Editor’s note: Jenifer Lewis’s memoir, THE MOTHER OF BLACK HOLLYWOOD, is hitting shelves and we thought it the perfect time to revisit this steadfast AIDS advocate.

Wired for Change
Actress and Black AIDS Institute Honoree Jenifer Lewis serves up her bawdy humor and sharp wit with A&U’s Dann Dulin and gets down to brass tacks about personal loss, fighting the pandemic, and giving hell to politicians

Photographed by Jordan Ancel

Jenifer Lewis is a diva’s diva. Sure, so the word “diva” has been way overused in our culture and is almost a cliché, but Lewis has really earned her diva status. With her fiery, no-holds-barred persona, you might think that she would overwhelm, but Lewis exudes enough warmth and goodwill to win over even the most timid soul. She’s skillfully applied her abundant talents as a singer, dancer, actor, songwriter, and comedienne to wow audiences. You probably know Lewis from her current role as receptionist Lana Hawkins on Lifetime’s Strong Medicine. Her other TV credits include Girlfriends and A Different World, and on the big screen she’s appeared in The Cookout, What’s Love Got To Do With It, and Sister Act. On Broadway, she costarred in Eubie and Dreamgirls, and she has toured in her one woman show, The Diva is Dismissed. (In the early eighties, she was even one of Bette Midler’s Harlettes). Jenifer wears another hat, as well. She is a committed AIDS activist. In fact, last year, she was honored by the Black AIDS Institute at their annual gala event as one of their “Heroes in the Struggle”—African-Americans who have been on the frontlines of AIDS.

Lewis has lost nearly two hundred friends to the disease. Ironically, just one week prior to the Black AIDS Institute event, Jenifer’s beloved cousin, Ronald Stewart (“Ronnie”), forty-one, succumbed to the disease. She was shocked, as she never knew that he was HIV-positive. Ronnie and Jenifer were raised together, and, for the past ten years, he had lived with her. Stewart was a hair stylist whose salon, Situations, had such celebrity clients as Angela Bassett and the members of Boyz II Men. “He was my first Pip to my Gladys,” Jenifer reminisces sullenly from her suburban home at the foot of the hills that enclose the San Fernando Valley. “Ronnie was always a caretaker. I brought him out here from St. Louis to help me raise my daughter.”

She glances out the kitchen’s bay window at the luscious swimming pool nestled in the well-manicured backyard. Moments before, this vivacious, ribald entertainer had been animated, energetic, and playfully talking like a truck driver. Now she strikes a serious pose. “What was so horrible about it was that Ronnie never told anyone. He stayed in denial. He never got treated,” she says. He kept his condition completely to himself. And since he didn’t physically deteriorate, like many people living with AIDS do, his secret was kept till the very end.

Jenifer, forty-eight, sits at the table of her sunny yellow kitchen clad in a fire-engine-red silk poncho, blue jeans, and short black boots. The ensemble is topped off with tiny gold earrings. It’s a simple yet elegant look. Her hair is pulled back tightly into a bun, which frames her youthful face. Lewis is candid, headstrong, and feisty, with a devious, delightful wit.

As Lewis remembers her cousin, her toy poodle, Cashew, starts to bark. “Who are these fuckin’ people?!” she asks jokingly, as she peers out the window. “Oh, it’s the gardeners. Hi, Juan,” she yells, as he revs up the leaf blower. The sound is deafening. We contemplate moving to another room but instead, Juan moves to a different area of the yard. Jenifer begins again, but then the phone rings. She answers. “Honey, I’m in the middle of an interview. I haven’t time for the bullshit. What is it?!” she pleads. It’s her writing partner, Mark Alton Brown. They’re presently working on a satire of Sunset Boulevard (a photograph from the movie prominently hangs in Lewis’s living room) called Ventura Boulevard. Several years ago, Lewis starred in Lifetime’s mockumentary, Jackie’s Back, written by Brown and Dee LaDuke. Brown apparently asks Jenifer who is interviewing her and she replies, “It’s A&U, the AIIIDS divas. Uh? Far from dress extras and carhops. They’re fabulous people and they’re gorgeous, too. I like pretty people in my house. I’m so glad these mothafuckers ain’t ugly ’cause I wouldn’t tell ’em shit.” For a couple of minutes Lewis listens to the monologue he’s just written for the project. She’s excited and intense.

After she hangs up the phone, Jenifer is calm. “See how I’ve changed…because it is so brilliant.” She sighs deeply. “It’s beyond.” This is one of her favorite phrases. She returns to the matter at hand. “I’ve known many people who have fallen to AIDS: pianists, makeup artists, backup singers, choreographers, wardrobe crew, and people who raised me [in the theater]: Michael Bennett, Michael Peters, Tom Eyen, everybody in the Eubie chorus, everybody in the Dreamgirls chorus. They’re gone! They’re gone.” Her voice breaks.

“I’ve literally performed in every state, except Montana,” Lewis points out. “Every Black History Month, in February, I would hire these African-American hair stylists and makeup artists. I’d go back the next year, call them, and there’d be a silence over the phone. Oh, god, that silence,” she says with dread. “I can’t tell you how many times I heard that silence.” These individuals had died from AIDS. One time when Jenifer returned from Egypt, she discovered that four friends had died, and two on that same day. “That fucked me up!” she laments, nodding. “I didn’t quite know what to do with losing that many people. I didn’t want to call my shrink, didn’t want to call my mother, and didn’t want to call a friend. So I called my acting teacher, Janet Alhanti. She’s a brilliant woman who is in touch with the inner stuff; she goes to the core of capturing a character. I said, ‘Janet, what do you do with that information?’ And without hesitation she said, ‘You live it,’” whispers Jenifer, who pulls back some tears.

Several moments pass until she breaks the silence. “And that’s what I did. I lived it. You feel it; you sit with it; you run with it. Ronnie was here every day for ten years. He was the first person I lost that I was extremely close to. Ronnie was my friend, my brother—the son I never had.” She leans forward, pensively. “I used to call for him in the house, ‘Ronn-eee,’” she hollers in her high spirited voice. “And he’d answer, ‘Yeah-ah.’” After he died, I’d yell for him just out of habit, and his fuckin’ answer was missing. So I’d answer for him. Then I said, ‘Now, bitch, don’t go crazy. Don’t start hearing things.’ But it helped me see him and feel him. His death was the most painful thing I had ever experienced.” Then she says in a low murmur, “That precious, precious boy leaving this planet; leaving all the people who loved him.”

Stewart’s funeral was held at a church in Lewis’s hometown of St. Louis. She admits that she went raving mad and screamed like a lunatic. “I couldn’t believe I did that. I didn’t fall over the casket but I kid you not, I’ve never known pain like that in my life. I thought I’d never sing again I howled so loud. It was almost animal,” she says. That’s not unusual, I add, a primal scream. “Yes! And it was beyond anything that I ever imagined I could do after fifteen years of therapy.

