THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Yasmin Nair

Activist and writer

I came of age after the peak years of the AIDS crisis. However, my politics as a queer radical were shaped by what I learned about the anger and resistance of groups like ACT UP. Being queer meant understanding and exposing the links between massive governmental indifference, the greed of pharmaceutical companies and the pressure to be 'good' gays who would shut up and die.

During the AIDS crisis, queers shifted the paradigms of healthcare. They made themselves experts on inaccessible pharmaceutical regimens and demanded greater accountability on the part of physicians and drug companies. AIDS activism pushed for extending healthcare to all. HIV/AIDS now affects over 40 million worldwide, most of whom have no access to medications, and a disproportionate number of people of color in the U.S. Yet, gays today forge ahead single-mindedly towards their holy grail: gay marriage. Today's gay movement forgets the painful lessons and history of AIDS and a broader vision has dwindled to a single cause. Gay marriage threatens any vestige of progressive social justice, particularly in the realm of healthcare. Queers once stood for expanding healthcare to all. Today, the 'movement' insists that gays should be able to get married in order to receive the healthcare benefits of their partners. It says nothing about 40 million uninsured Americans. Where is the queer impulse to think collectively about social justice and not just the status quo?

When I think about what AIDS means to me, I worry about our collective forgetting and our inability to think beyond the inadequate ideals of tolerance and equality. Neither one has brought us a vaccine or a cure. Where we go from here depends on whom we care about outside our narrow self-interests. Twenty-five years is too long.

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George Martinez

Patient-rights advocate

I think of my partner Jim Hogan passing away in 1994 of Hepatitis C and HIV. I have been living with HIV/AIDS since 1987 à¾" years ) and hepatitis B for 37 years. I have also been blessed to have had a liver transplant in May 2004. Yes, I have lived through the days when my partners and friends were dying due to AIDS and the complications associated with the disease.

I am blessed to be here today, thanks to my primary physician who responded to my diseases ( HIV and Hepatitis B ) as a combined treatment. In 1996, the 'triple combination' became available to myself and many others, and deaths due to AIDS started to gradually decrease due to these 'life-saving' drugs. 3TC and Tenofovir ( coming along in phase III testing ) helped to save my life and kept my 'end-stage liver disease' ( diagnosed in 1999 ) condition stable and I held on to life until May 2004, when organ transplantation became available to me.

Living with HIV/AIDS is hard. However, living with AIDS and co-infection ( e.g., liver disease, kidney disease, pancreatitis, heart disease or various cancers ) is even harder. I believe that those of us who have survived ten-plus years with HIV have harder challenges due to the conditions of our organs and the many prescription and non-prescription drugs we take. While today's treatments help in keeping our viruses under control, the toxicities of these drugs do have their effects on our organs and we will be faced with deaths in the HIV community. Improved regimens are needed for HIV co-infections such as hepatitis B and C as well as other opportunistic diseases. The time for looking 'outside the HIV/AIDS box' is now.

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Mark Ishaug

Executive Director, AIDS Foundation of Chicago

When we talk about HIV/AIDS, like many life-threatening diseases, we often only talk about the numbers. If it's not the 25th anniversary of the epidemic, the 10th year since the advent of protease inhibitors or the 20th year in an agency's history, we talk about the estimated 40 million people worldwide who are living with HIV/AIDS, the 3 million who died from the disease last year or federal budget cuts totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.

But this epidemic is NOT about the numbers; it's about people. It's about the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children and lovers and friends we have lost. It's about those living with HIV who display courage and commitment and faith every day of their lives. And it's about the vibrant community of service providers, advocates, family and friends who rally together to fight for fair and compassionate HIV/AIDS policies and programs.

Staggering statistics are a compelling reason to keep up the good fight, but let's not just recite numbers and plan the next commemoration. Let's keep running and walking and marathoning and biking and singing and dancing and eating chocolate and playing croquet and marching and picketing and screaming and e-mailing and doing whatever else it takes to end this pandemic. By doing these things we honor the loved ones we've lost, we cherish those living with HIV and we help stop new infections.

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Eric E. Whitaker, M.D., M.P.H.

Director, Illinois Department of Public Health

A quarter century … AIDS has revealed the best, as well as the worst of society.

