Gore fundraiser in Philadelphia that June, the group’s strength clearly lay in its numbers.

After Clinton’s announcement in Seattle, ACT UP Philadelphia looked to amplify their victory, pushing for the administration to extend the allowance for South Africa’s parallel import and compulsory licensing to the rest of the developing world. In the process, they wanted to highlight the link between structural adjustment policies and the severity of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. On Sunday, April 16, 2000, the group sent ten buses carrying around a thousand “rowdy protesters”–mostly people of color–to join others in Washington, DC for A16, a gathering of 10,000 anti-globalization activists. The

ACT UP contingent began with a rally near the White House, marching to Barshefsky’s

50 ACT UP/NY, “Candidate Gore Zaps,” http://www.actupny.org/actions/gorezaps.html, accessed 27 March 2013; Goodman, “Send Bohos, Nuts, and Addicts”.

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office before joining larger demonstrations downtown that would disrupt meetings of the

International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In advance of A16, ACT UP Philadelphia circulated a press release headed by the slogan “AGOA = More AIDS For Africa,” which spelled out the connection between the bill’s mandated economic controls, and addressed the pharmaceutical lobby’s criticism of compulsory licensing and parallel imports. According to the press release, countries that had been subjected to structural adjustment policies, such as Zimbabwe and the Ivory

Coast, had seen rising poverty as “farmers’ land has been seized by impoverished governments, forests have been cleared to plant crops, and national health systems have been closed,” along with rising poverty and astronomical HIV prevalence. Instead, ACT

UP Philadelphia demanded that the United States use its influence at the IMF to push through debt relief measures, that Congress “drop” AGOA or, perhaps realizing that the bill would inevitably pass, “cease efforts to strip or water-down” an amendment from

Senator Dianne Feinstein that would prevent the Trade Representative from punishing countries that pursued compulsory licensing. As for drug companies’ insistence that such practices would weaken market incentives to develop new and better medications, ACT

UP argued that the pharmaceutical industry profited from research subsidized by federal grants, and that in any case, Africa represented little threat to companies’ profit margins, making up less than two percent of the global drug market.

ACT UP Philadelphia also used A16 to bring attention to the 301 Watch List, due to be updated soon after the demonstration. In the group’s press release, John Bell warned that in the absence of “real policy change… we may have to revisit Al Gore's campaign appearances.” For the rest of the week, leading up to the release of the new list, ACT UP

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Philadelphia orchestrated a phone campaign targeting Gore’s campaign and Congress, calling for the removal of all countries “singled out due to pharmaceutical trade policies” from the list, and for “immediate, full and unconditional debt relief with no structural adjustment requirements.” Without grassroots pressure, they warned, Congress might enact “token debt relief measures that continue crushing structural adjustment mandates.”51

That summer, the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa brought ACT UP Philadelphia and others in the treatment access movement to the epicenter of the global pandemic, and the country that had been the focus of so much recent controversy. Some, like Melvin White, a black gay HIV-positive man, traveled from Philadelphia to help organize demonstrations at the conference, including a huge rally featuring Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the ex-wife of former president, activist, and political prisoner Nelson Mandela, and a prominent politician in her own right. She led the crowd in a chant of “phansi!” (Zulu for “down”), and thanked the activists who had come from around the world–from “Philadelphia, Guatemala City, and Mumbai to express their outrage at the tyranny of the market and to demand that people come before profit.”52

51 ACT UP Philadelphia, “ACT UP Shuts Down the IMF/World Bank,” information sheet, ACT UP Philadelphia Subject File, Subject Files Collection, William Way; ACT UP Philadelphia, “Fight the Global AIDS Crisis!” flyer, ACT UP Philadelphia Subject File, Subject Files Collection, William Way.

52 Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, “The Extent of the AIDS Disaster,” speech, July 9, 2000, http://www.tac.org.za/Documents/Speeches/wm000709.txt.