“You see, Ronnie did everyone’s hair. We were fucked when he was gone. I don’t know if people at the funeral were crying for him or for the loss of their hair stylist!” Jenifer’s words remind me how close comedy is to tragedy. After the funeral, Lewis reflected on her behavior. It surprised her so much, she wanted to explore it. “Actually, I discovered that I wasn’t just mourning Ronnie, I was mourning my childhood—the innocence, the purity that he represented.” Even yesterday, prepping for this interview she said she had the urge to call Ronnie and have him assist with her clothes and makeup. “I just stood by the closet door and broke down. I hadn’t cried in a long time. Grieving comes in waves, you know that. You accept it and go on.”

Though she still grieves, Jenifer believes that she will see Ronnie again. “I believe that we are forever,” she notes confidently, fixing her poncho which has draped below her shoulder. “That’s why we should slow down. We have forever to get this shit right.” Lewis has soul-searched her whole life. She’s investigated channeling, past life regression, and even the Ouija board. What conclusions has she drawn from her spiritual journey? “What happens is just like Dorothy [in The Wizard of Oz], you come right back home.”

Lewis always knew that she wanted to be a star. As the youngest of seven children, she fought hard to gain attention. “Early on, I wanted to be a gymnast because I found out how flexible I was. But that lasted about an hour; besides, my tits were too big,” says Jenifer, cackling in Phyllis Diller style. Her first public appearance was at the age of five when she sang “Oh Lord, You Brought Me a Mighty Long Way” at a church. She sings a few bars in her deep, rich voice. She loves an audience! Lewis had only one job outside of show business, which was during her first year at Webster University. She toasted buns at McDonald’s. Later, she wrote a song about the job for her one-woman show. She sings it for me.

So won’t ya fan my buns they’re burnin’,
Fan my buns they’re hot.
So you’re gonna fan my buns I’m yearnin’,
That’s what I like a lot.
’Cause brother they’re hot, hot, hot.
Oh, brother, they’re hot.
[A sexy exhale] Buns.
It’s early morning, McBreakfast time
Step up, please, you’re next in line
It’s lunch time sir, what is your wish
Yes, we have hot Filet O’Fish
You’re back again, that wasn’t enough?
You want to try my Egg McMuff?

After the song, Jenifer snaps, “Oh, it was disgusting. I’m brilliant!” She throws her head back in classic diva style. “Anything that was going on in my life came out in my show. It’s been great therapy. That’s what saved me until I got regulated with medication.” She was diagnosed as bipolar in 1997, and is presently in psychotherapy (“It continues to be a great asset in my life”). For added therapy she pieces together jigsaw puzzles (two presently lie on the table) and she paints with ink pen and markers. In fact, she’s presently writing a show about all of this, which she’s one-hundred-percent convinced will open on Broadway—this woman has a great positive attitude! With a nod to writer Lorraine Hansberry, the working title is To Be Middle-Aged, Bipolar, and Black.

When Jenifer announces the title, she is quite strident and dramatic. As Lewis’s voice rises, Claudia, Jenifer’s cousin and assistant, peeks into the kitchen with a startled look. Jenifer reassures her: “The white people are fine, Claudia.” Claudia exits quietly. Lewis tenderly says to me, “Now, that’s my ‘Birdie’ [Margo Channing’s assistant in All About Eve]. How cute is that? I scream every morning; I wake up screaming like this so I don’t know why I frightened her.”

Another important person in Lewis’s life is her seventeen-year-old adopted daughter, Charmaine, whom she met through the Big Sister program over twelve years ago. As we walk into the den, Jenifer is elated to show me some photos from her albums. We sit close to one another on a comfy sofa and the proud mom pages through pictures (framed pictures of Charmaine are plentiful throughout the home, too). Has she and her daughter talked about HIV prevention? “Well, she has a gorgeous boyfriend now, but I don’t think she’ll ever have sex because she’s so frightened of it. She’s been inundated with Jenifer Lewis,” she declares. “I have scared the shit outta her!” Sitting nearby is Ms. Lewis’s publicist, Arnold Preston who interjects: “Let me tell you what kind of mother she is. There are times when I want her to attend a premiere and she’ll say, ‘No, Charmaine’s got a soccer game.’ She passes up so many things that are important for her career.” Like magic, Charmaine enters, having just returned from school. Anyone can see that there is a definite bond between them, and Jenifer just beams as she introduces me.

Before our time together ends, Jenifer wants to show her gratitude by singing an original ballad, as she accompanies herself on the piano. She plays the piano, too?! Is there anything this girl can’t conquer? After the song, I inquire about her AIDS activism. “Being an activist just means being alive and being aware. It doesn’t take much. It’s very simple. We’re fighting a silent war. It came the fuck outta nowhere and killed my friends.

“America has disappointed me,” confesses Lewis. “The one thing America let me do was dream the American Dream, and I succeeded. When Reagan did nothing about AIDS, I thought well, they are gonna fix this. We were naïve. When they didn’t fix it, that made me angry. The biggest problem right now is that we don’t have a leader,” she states in a quiet straightforward manner, leaning against the black baby grand piano. “We all have to realize that it takes baby steps—step by step by step, by day by day, by inch by inch—to make a difference. One person can make such a difference. We need more people to participate, and we need to educate more. People don’t think AIDS is going to touch them. Like the Bushes,” she screams in disgust, and her thundering, intense voice steadily ascends with each subsequent sentence. “Do you think this is not going to come into your own backyard?! It will come to the front door. It’s at the front door now of every home in the world. What can you say? Fuck ‘talking’ about it. Do something!” Beware….Jenifer Lewis has just laid some strong medicine on you.

Dann Dulin is a Senior Editor at A&U.

Message to The World
Pop icon and former teen idol David Cassidy talks with A&U’s Dann Dulin about loss and hope

Photography by Tim Courtney

He stood me up! Although, not intentionally. Entangled in a Los Angeles casting meeting for his new TV movie, The David Cassidy Story, to be aired on NBC in early 2000, David Cassidy missed two prior interviews. Embarrassed, he phoned and apologized profusely and sincerely. This is the third time. A Charm?

As the large, ivory-colored gates to his Las Vegas home lazily open, I drive along the circular driveway, and park near the wood-framed glass entry doors. The grounds are thick with pine trees and foliage. It’s a home in the forest. The architecture is basically wood and stone, set in an eclectic style with colonnades.

His assistant, Robyn, and a barking dachshund named Chance escort me through the arched entry-way. We travel through a maze of hallways and stairs, a freshly cemented backyard patio and unopened moving boxes. Cassidy and his wife of ten years, songwriter Sue Shifrin, and their son, Beau, age eight, have just moved in. We arrive at the back of the house and I settle into Cassidy’s rustic office. Large wood beams stretch across the high ceiling, and French doors open onto a balcony overlooking the pool and Jacuzzi and a complete playground: swings slides, treehouse, trampoline, teeter-totter, and sandbox. The airy room embodies a fireplace, gigantic screen TV, a wooden desk topped with a framed photo of Beau, and tan leather sofas with embroidered pillows.