As a physician treating AIDS patients, first at San Francisco General Hospital and then on Chicago's South Side, I think I've seen it all. First off there was the nation's indifference to the plight of gay men with the disease, followed by open hostility toward them. AIDS sufferers were denied insurance benefits, fired from their jobs and ostracized by those closest to them. Legislation was enacted that further stigmatized those with AIDS. Homophobia was rampant. And, recently, I have seen AIDS become a disease that has taken the heaviest burden on African-American men and women.

On the other side of the spectrum, I have witnessed tremendous displays of love and compassion by those with the disease and those caring for them. I have seen urgency in the scientific field to conquer this insidious disease. I have seen bedridden patients run marathons after getting viable medicines. I have increasingly seen churches, whose doors were previously closed, open to those infected. I have seen government become more involved, providing life-saving medicines, safe-sex messages and special programs, such as BASUAH ( Brothers and Sisters United Against HIV/AIDS ) .

What I trust the future will bring is continuing compassion and love; strength for those battling the illness; better prevention in communities of color; and the promise of a cure, very soon.

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Greg Van Hyfte

Mental health counselor, Project VIDA

I was 19 when I first encountered someone with AIDS. Through serendipity, I found myself attending a workshop on energy healing at the National Catholic AIDS Network Conference, held annually at Loyola University. I met Michael at that workshop, and from the moment I saw his lanky body rise from beneath a sheet on a massage table, we connected. Later that evening, while holding him in his dorm-room bed, my heart ached for him to be loved. 'Usually when people find out I'm HIV, they won't even touch me,' he said. Before we parted after the conference, he told me, 'I'll be your angel, watching over you so that they don't do to you what they did to me.' Not quite understanding that at the time, I felt his presence with me in the years that followed. And despite several attempts at locating him, I never heard from him again.

Ten years later, I see many Michaels. Over the past four years, I have counseled a man whose nephews are yanked away from him because their mother fears a hug can infect; a woman whose church-going husband messed around with men on the side and brought her home a package of shattered trust; an activist whose spirit reigned on as he tried desperately to learn how to be taken care of; and a person with failing health changing genders while trying to make a name and face for herself against multiple minority identities. I see HIV/AIDS not only as a debilitating medical condition, but also as a symptom of widespread rejection, divisiveness, isolation and fear, amidst a deep need for intimacy and human connection. The desire to heal this brokenness at the most intimate level of connection is what brought me into this field—and it's what keeps me here.

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Jessica Waddell Lewinstein

Daughter of Dr. Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Games, and Sara Waddell Lewinstein, also a Gay Games pioneer

The other day I was asked the question, 'How has the HIV/AIDS virus impacted my life?' This is a question I have long had to face yet never truly addressed. I have been aware of this virus, and I have known this virus for as along as I can remember, because when I think of it I immediately associate it with my childhood, and more so with my father.

My father was a great man who unfortunately was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1982—when I was about two years old—and died of it around a year later, two months before I had my third birthday. This fatal virus can be held responsible for me growing up without a father, and for my mother having to play the role of both parental figures throughout my life. I know this HIV/AIDS because it has claimed the life of others since my father and exposed me to a world of death at an age when I should only know life.

HIV/AIDS had forced me into a world of reality when others my age lived in complete fantasy; and while they were letting their imagination run wild as they concocted tales of fairies, dragons and Prince Charming, I fantasized and prayed for my father to wake up from a long sleep with the touch of a kiss. I fantasized about my father coming home from a long adventure that took him around the world until it brought him back home to me.

Because of HIV/AIDS I was stripped of living the perfect childhood in the perfect family and with the perfect life. It is purely my mother's strength and the memories I hold on to and cherish with all my heart that has helped me to create a new ideal and a new appreciation for what is left. It is because of my mother that I continue to be strong, and continue to pursue the path to happiness. Yet I can never forget that although my father's life has ended, the virus continues to live on all over the world and continues to claim the lives of innocent men, women and children every day.

The HIV/AIDS virus serves as constant reminder to be smart, to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to me in my life, and to enjoy and be grateful for every moment and for all the time that I have with those I love and cherish, because you never know when they will be taken away.

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Association of Latino

Men for Action

Twenty-five years have passed since the government of the United States acknowledged the existence of a disease that has dramatically and disproportionately impacted the Latino community. While Latinos comprise 14 percent of the American population, 20 percent of the incidents of HIV/AIDS are found within the Latino community of our nation.

Officials have developed more educational programs than most can count, yet the virus continues to spread among poor minority populations. The impact on our community is dramatic. In Chicago, over 22 percent of the new cases of HIV diagnosed are in the Latino community.