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The Durban conference also focused treatment activists’ scorn on five of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, which had recently announced the

Accelerating Access Initiative (AAI), a program through which they would provide donations of ARVs to the developing world. Treatment activists saw the program as a cynical public relations ploy that would allow corporations to bully struggling countries into renouncing parallel imports and compulsory licensing in exchange for free drugs. In a joint “Global Manifesto,” representatives of the South African Treatment Access

Campaign (TAC) and HealthGAP criticized such programs for allowing “laboratories to play lord of the manor while economizing (tax exemptions and other fiscal advantages) without having to lower prices. In any case,” they resolved, “it is not a long-term solution for nations or for people with HIV/AIDS.”53

Soon after Durban, Bill Clinton announced an aid program that global treatment activists criticized as superficial at best, and harmful at worst. The proposed loan program offered African countries $1 billion dollars per year, presumably on the condition that countries would have to purchase AIDS drugs from Western pharmaceutical companies, although at discounted rates. ACT UP Philadelphia, along their HealthGAP allies, opposed the plan, as it promised to increase the African debt burden through further loans, and for the requirement that countries purchase discounted drugs from pharmaceutical companies, which forestalled the possibility of compulsory licensing or parallel imports. For AIDS activists, the loan policy missed the mark in proposing an effective solution for treatment access in Africa in all but one respect. As

53 ACT UP/NY, “Global Manifesto: Access to Treatment for All...Now!,” July 9, 2000, http://www.actupny.org/reports/durban-access.html.

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Julie Davids told Reuters Health, “One thing that’s right… is the US is talking about billions of dollars, because it's really going to take billions of dollars to get this epidemic under control.”54

However much they opposed Clinton and Gore’s approach to the epidemic in

Africa, ACT UP Philadelphia predicted that the AIDS policies of a President Gore would be far better than those of his Republican opponent, Texas governor George W. Bush.

During his time as the state’s chief executive, Bush neglected the AIDS epidemic there, although Texas had the fourth highest caseload in the United States. They worried that

Bush would likely appoint Deborah Steelman, a lobbyist for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to the head of either HCFA or the Department of Health. Given his connection to Steelman, Bush also seemed likely to repeal Clinton’s executive order on TRIPS, undoing the movement’s progress on AIDS drugs for the developing world.

Finally, in a disturbing echo of former president Ronald Reagan, who did not utter the word “AIDS” in public until 1987, Bush had neither mentioned the disease during his time as governor, nor while on the campaign trail.

Fortunately for ACT UP Philadelphia, Bush was headed to town. The 2000

Republican National Convention in Philadelphia attracted not only the lights of American conservatism and hundreds of GOP delegates to the City of Brotherly Love, but representatives from a wide range of left causes, including environmentalists, anti-

54 Alka Agrawal, “AIDS Activists Protest US Loan to Africa to Buy AIDS Drugs,” JAMA HIV/AIDS Information Center, cached by Wayback Machine August 17, 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/20000817000547/http://www.ama- assn.org/special/hiv/newsline/reuters/07218314.htm; Tania Boler and David Archer, The Politics of Prevention: a Global Crisis in AIDS and Education (London: Pluto Press, 2008).

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globalization groups, and AIDS activists. On July 31, the opening day of the convention,

ACT UP Philadelphia hung a giant banner that read, “Bush + Drug Company Greed

Kills. Generic AIDS Drugs for Africa Now!” across the face of a billboard next to I-676, a main Center City thoroughfare. The same day, a rally march down Benjamin Franklin

Parkway organized by Unity 2000, a coalition of liberal and left organizations, drew thousands of peaceful protestors, including anti-death penalty and pro-choice activists.

The next day, however, activists clashed with police as the former locked down major intersections around Center City during rush hour traffic, while anarchists—clothed in black with handkerchiefs covering their faces—roamed the downtown area spraying and smashing windows. Whereas the Unity 2000 rally had been authorized by the city, many of the actions the following day took place without the prior knowledge of police or city officials.