Within a few minutes, neatly groomed David leisurely strolls into the living room dressed in a deep blue velour shirt and snug black denims that fit his lean, slender frame. His magnetic greenish-blue eyes are his most captivating features, which are accented by dark lashes. His hair tightly slicked with a few thin streaks of gray, and his ear is pierced, but no earring. The open-collared shirt reveals a few hairs on his smooth chest. There is an androgynous quality about him. Although he will be fifty next year, he still has that boyish face, which makes him look much younger than his actual age. David greets we warmly. He grabs bottled water and sits on the sofa. He confides that he had a scratchy throat earlier in the morning, probably due to stress. He flew back home late last night from daylong meetings in Los Angeles. “My neck’s like a vice,” he asserts. He took an antihistamine prior to the interview. He is somewhat sleepy.

“We were just talking about all the names, unfortunately all boys, who are gone,” Cassidy says referring to an earlier conversation that day with a friend, recalling all the people they’ve known who have died of AIDS. “We were talking about people that touched our lives—where the talent pool was so vast. It’s depressing to talk about it.” In 1981, when AIDS wasn’t even a label, Cassidy was performing on Broadway in Little Johnny Jones. A dancer, also named David, became ill. “He kept going to doctors and no one could figure out what was wrong with him. David was someone who frequented lots of the bars. He was a fabulous dancer, and had an interesting dual personality. He was completely into football—serious football.” They would huddle together in Cassidy’s dressing room to watch the games between shows. David died six months after the show ended, but Cassidy didn’t find out until a year later. Three other guys, also from the show, died soon after. Two years later, Cassidy was back on Broadway in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat when a singer took ill during the run of the show. Three months later, he too was dead. Then in 1984, Cassidy discovered that a heterosexual male friend of his in California contracted AIDS through blood transfusion. He spent several days with his friend before he died. This was David’s introduction to the AIDS drama.

“In the early stages we were all very ignorant and very frightened. The heterosexual community reacted homophobically. The media acted homophobic. It became what the Bible Belt referred to as the ‘gay plague’; that God was punishing gay people,” he says gulping a swig of water. ‘My growing concern during the eighties became public awareness. As we were learning the various ways it reared its ugly head and how it affected so many of my friend’s lives it became apparent that the public was not in any way educated. I have to say that there have been an awful lot of people who have worked to raise people’s consciousness about AIDS having no boundaries.’

AIDS has landed at David’s front door. He has a close friend who is living withfull page picture of David AIDS. How does he deal with that? “Compassion, love, support, friendship, openness, reveal, talk about it, don’t hide,” he specifies, being no stranger to suffering. Loss first befriended David at the early age of three when his father, actor Jack Cassidy, and his mother, actress Evelyn Ward, divorced. “My life has been filled with many losses. Most of the analysis that I’ve been through in the past six years has dealt with loss. It came in waves for me. Both as a child, and then as a young adult with the loss of my own identity and the loss of my fortune of money. The direction in which I had set out was to be a creative person, artist, and actor, but then I became this thing [pop idol] and suddenly no one could see me as just anything but that. Therein lies my creative and artistic frustration. I never felt bitter about any of it,” says David. “I will never be all cried out though. The wounds, the pain, the loss that one goes through losing someone. Without the life that they had, without the contribution to my life, I would not be anywhere near as rich a person as I am now. So I view it as a gift to have known, to have experienced, to have loved, to be blessed. And my life, look around, is blessed.”

His father has been an underlying current for David throughout this life. “I was abandoned by a father who was incapable of being there for me and now I have healed myself through my own son and my own analysis. And had I known then what I know now about life and perspective, had I been this guy in 1976 when my father died, I would not have been estranged from him. I would have been able to live with his short-comings, and would have been honest with him, which was very difficult for me to do [It was also difficult] for all of my brothers, my stepmother, and my mother. Because if you didn’t see the world the way he wanted you to see it, he dismissed you.” The more success David found, the more alienated his father became. David merely wanted his father to be proud of him, but Jack Cassidy could not bear the recognition and popularity that his son was gaining. Practically the only thing they both agreed upon was the music of Bobby Darin, whom David ironically impersonates in his Vegas revue, The Rat Pack is Back!

“My father was very narcissistic, as was my mother, but fortunately my mother had enough maternal love, instinct and goodness in her to see that she had a little boy that really needed his father and needed parenting. She came from solid stock. My mother wasn’t a nut, and she wasn’t emotionally disturbed like my father, who was also an alcoholic. He was a wonderful human being. I worshipped the ground he walked on. He was crazy, but part of his madness was his gift. The madness just enhanced it. He was so talented, so creative, gifted, handsome, and a great singer. He could decorate, do things with his hands, he could draw, he could write. It’s intimidating,” he laughs demurely. “He was good at everything. If you put [my brothers] Shaun, Patrick, Ryan, and me together in this room you would probably have all of what he had in his body.”

David Cassidy had it too. Utter his name and it evokes some strong images. Long, shaggy hair. Bedroom eyes. A charismatic smile. The Partridge Family. Squealing fans darting onstage during the pop singer’s sold-out stadium concerts. The number one song, “I Think I Love You.” His image plastered on teen mags, album covers, lunchboxes, notebooks, T-shirts, beach towels, and posters that hung on bedroom walls.

Dave Madden, who played Reuben Kinkaid on The Partridge Family, comments in one of the Cassidy bios, “Fame is a prison. The more famous you are, the smaller your world becomes and that’s not any fun.” I ask David if he agrees. “Yes, that’s very true. As my career got bigger and bigger, my life got smaller and smaller. I lived in this little vacuum. It closed in and shut me off. It shut me out of life—totally.” He was forced to limit his activities. He would only travel from his car, to his house, to his room. “There were people around me all the time. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone! It’s weird, very strange. Anyway, that’s the past.”

Cassidy says it is a compliment to have the resurgence of interest in his life. Although he never really faded away, he just conquered new challenges. He received an Emmy nomination for his acting performance in the TV movie, A Chance to Live. He starred on Broadway in Blood Brothers with his brother, Shaun, and Petula Clark. And he performed in London’s West End theater district.

Presently, there are several Cassidy bios being aired on television. “It’s been quite flattering to have people continually talking about the phenomena of you. Try and put yourself in that position for a moment, then you go, ‘Pooh, yes, I’m phenomenal, but I’m just a guy. I’m just a guy. It’s just life. And God, I’m lucky,”’ he says with his head laid back propped by a pillow looking up to the ceiling flashing that toothpaste-commercial smile. Of the bios being televised, Cassidy has only seen VH1’s David Cassidy: Behind the Music, in which he participated in the making of the production. The adventure was quite cathartic for him. The other bio producers never pitched him for his approval, so he doubts the accuracy of their facts. He does not endorse them.

Do you have any advice for the latest pop idol, Ricky Martin? “Take control. Don’t lose your perspective! But I suspect he will; we all do to some degree. Question is how quickly can you get a hold of it again. What is your purpose? Is it to become rich and famous and a sex symbol?” He pauses a moment and quietly laughs. “I’ve been through the fire so many times; seen people come and go—I can’t take any of it seriously. Being a pop idol is a shallow existence; there’s not a whole hell of a lot to it. You have to look good, walk around and feel your ass a lot. Keep your tan up. Your tan is important!”