As a community, we must take the steps necessary to educate ourselves about this disease. Each of us must take the time to learn what we can do to assist those in our community that are HIV positive or have AIDS. It is our community and our responsibility.

The Association of Latino Men for Action ( ALMA ) provides one arena that gay, bisexual and questioning Latino men can come for assistance, referrals and educational materials related to HIV/AIDS. ALMA works closely with other community agencies to ensure access to information related to this epidemic.

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Karen Sendziak

President, Gerber/Hart Library

Gerber/Hart Library began in 1981, the same year as the emergence of the AIDS pandemic. From its inception, Gerber/Hart has collected the newspapers that reported on this new threat to LGBT existence, the brochures attempting to disseminate accurate information, the handbills clamoring for protests and the records of organizations founded to make sense of the incomprehensible. We have collected the music, literature and audiovisual history of an epidemic that transformed post-Stonewall complacency into unflinching heroic activism.

Gerber/Hart lost both its founder, Gregory Sprague, and its longtime librarian, Joseph Gregg, to AIDS in 1987. We invite everyone in the community to view our exhibition on AIDS, 'Remembering Lives, Fighting a Plague: 25 Years of AIDS,' which will be open until the end of August.

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Mary Ann Childers

Anchor and medical reporter, CBS-2 Chicago News:

I remember well covering the first Chicago cases of HIV/AIDS in the early '80s—and trying to convince skeptical news managers this infection was not a problem for just one group of people, or one geographical area.

Since then, I've mourned the death of a close high-school buddy. I've lost more than one respected colleague. I've danced at the wedding of a longtime co-worker ... only to cry at the funeral of his wife a few years later.

We have all lost so many friends.

Some stories I've reported have been encouraging, especially those about new, more effective drugs and a decrease in mother-to-child infection rates. It's also been gratifying to see how Chicago grew, over the years, to embrace and support the AIDS Walk. There sure weren't a lot of big-money supporters—or a lot of publicity—those first few years.

But the story I want most to report ... is the story of the cure. Too many years have passed. It's time for this story to end.

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Rob Hadley

Community activist

I had just graduated from high school. Oddly enough, it was the same high school that the current executive director of the AIDS Foundation went to. We were Cub Scouts together, living in the same suburb but had no idea that each other was gay. We also had no awareness of HIV, or GRID as it was first called.

I've only been HIV-positive since 1988 but I do recall Bob Hope during the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986: 'I just heard the Statue of Liberty has AIDS. Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.'

Earlier that year, President Ronald Reagan ( it's even hard to type that name ) didn't even utter AIDS until four years into this pandemic. Gays were demonized by the extreme right wing. Reagan adviser Pat Buchanan editorialized in 1983, 'The poor homosexuals—they have declared war against nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.'

More people today are learning that they are HIV-positive and those are from communities of color. The joke, 'The hardest part of telling your parents that you're HIV-positive is to convince them that you're Haitian' is even further from any sense of humor or truth.

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Justin Hayford

Volunteer, AIDS Legal Council of Chicago

Twenty-five years ago, AIDS was, ironically enough, a powerful unifying force in the gay community. Everyone was under threat, not just from a mysterious retrovirus but, more importantly, from the newly vitalized forces of neo-conservatism eager to see all of us—gay men and lesbians—eliminated from public life. That tragically galvanizing sense of urgency forged new political alliances; Chicago's last big ACT UP demonstration saw thousands of gay men risking arrest to protest the shortage of AIDS beds for poor women at Cook County Hospital. But as the years have passed and AIDS has been increasingly reconstructed as solely a medical problem best handled by scientific 'experts' ( who too often view people with HIV as little but CD4 counts and viral loads ) , our community has surrendered much of its hard-won authority and splintered into wary factions—positives vs. negatives, gay men vs. lesbians and condom champions vs. barebackers. AIDS is still a political crisis requiring cohesive advocacy rather than factious squabbling. As Michael Callen famously pronounced in the early days of the epidemic, only politics can cure AIDS.

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Rev. Stan Sloan

CEO, Chicago House and Social Service Agency

As the Midwest's first provider of housing for people with AIDS, the changes in our housing facilities themselves reflect the realities of changes in HIV/ AIDS over the last 25 years. Originally, our facilities most closely resembled hospice care, offering dignified end of life care. Today, our five housing facilities offer the supports and programs needed to rebuild whole lives after losing almost everything to HIV/AIDS. The lives of our residents are still far from easy, but the progress has been great.