The ACT UP/NY website made no mention of destructive anarchists, but charged that the lockdowns had been part of a huge demonstration against the “criminal injustice system,” that turned violent, “with and intimidation many of the same tactics the police commonly use against people of color, poor and working class communities and which this day of action was called to protest.” Meanwhile, the local press coverage highlighted the downtown property damage, which recalled street violence during the WTO meeting in Seattle. On the other hand, hundreds of protestors were jailed and, according to ACT UP/NY, processed deliberately slowly to prevent them from protesting three weeks later at the Democratic National Convention. Reports from inside the prison indicated that some had been isolated, beaten, or denied access to their

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medications. For a handful, including Asia Russell, the city set bail at an exorbitant $1 million.55

Police repression did not stop ACT UP Philadelphia from planning another “Bush zap” less than a month before the election in Washington, DC. On October 13, over 500 marched there, carrying coffins full of empty pill bottles to dump on the steps of the

Republican National Headquarters. In a press release on the ACT UP/NY website, Paul

Davis warned that if Bush rescinded the Clinton executive order on TRIPS, the “reversal will leave millions of Africans for dead, while soaking US taxpayers, [as] Americans will be forced to continue subsidizing the exorbitant profits of the price gouging pharmaceutical industry, while denying medicine to millions.” ACT UP Philadelphia also worried that support for abstinence-only sex education instead of safer sex alternatives would become presidential policy in a new Bush administration, and expressed concern that a President Bush would shrink drug treatment programs while accelerating the growth of the already massive prison industry as he had in Texas. Abdul Hakaim, who was arrested during the demonstration, put it baldly: “If Bush had his way, he would lock up everybody.”56

Once Bush took office in January 2001, ACT UP Philadelphia eyed the new president warily. Bush did not rescind Clinton's executive order on TRIPS for sub-

55 ACT UP/NY, “ACT UP @ Republican National Convention, Philadelphia July/August2000,” http://www.actupny.org/reports/rnc-7-31-00.html, accessed March 21, 2013.

56 ACT UP/NY, “1000 AIDS Activists Demonstrate Against G.W. Bush at Republican National HQ,” http://www.actupny.org/reports/bushzap10-13-00.html, accessed April 7, 2013.

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Saharan Africa, as some expected. Nevertheless, the group criticized the new administration for lackluster support for Secretary General Kofi Annan's call for a new "war chest" of funds to fight AIDS in the developing world. ACT UP

Philadelphia and their HealthGAP partners supported Annan's idea, hoping that a multilateral funding organization would insulate global treatment and prevention efforts from domestic politicking and the influence of industry lobbyists. In May 2001, Bush announced that the United States would contribute only $200 million dollars to the new

"global fund," far short of the $2 billion Annan requested, out of a $7 to 10 billion total goal. ACT UP Philadelphia and HealthGAP criticized Bush for the paltry commitment, especially in light of his "proposed tax cut that will largely benefit the richest citizens of the richest nation in the world." Moreover, they feared that a small donation from the

United States would have a "chilling effect" on donations from other G-8 nations, crippling the nascent funding effort.57

Throughout June 2001, ACT UP Philadelphia sent buses full of protesters to

Washington for a rally marking the twentieth anniversary of the epidemic. Chanting

"Medication for every nation!" and carrying signs that read "Stop Medical Apartheid from Philadelphia to South Africa," the ACT UP contingent split off from the rest of the march protest in front of the office of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobbying group. Later in the month, as UN delegates gathered in New York for a special session of the General Assembly to hash out the terms of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,

57 HealthGAP Coalition, “Action Alert: Failing the Test on Global AIDS,” May 10, 2001, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Urgent_Action/apic-051001.html; David E. Sanger, “Bush Says U.S. Will Give $200 Million to World AIDS Fund,” New York Times, May 12, 2001, A4.

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Tuberculosis, and Malaria, ACT UP Philadelphia sent buses carrying five hundred demonstrators to a "Stop Global AIDS" rally. They carried signs that read, "Trillions for tax cuts, death for people with AIDS," and, "Death by patents, drugs for Africa," calling out the Bush administration for both its lackluster commitment to the Global Fund and ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Marching down Avenue of the Americas, they chanted "Pills cost pennies! Greed costs lives!" and "We're here, we're wet, it's time to drop the debt!" after a thundershower soaked the demonstration.58

The June rallies garnered attention from liberal and left-leaning news outlets–The

Nation, Village Voice, and salon.com all ran features on ACT UP Philadelphia, highlighting the group's largely African American membership and ability to mobilize busloads of protesters as they "linked the local to the global." As Julie Davids told The