Nowadays his “tan” is not that important. His son takes precedence and Beau has helped to maintain the balance in David’s life. As he speaks about his son, he is concerned that it doesn’t sound contrived. “Some of us heal our wounds with our children. And for me, I’ve done a lot of healing with my son. So, he’s the light in my life, and he’s the new and improved model,” radiates the proud pop.

In five years, Beau will be an adolescent. “I will be honest with the issues of drugs, violence, and AIDS. I will emphasize for him to be careful and safe. It doesn’t take a lot of responsibility, [although] in the heat and passion of the moment, as we all know, it’s difficult.” He takes on a juvenile voice, ”I just didn’t happen to bring my Durex, so now what do we do?’ [It’s important to] have the foresight to think ahead and say, ‘Is there a possibility that I might sleep with someone tonight?’ It doesn’t take much to be careful. ‘David wants Beau to bask in a full life, and is not concerned about his son being capricious. ‘My son is much brighter than I am. He’s got his mother’s sensibility. I was wild and reckless. I would probably be dead had I lived twenty years later. Had I lived through the eighties, as I had in the sixties, I’d be gone,’ he says while dabbling with his copper bracelet. ”I’m not a good guy when it comes to consciousness-altering stuff. I like being in the present. I’ve lost too many friends of mine to substance abuse from the time I was seventeen.” When Cassidy racked up his first hit, his best friend died of an overdose.

Cassidy keeps healthy and fit, but his physique is at peak form when he performs ten shows a week as he did for two years in the MGM Grand’s extravaganza, EFX, which ended a year ago. In the eighties, he used to be a gym addict (the only thing he was ever addicted to, he says, besides music and merriment), working out six days a week plus running three to five miles daily. He has no interest in that now. “I never had big muscles. I wasted months of my life in there—months. I could have been hanging out, smoking a cigar, and having a drink!” He can’t jog now because of bad knees and foot surgery that he underwent this year. “Basically, I’m giving you the story of an old man breaking down,’ he says as he sings a few bars repeating, ‘break-ing down.’ Oh, that cool, smooth, hearty, familiar voice immediately flashbacks to my youth. Did I really lip-sync to his songs in the mirror as a teen? I can’t help but think of how many baby boomers swooned over this guy. “I’m here to tell you, though, that I’m not in the best of shape right now, except for my mind and voice, but I will soon be in training—revving up for the show at the Rio.”

Cassidy is mounting a production that opens in January 2000 at the Rio in Las Vegas. It’s a combination Broadway musical and Vegas headliner show. He is the writer, producer, and star, and says the show is both soulful and highly energetic. Currently playing at the Desert Inn, in a show Cassidy coproduced and cowrote, is a 1962 time warp musical piece, The Rat Pack is Back! It celebrates Frank Sinatra’s birthday as Dean, Sammy and Joey join in. “Ol’ Blue Eyes” actually used to perform at the Desert Inn. Last year David released a CD entitled Old Trick New Dog that also included a house version of “I Think I Love You” and two other reworked Partridge Family hits. And he is presently producing the TV movie The David Cassidy Story, in which Malcolm McDowell plays Cassidy’s dad. Initially, David wanted to play his father, but realized it would have been too confusing for the audience.

Beau’s voice can be heard from another part of the house. He enters, recently home from school. “Can I at least get a hug?” David urges. Beau shyly walks over to David and they each throw their arms around one another—a loving moment which seems to be a daily ritual. “I thought I heard your voice,” David says coyly. It seems Beau was told that daddy was in a meeting and he didn’t want to interrupt, so he was playing on the computer.

Cassidy says his schedule is more hectic today than it was in his pop days. “I work day and night and I accept it as being a great gift. I complain about it sometimes because I’m just tired and worn out. And I go, ‘Ah, please not now!”’ as he pleads with the fates for top health. “But I never want to say, ‘I’m to busy now,’ ‘I’m too big now,’ ‘I’m too famous now,’ ‘I’m too rich now’—I’m not. No one is. We’re all the same. It’s just what we do. Being famous [just] gets you good seats in restaurants,” he scoffs dismissively. “I don’t ever want to be the kind of person that doesn’t respond.”

No fear of that! In 1992, Cassidy and his wife wrote the song “Stand and Be Proud” to aid in the rebuilding of Los Angeles after the riots. They raised two million dollars. And in March 1999, David and Sue remixed a song they had previously penned called “Message To The World” to aid the young war victims of Bosnia and Croatia. Over 80,000 people have been recorded singing the tune with the likes of Wyclef Jean, Sam Moore, Martin Sheen, Super David Osborne, Dyan Cannon, Greg Evigan, Rosie O’Donnell, including 50,000 people at Woodstock 1999 led by Cassidy’s wife. The CD is available on the Web at www.warchild.org.

David has performed in AIDS benefits domestically and internationally and he frequently donates his memorabilia for auctions and raffles. He has performed with Petula Clark to benefit Equity Fights AIDS, he hosts a yearly AIDS bowling tournament, and he participates in Golden Rainbow’s Ribbon of Life, an annual Las Vegas AIDS fund-raiser. Founded in 1987, this nonprofit organization provides assistance with food, rent, utilities and other expenses to people living with HIV/AIDS. Golden Rainbow also maintains a resident facility.

Cassidy very much questions the lack of government responsibility in the battle against AIDS. “We as a planet have an obligation and a responsibility to ourselves to say, ‘If we’re going to designate X amount of dollars for the machinery to kill human beings, we should set aside the same amount of dollars to keep people living.’ And that means for cancer, leukemia, and AIDS. We need to focus on a vaccine for AIDS.” He argues for a pill or shot so that we can say, “There, I’m immune. I can never get that.”

“Certainly there’ve been enough advances in the last five years that have assisted AIDS patients far more than there had been in the prior fifteen. From my perspective things are getting better; at least the people I know who have it are healthier, actually functioning and [living] normal lives. And that’s the good news,” David says in a calm voice generating a partial smile. “But therein lies the danger of sitting still. It’s like our fingers are in the dike. Let’s get some serious medical money for research and development. That’s the key for the new millennium—to find a cure.”

Dann Dulin is a Senior Editor for A&U.

Love Is Always the Theme
Grammy-nominated R&B singer Ledisi embarks on a new calling—HIV advocacy
by Candace Y.A. Montague

Photos by JUCO

Since 2000, steadfast fans have been indulging in the neo-soul tunes of Ledisi. They buy her CDs and download her songs. They line up to see her perform. This fall Ledisi has been co-headlining “The Rebel, The Soul & The Saint” tour with gospel artist and producer Kirk Franklin. Starting in her old stomping grounds of Oakland, California, and ending in Richmond, Virginia this tour runs fast and covers a lot of ground. While she’s serenading and inspiring the masses with her soulful voice Ledisi is also using her time on the road to be of service. She has recently taken on a new role as an advocate for HIV education. The story comes together in pieces.

