In honor of World AIDS Day, the below text is the speech I gave at the Reasons We Remember Vigil for AIDS Walk San Diego, Friday, Sept. 26.
1981 was the beginning – the early 1980s – yes, the worst of times and the best of times; the worst of times for our community and others; for our family and friends. But, the best time for showing true compassion and love of our community. As we lit the candle of awareness and care, other communities were able to see that this disease affected everyone and all communities.
In the early 1980s I was in New York for a civil rights conference and I remember first hearing the talk and growing rumors of a “gay cancer” or “GRID.” Soon those rumors and talks became a reality and AIDS hit San Diego.
Hal Frank formed the San Diego AIDS Project to alert and educate the community. News stories soon appeared that AIDS could be caught by touching, kissing, in the air and by the bite of a mosquito! Panic and fear gripped America and soon we realized we were alone in this battle under a president who did not even mention the word AIDS until six years into the epidemic.
I remember attending one of the AIDS Project’s meetings at the MCC Social Hall where it was announced that we had successfully sent a San Diegan living with AIDS to receive care from two organizations in Los Angeles and San Francisco because we in San Diego had no support network. I called a group of activists together and we formed the AIDS Assistance Fund to provide food, assistance and direct services to people with AIDS. We soon started assisting people with burials and funerals; going to these weekly became a way of life for all of us!
And let me say here and now, that the women of our community were unsung heroes during these dark early days of AIDS. Laurie Leonard and her mother started Mama’s Kitchen; Susan Jester started our first AIDS Walk; Barbara Peabody started AIDS Arts Alive; Ruth Hendricks began Special Delivery; the women of the San Diego Democratic Club started “Blood Sisters” because their gay brothers could not donate their blood. I remember heroes like: Bridget Wilson, Gloria Johnson, Irma Munoz, Teresa Oyos, Mary McCarthy and, yes, Joan Rivers and Elizabeth Taylor, the first celebrities to speak out and join our fight. God bless these women and countless other women who were there with us at the beginning, when most people ran the other way.
In those early, dark years Larry Kramer was right: Silence = Death. In San Diego; Albert Bell started an ACT-UP chapter as we were indeed fighting for our lives. There were no corporate sponsors or large businesses supporting our AIDS organizations in the early years but, as usual, we could count on the bars; the drag shows, the leather community, the Sisters and, yes, the adult industry. The Vasic family of F Street Corp gave over a quarter of a million dollars in those early years.
Unsung heroes were business people like Chris Shaw, Doug Snyder, Carla Coshow, Frank Stiriti, Gene Burkard, Darl Edwards, Rick Ford, Lou and Carol Arko, the Ben Dillinghams and so many more. They kept our AIDS Food Bank shelves always full.
But, we San Diegans knew that AIDS had no borders and we extended our hands and compassion to our brothers and sisters in Tijuana. I will never forget when an AIDS Activist in Mexico contacted me and told me that the coroner would not pick up the bodies of people who had died of AIDS unless the family provided a body bag. We immediately held a benefit at Dillon’s (now RICH’s) to purchase body bags.
And then Mayor Maureen O’Connor and her Chief of Staff Ben provided body bags from the City of San Diego ( quietly, because it was against the law.)
We must always remember heroes like Dr. Brad Truax, MMC and Rev. David Farrell, John Ciaccio, Scott Carlson, Ron Ferrero, Pierre Rivet, Bill Beck, Carolina Ramos, Gary Reese, George Havensfield, Tom Homann, Chris Kehoe, Big Mike Phillips, Rick Kerman, Phil Baldwin and Dr. Chris Matthews of the Owens Clinic, Dan O’Shea of Being Alive, Terry Cunningham (who to this day has dedicated 30 years of his life to this fight), Father Nick Christira and the AIDS Chaplaincy Program and so many others.And we must never ever forget our LGBT Community Center that has been with us every step of the way. Yes, I will never forget those dark early years of AIDS and we must always remember and not forget those heroes and people we lost.
For it was such a lonely dark time that when we approached the Catholic Bishop to say a Christmas Mass for people living with AIDS, he refused, and not till we threatened to picket at his annual Christmas Eve Mass at St. Joseph’s Cathedral did he relent and have a Mass said.
Yes, Reasons We Remember, as I have said so many times: A community, indeed, a movement that does not know where it came from does not really know where it is going. So tonight I have a very special announcement to make about something long overdue that finally our city will be joining other cities across the nation indeed around the world in remembering the over 7,735 San Diegans who have died from AIDS.
Tonight I officially announce to you that our Mayor Kevin Faulconer has answered the request of the GLBT Historic Task Force and will be forming a Mayoral Task Force for an AIDS Memorial – a place for us to go to remember our brothers and sisters who have died of AIDS. We will always remember them. And I am proud to announce that the mayor’s wife – the first lady of San Diego, Katherine Faulconer – has asked to co-chair the AIDS Memorial Task Force.
So in closing, in 2014 one San Diegan a week still dies from AIDS and more than one new infection is reported daily in San Diego. I say to you that we must renew our focus and priorities in this ongoing battle of over three decades.
My brothers and sisters, I say to you: We all have AIDS, till none of us have AIDS. We all have AIDS, till none of us have AIDS. Reasons We Remember. God bless you all.