Nation, "Our members feel passionate about these issues because they realize that it's the same life-threatening forms of racism and economic injustice that impact their lives here in the United States." Speaking to salon.com, Kate Krauss put the group's work in moral terms, describing the "searing experience" of meeting other activists from around the world who were dying for lack of drugs to treat their opportunistic infections. She told

58 Lance Lattig, “Acting Up Again,” Village Voice, June 19, 2001, http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-06-19/news/acting-up-again/; Katie Krauss, “‘act_up_phi.txt’,” June 13, 2001, http://nyc.indymedia.org/media/text/act_up_phi.txt; Daryl Lindsey, “AIDS Activists Change Their Act,” Salon, June 25, 2001, http://www.salon.com/2001/06/25/aids_11/; Esther Kaplan, “The Mighty ACT UP Has Fallen: The Philadelphia Story,” POZ, November 2001, http://www.poz.com/articles/194_1278.shtml.

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the news site, "It's not much of a jump from caring about your local community which is being ravaged by AIDS to caring about a neighboring community."59

After the September 11th terrorist attacks three months later, ACT UP

Philadelphia members and others in the global treatment access movement worried that the emerging "war on terror" would sap momentum and resources from their own fight against AIDS in the developing world. Two months after the attacks, the group held a town hall meeting in North Philadelphia, led by John Bell, a Malawian activist, and

Reverend Isaac Miller of the church that hosted the meeting, to discuss ongoing work on

HIV and AIDS "in the midst of a new storm." A flyer for the meeting highlighted the daily worldwide death toll from AIDS–over double the number of fatalities in the attacks on Washington and New York–"primarily in African nations suffering from intense debt burden and the impact of U.S.-led international trade policies that benefit big companies, not people in need of dedication." The flyer drew a parallel between the picture of the global pandemic and "our communities and cities… struggling for resources for health, education and housing, while leaders in Washington, DC cry out for more tax cuts for the rich to promote 'stability.'"60

Nevertheless, ACT UP Philadelphia found some opportunities in the aftermath of

September 11th to bring treatment issues in the global AIDS epidemic back into . At the beginning of November, ACT UP sent buses carrying hundreds of protestors to Washington DC for a demonstration outside the office of Robert Zoellick,

59 Lattig, “Acting Up Again”; Lindsey, “AIDS Activists”.

60 ACT UP Philadelphia, “Weathering the Storm” flyer, November 14, 2001, ACT UP Philadelphia Subject File, Subject Files Collection, William Way.

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the Trade Representative appointed by Bush, as Zoellick readied for a World Trade

Organization meeting in Doha, Qatar. The group connected the recent anthrax scare, in which letters containing spores of the deadly bacterium were mailed to major news outlets and members of Congress, to the ongoing dispute over pharmaceutical patent rights. Asia Russell told the Washington Post that Bayer, which held the patent on Cipro, a powerful antibiotic, stood to "profit considerably" from the anthrax scare, while "a domestic antibiotics stockpile would be built up more quickly and cheaply if Bayer's monopoly were set aside." The demonstration, or at least the anthrax threat, may have had some effect–in Doha, the WTO affirmed the right of poor nations to compulsory license drugs in cases of medical emergency, a measure that Zoellick had previously opposed. Nevertheless, ACT UP Philadelphia and other AIDS activist groups worried that the new war in Afghanistan would divert attention away from the fight against AIDS in Africa; donations to the Global Fund had slowed considerably, and as Asia Russell told the Philadelphia Tribune, "The United States has spent more time and money bailing out the airline industry than investing in life-extending medications for Africa."61

The following April, ACT UP Philadelphia, ACT UP/NY, and others gathered once again in Washington, DC, joining celebrities and lawmakers for a rally that coincided with Congressional budget debates. Chanting "medication for every nation," they demanded that Congress increase the US contribution to the Global Fund from

Bush's requested $200 million to over a billion dollars, bringing the nation's total

61 “U.S. Stance on Patents Decried,” The Washington Post, November 2, 2001, B2; David Crary, “War in Mideast Diverting Attention from War on AIDS,” Philadelphia Tribune, , 2001, 8C.