Intro
“I wanna get to know you
How can I get to know you
I wanna get to know you
Know you better”
—“Get to Know You,” Lost and Found album, 2011

Ledisi (pronounced led-ee-see) Anibade Young was born in New Orleans with a birthright for music. Her mother, Nyra Dynese, and her father, Larry Sanders, were both singers. Her stepfather, Joseph Pierce III, was a drummer in a band. During her adolescent years, the shy teen moved with her family to Oakland, California where her singing skills bloomed. Being surrounded by a full range of musical genres in her life helped shape the singer’s thumbprint. “Growing and being raised in New Orleans and Oakland was definitely entertaining. The combination was really great. In New Orleans you have music from zydeco and Fats Domino. I would listen to soul, country, Earth, Wind & Fire, Rufus and Chaka [Khan]. I had aunts listening to Mahalia Jackson. It was just an eclectic collection of music to listen to. And then in Oakland where I came up with the Hawkins family I learned more about gospel music and classical music. All kinds of music. The combination was so enlightening. Having parents that understood my love for music and supported me, that made a big difference with how I listen to music and how I support music meaning my philanthropy work as well.”

If Ledisi had an official second title it might be philanthropist. Throughout her music career she has found ways to give back to others. During her formative years, Ledisi participated in school music programs that helped shape her love for the arts. When she grew up she found a way to give back to her little self through music education. Ledisi was hand-picked by former First Lady Michelle Obama to be an ambassador for the Turnaround Arts program sponsored by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Turnaround Arts is an educational program that brings arts education to seventy-three low-performing elementary and middle schools across the country. Artists and performers such as Elton John, Kerry Washington, Dave Matthews, YoYo Ma, Esperanza Spalding and Russell Simmons donate their talents to this program. “Music education is really important for me. It helped me growing up. Every program I was involved in and every scholarship I got was because of donations.” Ledisi was asked to perform at the White House during the Obama administration multiple times. It’s no surprise that she was selected. She proudly beamed, “Other artists donated their time. I was appointed by her. It was an honor.”

Verse
“I ain’t worried ’bout the hate (uh-uh)
Last year was a good year for your girl
I’ve been keeping up with the pace
So don’t be coming with the bull
Had a good year, now you starting to see my face
Ain’t worried ’bout the hate”
—“High,” Let Love Rule album, 2017

Music for Ledisi is a language in which she is undoubtedly fluent. Her songs reflect on themes like struggle, growth, change, pain, love, passion, and resurrection. Her first album, Soul Singer, came into rotation in 2000. Songs like “Take Time” and “You Are My Friend” piped through the speakers with positive messages over a grown and sexy groove. Her latest release, Let Love Rule, does not deviate from the formula that has brought her so much success over the years. Her songs continue to uplift and encourage listeners. What inspired her album this year? Ledisi explained how the deficit of love spurred her to write the music. “I was inspired by being a human being and having a human experience outside of music. Let love rule. I was basically upset with how things are going. Some of our acts are so selfish. There’s no compassion or empathy. We need to get those things back and it requires love. Love is always the theme. Hate exists because we need love. Our actions should be ruled by love.”

Ledisi’s music comes from experience. She has lived through some things. She has borne witness to others. Music is her therapy. The lyrics are a testimony to survival. Her wisdom flows through each word. Her early recordings such as “Papa Loved to Love Me,” an uncomfortable session about a father raping his daughter, and “Coffee,” a spoken-word piece about domestic abuse, shows that she won’t back down from issues no matter how close they hit home. “I have been molested. Probably not as heavy as most people that I know that have been molested. I survived it. We got through that. I had to go to counseling and get help for that. ‘Papa Loved to Love Me’ was a poem that turned into a song years ago. I’m glad I wrote it. But I don’t want people to think that just because I wrote those songs that I live there. I got out of it and it made me stronger. Luckily I have the outlet of music to get out of it. Some people don’t have that luxury.”

Ledisi explained that she doesn’t think that people should live in that place of pain. “I think people need to acknowledge it. Say it out loud. And don’t be ashamed of it. Say it happened but don’t live in it. That goes for any kind of abuse. Whether it’s domestic or sexual or any kind of abuse. Acknowledge that it happened but don’t live there.”

Chorus
“There is a path and it is written for you
Take your time to find the truth
What do you have to lose?
It’s time for you to choose
No one else can do it for you”
—“Raise Up,” Pieces of Me album, 2011

When the spotlight is turned off you can see the audience that you’ve been performing for clearly. Like many people Ledisi affirms that she has been unknowingly surrounded by people living with HIV for a long time. Many of them concealed their status so she was unaware of their health issues. She adds that it comes as a shock when she finds out their status later on. “I’ve known many people with HIV. A lot of them were my mentors that helped me become more vocal and not be shy. I have had friends who have hidden it. They would rather die than tell someone. I never knew they had the disease until after they were gone. It’s strange. And then when you find out you’re like ‘Whoa! I didn’t know.’” Another significant detail that served as a wake-up call were the effects of HIV on black women. “I didn’t know how heavy it was for black women. That’s a new thing to me. That has blown me away. That part bothers me.”

Ledisi’s first flash of celebrity AIDS advocacy came in 2007. Ledisi was tapped by the legendary Sheryl Lee Ralph [A&U, August 2015] to join her on stage for her signature AIDS fundraiser DIVAS Simply Singing! This evening of song and entertainment brings together artists that are legendary in their own rite. Ledisi had earned her place in this assemblage. She joined Ms Ralph for a second time with DIVAS in 2010. Ms. Ralph raves about Ledisi’s contribution to the performances. “For twenty-seven years I’ve been producing DIVAS Simply Singing!, the longest consecutive-running musical AIDS benefit concert in the country and for at least two of those concerts we have experienced the brilliance, the giving heart, the voice that is Ledisi. I thank her for her compassion and simply daring to care about those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.”

An act of fate this year brought Ledisi in the same room at an event in Arizona with Phill Wilson [A&U, February 2014], President and Chief Executive Officer of the Black AIDS Institute. While listening in the audience she absorbed stats and anecdotes about the reality of HIV today from various speakers. Mr. Wilson spoke about HIV in the Black community. Ledisi really listened. She learned that in 2015, 4,524 African American women were diagnosed with HIV. That’s about sixty-two percent of the women who are diagnosed. She learned about PrEP, a pill that actually prevents HIV infections, and the struggle to educate Black women about the drug. Ledisi learned that her work in philanthropy was far from over.

When the event was over Ledisi marched straight to Mr. Wilson after he spoke to extend her services. Mr. Wilson recalls the passion he saw in her face from the moment she spoke. “She came up to me and she said ‘I need to get involved because many of the things you mentioned in your talk I didn’t know about. And I assume that many of the women that follow me and many of my friends don’t know about it either. I need to step up. I need to do my part to fight this in our community.’” The conversation led to dinner a few weeks later where Ledisi reiterated her desire to help fight HIV in the Black community. “It is not unusual to meet someone who wants to get involved and then they’re off to their next thing and then life happens and nothing comes of it. But that didn’t happen with her. We talked about Heroes In the Struggle [see this issue], where we induct people into the HIV hall of fame. This year we decided to honor only women. We had a remarkable group of women that we inducted. We were thinking about what would be an appropriate tribute for them. Jussie Smollett, who was the host and the event chair, said I think a musical tribute from Ledisi would be perfect,” Mr. Wilson recalls. Ledisi obliged and brought the house down with her amazing performance.

She wasn’t done yet. The drive continued as Ledisi met with Mr. Wilson again to determine what else she could do. “You kinda pinch yourself when you have someone of her stature say they want to be involved and someone as creative as she is. She has ideas,” says Mr. Wilson. For starters she would offer VIP packages that include special seating at her show and a chance to come backstage and meet her and Kirk Franklin. AIDS service organizations can offer this package to their clients as an incentive. She would also do a tour alongside her musical one. With the help of the Black AIDS Institute, Ledisi will do speaking engagements and visit select community events to encourage people to get tested. On top of all that, she will do a public service announcement about HIV. Her indefatigable spirit impressed Mr. Wilson. “We are just trying to keep up with her. She’s going to twenty-seven cities in six weeks. In some cases she’s in a city one morning and out that night. It’s a lot to take on. HIV and AIDS is an issue that continues to devastate the black community. It particularly impacts black women. This is a great thing for her to take on,” says Mr. Wilson.

Needless to say Ledisi is pumped about being an ambassador for the Black AIDS Institute. “I can’t wait to get better at this. I’m here waiting to be of service. My part in life is to be of service. So what I leave behind was Ledisi was of service. She did her part. That’s so important. It makes me feel good.”

Outro
“Listening, without speaking
I think only when we really try to hear people
can the process toward understanding them begin to take shape”
“Understanding/I Love You (Interlude),” featuring Soledad O’Brien, Let Love Rule album, 2017

Whether it’s on a record, on stage, in a PSA, or at a speaking engagement, you’re going to hear Ledisi’s voice for many years to come. She isn’t done making her mark. Her art remains in demand and she plans to use it for good. A gallant spirit like hers just cannot be contained. She knows that it takes guts to make a statement and she welcomes the challenge in that. “It takes courage to speak out but if something is wrong you need to speak up about it. It’s about being real and protecting our race. And not just race meaning Black people and white people. I mean the human race. We all should be contributing to this world. So if something is wrong we all should be speaking up. We all should say this isn’t right. As an artist that’s our job. It’s our job to sing the songs that tell what’s going on in the world right now,” she exclaims.

She credits artists like the late Bob Marley for inspiring her to record her song “Shot Down,” an ode to the victims of gun violence. “Bob Marley has a way of telling you something without preaching. He tells the story and you feel good when you hear it but he wanted you to think about some things too. That’s the point of making music as an artist. Some people are silent about their activism. Some sneak it in. Some people are loud. I do it however I feel. And that song [“Shot Down”] is my feel-good protest. Yeah you feel good when you hear it but you better recognize what’s going on in this world.”

We can count on Ledisi to be authentic and benevolent to all who embrace her. Her compassion is awe-inspiring. Her philosophy is simple. “We are human. We’re not perfect. We all want the same things. We need to be loving. That’s what I want. That’s what I have to have in every aspect of my human experience. Let’s get back to that.”
A round of applause for Ledisi; the artist, the muse, and the advocate. BRAVA!

For more information about Ledisi, visit: www.ledisi.com. For more information about the Black AIDS Institute, visit: www.blackaids.org. The 27th Annual DIVAS Simply Singing! is set for December 9, 2017.

Candace Y.A. Montague is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. Her work has been featured in a number of print and online publications including The Washington Post and The Grio.com. Follow her on Twitter @urbanbushwoman9.

The Defenders
David Arquette sets the record straight on gender, HIV and his late sister’s legacy
by Larry Buhl

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

On September 11, 2016, the first guitar chords of the David Bowie song “Starman” could be heard in a corridor at Cedars Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. It was coming from a room where, moments before, Alexis Arquette died at the age of forty-seven, after battling a liver infection, and, finally, a heart attack. She died surrounded by her brothers and sisters, part of the Arquette acting dynasty. “Starman” was one of Alexis’ favorite songs, and on the list of songs she requested to be played when she passed.

Alexis Arquette was hailed in obituaries as a transgender pioneer. But in reality she had a long career dry spell and a more complicated and nuanced relationship to gender than many knew. She was featured in a 2007 documentary, She’s My Brother, where she underwent sex reassignment surgery. Not long after the film came out, Alexis told family and friends that she was no longer committed to living as a woman, and felt like both a man and woman.

Even the Facebook post by her eldest brother, Richmond, in announcing her death, acknowledged her gender fluidity. “Our brother Robert, who became our brother Alexis, who became our sister Alexis, who became our brother Alexis [has] passed.” The Facebook post continued, saying that, “As per his wishes, we cheered at the moment that he transitioned to another dimension.”

For sake of clarity, A&U will use the female name and pronoun, just as Alexis’s younger brother, actor, producer, and writer David Arquette, did when I spoke with him.
Days after Alexis’ passing, it was revealed that her illness and death were the result of HIV, which she had contracted nearly thirty years earlier. Alexis Arquette’s death and revelation of being a long-term HIV survivor came as a shock to Hollywood. Because, in 2017, how could someone with access to lifesaving AIDS medications actually die from the virus?

David Arquette told me that dying from HIV/AIDS shouldn’t have come as shock, not if you knew Alexis and not if you understand the nature of the virus.

“She just didn’t take her meds on a regular basis,” he said. “That’s something you can’t do. It makes the medicine ineffective. You have to be diligent. We went to doctors’ appointments [together]. But when she started feeling great, she would stop taking the meds.”

When I asked David to explain Alexis’ casual attitude about HIV treatment, he sighed and said, simply, “Alexis was a free spirit. She never wanted to be told what to do.”
When David talked about Alexis, it’s not hard to see the frustration of trying to love and protect someone who, David admits, lived on her own terms. Now more than a year after Alexis’ death, the shock has worn off but the pain is still just under the surface.

In our conversation, David would sometimes grimace, or shrug or shake his head. Then he would suddenly burst out laughing at a memory, like the time when Alexis inexplicably put up a Boy Scout tent on her balcony. Or about an incident decades ago, when he and sister Patricia and brother Richmond were roughed up while protecting Alexis from some drunken homophobic frat boys in Toronto.

I asked how one could accurately describe someone with so many contradictions. David went quiet—he does this a lot—and then came up with a word, defender. “She would look after the new kids in town. A lot of trans kids or gay kids and straight kids. She felt like she needed to protect them.”

David recalled a second-hand story about Alexis at some big Hollywood party where booze and cocaine were abundant, and Alexis stepped in to keep an eighteen-year-old L.A. newbie, Marcus, from getting hooked. “Alexis busted into the bathroom, grabbed Marcus and told the person who was supplying [the coke], ‘Don’t you ever give that to him again. He’s innocent.’”