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spending on AIDS in the developing world to a total of $2.5 billion in 2003. In a press release for the action, Paul Davis warned:

Right now the [Global Fund] is too starved for funds to accomplish its goals…. Unless Congress turns Bush's stingy 2003 budget request into the $2.5 billion experts agree is the U.S. fair share, 2003 will be another year of business as usual–another 3 million dead from AIDS.62

The following November, they returned to Washington to protest the president's lack of progress on AIDS both at home and abroad, demanding debt cancellation for impoverished countries, and greater access to HIV drugs in the developing world through contributions to the Global Fund and in the United States through increased funding for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, along with support for a pending bill that would extend Medicaid coverage to people with HIV whose infection had not yet progressed to full-blown AIDS. They also called for a "Presidential AIDS Initiative," a sustained, multibillion dollar annual "investment" by the United States to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases in developing world, half of which would be disbursed through the

Global Fund. The plan also included support for parallel importing by countries that lacked manufacturing infrastructure to produce their own generic drugs, and debt cancellation to free up revenue in poor countries for spending on education and health care.63

62 ACT UP et al, “AIDS Activists, , Rep. Rally at Capital against Global AIDS Disaster,” Press Release, April 4, 2002, http://www.actupny.org/reports/gap4-10-02.html.

63 Stop Global AIDS Now, “Money For AIDS, Not For War,” November 22, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20021121193641/http://www.stopglobalaidsnow.org/.

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President George W. Bush’s announcement six months later of his President’s

Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a $15 billion, five-year plan to provide antiretroviral treatment to two million people, prevent seven million new infections, and provide care for ten million came as a significant victory for ACT UP Philadelphia and its global treatment access allies, and one for which the group has claimed some credit.64

However, the program also fell short on a number of issues. Although the funding package included a $1 billion donation to the Global Fund, the bulk of the money was disbursed through the office of the Global AIDS Coordinator with Congressional oversight, which prohibited support for needle exchange programs and promoted abstinence-only education. Furthermore, Randall Tobias, who served as Global AIDS

Coordinator for the program’s first three years, had also been the CEO of the drug manufacturer Eli Lilly and Company, pointing up the president’s deep ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Whereas ACT UP Philadelphia, Health GAP, and other had attacked the Clinton administration for confusing the solvency of corporate donors with the health of the world’s poor, PEPFAR further blurred the two.

Still, PEPFAR made some headway in its first few years, measurably averting deaths from HIV and AIDS in the program’s “focus countries.” The standards for

PEPFAR eligibility also trickled back to the United States, in a sense. Soon after taking office in 2009, President implemented a national strategy for addressing

64 Jose de Marco et al, “Does the AIDS Movement Still Need ACT UP? Lessons from ACT UP Philadelphia on Changing Tactics for a Changing Epidemic” (poster presentation, XIX International AIDS Conference, Washington, D.C., July 22-27, 2012), http://pag.aids2012.org/EPosterHandler.axd?aid=7748; Jose de Marco interview; Davids interview.

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HIV and AIDS; up until that point, twenty eight years into the epidemic, no such plan existed in the United States, although PEPFAR required countries received aid to have their own plans in place. And although the CARE Act has dramatically expanded the pool of resources available to combat AIDS in the United States since

Congress first passed the bill in 1991, the ongoing severity of the epidemic in black

America begs for more, or at least more effective, HIV prevention and treatment among

African Americans. As Pernessa Seele reflects, “Of course, we needed a PEPFAR for the

US as well.”65

As ACT UP Philadelphia evolved during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the group not only kept alive an activist phenomenon widely presumed to have died out, but also shifted its center of gravity from relatively affluent white gay men to poor people of color. Locally as well as globally, the group sought to increase access among poor people to medications that would extend and improve the lives of people living with HIV and

AIDS. In so doing, they also pushed for changes to free market-based policies which, they argued, stymied access to begin with–Medicare privatization in Philadelphia and

Pennsylvania, and patent globalization and structural adjustment throughout the developing world. In both cases, they helped to win important victories that gave treatment to people in need, but that left the architectures of Medicaid managed care in place and Africa buried under a mountain of foreign debt. Nonetheless, the group’s success may also be measured in the poor, HIV-positive people of color ACT UP

65 Eran Bendavid and Jayanta Bhattacharya, “The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Africa: An Evaluation of Outcomes,” Annals of Internal Medicine 150, no. 10 (May 19, 2009): 688–W:122; Seele interview.