1 of 3

Alexis came out as HIV-positive to the family when she was in her early twenties, right after she came out as gay and several years before she came out as trans.
“It was at a time when [HIV] was a death sentence, so it was shocking and sad,” David said. “We grew through the process. In fact our mom became a marriage and family counselor, and her thesis was on the effect of HIV on the family dynamic.”

When I asked David why Alexis didn’t speak out about having HIV, he said stigma in the entertainment industry kept her silent. He suggested that the time she got her diagnosis may have had something to do with it. Getting diagnosed with HIV in 1989, well before antiretrovirals came onto the market, was thought of as a death sentence. And, while HIV stigma and ignorance still exist, it was much, much worse then.

For someone so extremely outspoken, someone who stood up for people and what she believed, like being openly trans before a lot of people accepted that, to not be open about [HIV] says a lot about stigma

“For someone so extremely outspoken, someone who stood up for people and what she believed, like being openly trans before a lot of people accepted that, to not be open about [HIV] says a lot about stigma,” David said.

Now more than a year after Alexis’ death, David said her memory stays with him daily. Even when he talked about his upcoming gigs and producing roles, the conversation would veer back to Alexis.

“I often play ’80s music to remind me of her. That’s where she owned who she was and started performing at clubs.”

The Quieter Defender
It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say David Arquette’s decision to join The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF) as its newest ambassador was all about Alexis. It was, in part. But David has been, like Alexis, only quieter, a defender of those who need help. He just won’t talk about it much, and it took a bit of work to get him to open up.

He’s worked with charities like the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and Feeding America. He told me it was an honor to join ETAF, because Liz Taylor [A&U, February 2003] was “so outspoken at a time when they needed a hero and she was there. The only real value to celebrity is being able to lend your voices to causes that are important.”

Joel Goldman [A&U, June 2016], who worked with David while at both Elizabeth Glaser and Feeding America, said that David has a strong commitment to ending HIV/AIDS.

“When he was working in pediatric AIDS, he understood the issues beyond just raising money, although he does have a big network for fundraising,” ETAF’s managing director Joel Goldman told me.

“When I reached out again to David to help us [at ETAF], he said, ‘I was hoping you would ask.’”

I asked Goldman for his comments because intuitively I felt that, in talking with David, he was soft-pedaling his activist efforts. Goldman suggested I was right.
“David does a lot behind the scenes that he doesn’t publicize,” Goldman said, recalling when he worked at Feeding America almost a decade ago and David volunteered two days per week at a local food pantry.

“David was there without fail, and when he was on a film he got one of his brothers or sisters or a friend to take the shift. He really wants to make a difference and he’s very generous. There are very few people like him in the celebrity world.”

Earlier this year David and his siblings helped to set up The Alexis Arquette Family Foundation. That foundation has partnered with Violence Intervention Program (VIP) at the LAC+USC Medical Center, to develop The Alexis Project, and is an extension of VIP’s medical, mental health and support programs targeted at the LGBTQ+ population.

With its first clinic in downtown L.A., the Alexis Project is building a platform that can be replicated around the country, David said.

I know I’m going to be raising awareness. There are kids now who weren’t alive when [the AIDS crisis] began, and they don’t know how many people we lost. There’s a nonchalant attitude toward [HIV] now, especially because there are meds. But it’s still spreading. People need to know that.

“It’s supporting a community that isn’t represented as much as they should be,” he said.

As for ETAF, the role David would be playing was still TBD when we met just before Thanksgiving. He was planning to meet with Goldman just before the new year to brainstorm roles. But David told me a few ideas.

“I know I’m going to be raising awareness. There are kids now who weren’t alive when [the AIDS crisis] began, and they don’t know how many people we lost. There’s a nonchalant attitude toward it now, especially because there are meds. But it’s still spreading. People need to know that.”

“And the stigma,” he continued. “Like Alexis felt.”

Starman, from a star family
At forty-six, David Arquette is comfortably masculine and soft spoken—a gentle bro, if one had to come up with a label. While he’s best known for his acting work in the Scream series, as well as TV roles like Jason on ABC’s In Case of Emergency, David is also a director, producer, writer, and was—for a while in the early 2000s—a professional wrestler and World Championship Wrestling heavyweight champion.

In the past year David and his wife Christina McLarty produced a serious documentary, Survivors Guide to Prison, which looks at the difficulties of navigating America’s system of incarceration. Also last year he starred in the romantic satire Amanda and Jack Go Glamping, where he tries to save his marriage through a “glamorous camping” retreat. And, as a child of the seventies, why wouldn’t he want to costar in the Amazon Prime reboot of Sid & Marty Krofft’s Sigmund and the Sea Monsters?

David and his siblings grew up in Hollywood—the geographic location, as well as the industry—and befriended street kids and hustlers on Santa Monica Boulevard. Some of that early friendship, and a little bit of research, helped him flesh out his character, a homeless kid struggling with his sexuality, in the 1996 film Johns.

David said he loves acting and still wants to act, but also wants to contribute to productions, in any capacity, that he’s proud of. “It’s a fickle world. You break your back on something and people don’t see it. I’ve been acting professionally for twenty-nine years, since I was seventeen.”

The decision to build a career in entertainment wasn’t agonizing for David or Alexis. Given that their family acting dynasty stretches three generations, it would be more surprising if they had gone into banking or real estate. Their grandfather, Cliff Arquette, was an early TV star famous for his yokel character “Charley Weaver.” Their father, Lewis Arquette, was a steadily working character actor most famous for his recurring role J.D. Pickett on The Waltons. Clustered in the same generation are actor/writer Richmond, Rosanna and Patricia. But for Alexis, Hollywood proved fickle and disappointing. In media reports after her death, friends of Alexis said that after her auspicious and audacious gender-bending roles in the 1990s films, including Last Exit to Brooklyn, Grief, and The Wedding Singer, the acting work dried up. David told me it was the result of typecasting and a severe lack of trans and genderqueer roles.

Even in death Alexis was dissed. Oscar winner Patricia told Vanity Fair she was disappointed that Alexis was left out of the 2017 Academy Awards ceremony’s In Memoriam tribute. “It’s really unfortunate that the Oscars decided they couldn’t show a trans person who was such an important person in this community,” she said. “Because—trans kids—it could have meant a lot to them.”

I asked David whether Alexis had expressed frustration, as some media outlets reported, that she had not achieved the fame of her siblings. He said that toward the end Alexis did have regrets, but not about career.

“She felt she wasted a lot of time and energy on the sexual element of life. And toward the end she wanted to return to things like art, being with family, laughing at old films.”

When I asked him to elaborate on what Alexis meant by wasting time on the sexual element, he said she had “some dark experiences and had been abused by lovers at points and [sex] didn’t have as much value at the end. She had sadness about trusting friends and lovers who let her down. And she regretted not spending as much time in the loving, caring relationships.