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Philadelphia empowered as advocates for the health of people in South Philadelphia and

South Africa alike. By connecting AIDS to economic inequality, both locally and globally, they sought to expose the relationship among medicine, politics, and capital in a globalized world, envisioning a more humane alternative in the process.

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CONCLUSION

At a conference that I attended early on in this project, I introduced myself to a documentary filmmaker who had screened part of her work on AIDS in the American

South. In a haunting clip, she showed the devastation that rural African American communities have suffered as the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic shifts south of the

Mason-Dixon Line. When I told her that I was working on a project about African

American AIDS activism, she asked me in all seriousness, “Was there any?” I was taken aback by her question. Perhaps she defined “activism” more narrowly than I have here, as

I include advocacy and service provision alongside more dramatic protest tactics— although, as we have seen, African Americans affected by HIV and AIDS engaged in all three.

Her question struck at the issue driving this project, that although racial disparities showed up in the epidemiological data on AIDS beginning in the middle

1980s, African Americans’ responses to the epidemic remain woefully under- documented. Overall, the literature on AIDS politics thus casts African Americans as tragic but passive victims of the epidemic, and does a disservice to the African American men and women who worked to bring attention to AIDS in their communities. Moreover, studying the work of African American AIDS activists may point to more effective

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interventions against the spread of HIV in black communities, where the epidemic remains dire.1

Taking into account responses from black communities to HIV and AIDS expands the set of actors in our emerging historical narrative of AIDS activism. As the filmmaker’s comment suggests, African Americans’ contributions to grassroots organizing around the epidemic have gone largely unrecognized. This sense has been reinforced as of late by both scholarly literature and popular film. ’s recent

Oscar-nominated documentary of ACT UP New York and the Treatment Action Group

(TAG), How To Survive a Plague, portrays AIDS activism as the fight for access to and reform of the experimental drug trials and approvals process at the federal level, and the movement as populated almost entirely by gay white men. To be sure, TAG and its predecessor, ACT UP New York’s Treatment and Data Group, helped to change HIV infection from a death sentence into a chronic illness, allowing millions with access to the new drugs lead longer and more comfortable lives. But to represent their work as the end all and be all of AIDS activism limits the politics of the epidemic to the fight for medical

1 Cathy Cohen’s Boundaries of Blackness, though foundational to any study of AIDS and race, inquires far more about the lack of activism among leading national black organizations than about the shape and content of African American AIDS activism where and when it actually took place. Others, such as Jacob Levenson’s The Secret Epidemic, show the suffering of black families affected by AIDS, but give little sense of a constructive response from within black communities. See Levenson, The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America. (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

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solutions and reassures us, the audience, that although new HIV infections continue, the most important battle of the day has been won.2

Recognizing the work of African American AIDS activists expands the terrain of

AIDS politics beyond this narrow biomedical framework. African American AIDS activists pushed for drug trials and price reductions, as with the Nation of Islam’s

Kemron advocacy or ACT UP Philadelphia’s work for global treatment access. However, they also connected HIV prevention to the social determinants of health they saw as driving the epidemic, including segregation, poverty, and the psychological effects of racial discrimination and homophobia. African American AIDS activism thus points us toward a more radical vision of AIDS politics, moving beyond the quest for a “magic bullet,” and toward identifying the ways that inequality in American society has shaped the course of the epidemic. At the same time, the story of African American AIDS activism includes some unlikely figures, including officials from the Nation of Islam, who paired critiques of racism and colonialism with conservative gender and sexual politics. In any case, these stories point to a more complex and expansive historical view of AIDS activism in the United States.

Bringing African American AIDS activists into the emerging larger narrative of the epidemic also expands our timeline of political responses to AIDS backwards and forwards. Recognizing that the work of black AIDS activists fits into a long trajectory of

2 David France, T. Woody Richman, and Tyler H. Walk, How To Survive a Plague, DVD, dir. by David France (New York, IFC: 2012); cf. Ali Contrell and Jim Hubbard, United in Anger, film, dir. by Jim Hubbard (2012). The latter shows some of ACT UP’s campaigns beyond treatment access, but has yet to be released commercially on DVD.

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black health activism establishes an alternative genealogy to one that locates roots of the grassroots response to HIV and AIDS in queer liberation and gay health activism. At the same time, recognizing African American AIDS activism brings the timeline up to the present day. Much of the literature on the history of AIDS politics ends in the middle

1990s, around the time that most ACT UP chapters disappeared or went into decline.

However, a handful of ACT UP chapters, and particularly ACT UP Philadelphia, have carried the movement well into the 21st century, even as their focus and membership has shifted. 3

Just as the history of African American AIDS activism, and of black communities’ experiences with the disease more broadly, must be integrated into the history of the AIDS, historians of African American life since the late 1970s must consider the effect of the epidemic on the course of black history in the United States.

While this study has shown that African American AIDS activists highlighted the role of

3 Although she includes a coda discussing how the “AIDS community” has changed in the years since Congress passed the Ryan White CARE Act in the early 1990s, Susan Chambré ends the narrative portion of her study around 1993; Jennifer Brier and Stephen Inrig both conclude theirs a few years later. Chambré, dealing with AIDS politics in New York City, deals with African Americans’ response to the epidemic only as evidenced in black leaders’ opposition to needle exchange programs. Inrig ends his study with the advent of protease inhibitors in the middle 1990s. Brier’s final chapter deals with the dissolution of ACT UP, although she includes an epilogue on South Africa and the Treatment Action Campaign in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She argues that the center of gravity for rights-based activism by people with AIDS has shifted to the global South, and particularly to South Africa, although the history of ACT UP Philadelphia’s work on global treatment access presented here suggests a somewhat different interpretation. Other, older works such as Stephen Epstein’s classic Impure Science and Cathy Cohen’s Boundaries of Blackness predate this later period of AIDS activism. See Susan M. Chambré, Fighting For Our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease (Rutgers University Press, 2006); Brier, Infectious Ideas; Epstein, Impure Science.

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social determinants of health in perpetuating the epidemic to mobilize black communities, historians should also consider the reverse. If segregation, unemployment, and mass incarceration all facilitated the spread of HIV in myriad ways, how did the severity of the epidemic affect the social and spatial mobility of African Americans? Can we measure the political economic impact of AIDS on the United States and the world, especially for those who have been hardest hit by the disease?

Finally, incorporating the work of African American AIDS activists also sheds light on international and transnational grassroots responses to the epidemic. Although many black men and women in the United States bristled at talk of the pandemic’s

“African origins,” the global AIDS crisis also offered the opportunity for African

Americans to forge new affinities with people in sub-Saharan Africa and around the world. For some, as with The Nation of Islam or The Balm in Gilead, the epidemic called for an exchange of treatments or prevention models across the Atlantic, premised on the idea that, because of a common racial background, Africans and African Americans would benefit from similar interventions against the spread of HIV and AIDS. Others, such as the Black Leadership Commission on AIDS and Gay Men of African Descent, looked to African tradition for a set of values to guide HIV prevention programs. At the same time, as in the case of ACT UP Philadelphia, the epidemic also generated a sense among some African Americans of common belonging with black Africans within a global underclass, based on a shared struggle against structural inequities.

At some point, a vaccine or cure will likely bring the AIDS pandemic to an end, or at least under control. However, while biomedical advances may further contain the spread of HIV, they will not ameliorate the social and economic inequalities that drive

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the epidemic—the very same conditions to which the actors in this story tried to draw attention. Vaccines and antiretroviral drugs will not bring an end to segregation, poverty, and prejudice. As long as these remain, those who have been marginalized by these factors will be more vulnerable to the next great plague, as well as a host of other, more quotidian medical ailments. The root causes of the epidemic in black America can only be resolved when we as a society decide that no lives are expendable.

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