“I think that’s why she didn’t want to identify as a woman only. She felt that [gender] was tied to sexuality. She wanted to embody all of that and gender didn’t matter. Toward the end she felt she had gone through so much and suffered for so long. She was ready to move on.”

I had to ask about what, if anything, was left unsaid.

“We didn’t have anything left to resolve,” David said. “The family all came together for her at the end and got over any stupid family dynamic stuff that all families go through.”

Then he went quiet before adding: “Grief comes in waves, you know, when you lose a family member. It feels like it never ends. You always miss them. You want more time. You think about how you could have spent more time.”

For more info about The Alexis Arquette Family Foundation/The Alexis Project, log on to: www.alexisarquette.com. For more info about ETAF, log on to: www.elizabethtayloraidsfoundation.org.

Photographed with Leica S 007 courtesy of Leica LA.

Larry Buhl is a multimedia journalist, screenwriter, and novelist living in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter @LarryBuhl.

Karamo Gets Real
From The Real World to Queer Eye, Karamo Brown Uses His Platform to Advocate for Nurturing the Self-Esteem and Mental Health of Young Gay Black Men, and Creating Opportunities for Mentorship
by George M. Johnson

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

It was September 7, 2004, when the hit MTV show The Real World returned for its fifteenth season in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. Little did we know at the time, history would take place on that day when the world would be introduced to a charismatic young Black man from Houston, Texas, unlike any other Black person on reality TV before. It was on that day that Karamo Brown would make television history as the first openly gay Black man on reality television, a moment that almost fourteen years later continues to be a point of reference for the importance of awareness and representation for a Black LGBTQ community continuing to find its place in society.

In speaking with Karamo, he isn’t shy about how important that moment was, and what it means for so many Black gay men looking for something in media that reflects their own image.

“That’s paramount. If you don’t see yourself, you don’t know what you can do. That’s just the unfortunate truth with many people in our community. We have been told that we are not good enough, that we are less than.”

He correlated these feelings by comparing them to the culture of Black Greek fraternities and sororities, which from time to time have had a rough track record when dealing with homosexuality and controlling of what one should deem as a respectable image in the Black community. “I often think about the frat culture. I am in a frat and I remember so many times when I was going to college how so many people told me ‘you can’t join a Black frat, you’re openly gay, that’s not allowed’ and I was like ‘F*** You,’ that is allowed. And I am going to do this and be openly gay.”

That “never take no for an answer” attitude has boded very well for Karamo, who has been able to take a one season break into reality television and create a viable media brand for himself and several others. However, as a Black gay man, Karamo knows the importance of using all that he has attained to help in the fight against HIV, a virus that thirty-plus years later continues to infect Black and brown men who have sex with men at epidemic levels. “I’ve always been involved in HIV and AIDS advocacy work, just as a Black gay male I’ve always thought that it was important because it affects us the most.” According to Karamo, it would be an interview gone awry that would kick his HIV activism into full gear, utilizing his education and training to give back to his community in an area so desperately needing attention.

“I never had a desire to start an organization. I was doing an interview with a national platform, I’m not gonna say which one right now, but the whole interview was talking about HIV and AIDS in the Black community. This white guy canceled the interview before because he didn’t think that his audience would be interested. Which I took deep offense to, because exactly which part don’t you or your audience care about? Is it the Black part, the gay part, or the HIV part, ’cause whichever way we talked about, it affected me.”

Suffice it to say Karamo contacted the producer and interviewer to share his feelings, using some “not so nice” language as he put it. Although he felt good being able to address the problematic view of the issue in his own words he was still not “fulfilled” and knew that he “needed to do more.”

“My background is in psychotherapy and I’m a licensed social worker so I thought why not start something where we can address the mental health of Black gay and bisexual men who are being infected or affected by HIV. That was a big thing for me because I’m negative but dated many men who were positive. But when I come across some men who are negative, for some reason they don’t think it is our issue. That always blows my mind because if it affects one then it affects all of us.”

This is what birthed the 6in10 Organization, co-founded with friend and longtime HIV activist Dontá Morrison [A&U, September 2015]. According to the website, “6in10.org is a HIV awareness organization [501(c)(3)] with a dedicated mission to eradicate the 6 in 10 HIV statistic plaguing gay and bisexual Black men; by providing tailored mental health support though viral campaigns and community engagement.” This fact is evidenced by the March 2016 CDC report which stated that “one in six men who have sex with men (MSM) will contract HIV in their lifetimes, with half of Black MSM likely to contract.”

Karamo and Dontá began charting what arenas don’t address mental health within the Black community and decided they would start their work in those areas. “The Black Church, Black family and in schools. We thought that if we could address those areas where Black men are spending a lot of their time and hearing a lot of things that affect their self-esteem, we could create some changes with the view of HIV and mental health in our community.” As founders, they are dedicated to giving “sound information in an innovative social campaign relating to factors that contribute to HIV infections” while also providing the tools necessary to achieve those goals.

It was evident throughout the conversation that Karamo is very focused on improving the self-esteem and mental health of young Black gay men; realizing that despite the work being done to create access and provide education, our community is still being infected. “Too many of my boys are still being diagnosed. Don’t get me wrong, I went to school at FAMU, I was reckless as hell. Every boy that walked by I was right there. I also didn’t have the education. I feel that times have changed and we have so much education and so much knowledge, sometimes being rammed down our throats. So why are things not changing?”

The first thing I always address is mental health. When I say mental health in interviews I am often talking about self-esteem. That for me is the issue.

Self-esteem is what it comes down to, for Karamo, and not in a surface level way. He talks about how intersected self-esteem and mental health are and how that lack of self-worth can lead to poor decisions, making one not only high risk but more vulnerable to acquire HIV. “The first thing I always address is mental health. When I say mental health in interviews I am often talking about self-esteem. That for me is the issue. Our self-esteem affects the way that we walk through this world and the way that we feel we deserve certain things. So, when you talk about the Trump administration, several communities are under attack. Black people, gay people, people living with chronic conditions are under attack. The way that we address that or don’t is based on our self-esteem.”

He ensures that the work he does is centered in creating a more positive outlook for Black gay men, helping them by teaching tools of self-reflection and introspection in effort to create a generation of young men who truly value their own worth. “Until you start to check how you feel and how you see yourself, you are not going to be able to fight for your rights against people like Trump because you’re going to be like, what can I do? I don’t deserve to have these rights. I don’t feel like I have the power. What you realize once you get your self-esteem in check is that you do have the power and that there is a wealth of resources that are available to you.”

Some of what keeps Karamo grounded in HIV work are the years of mentorship he has received from Phill Wilson [A&U, February 2014], President and CEO of Black AIDS Institute. “Phill Wilson has been a mentor of mine. One of my best friends Jussie Smollett, before we were on TV, Phill had taken us under his wing and sort of just got us involved. Since I’ve started my organization Phill has been encouraging and guiding me and I appreciate it.” Outside of his own organization, Karamo has done campaigns throughout the country including being the ambassador of the 2016 “Positively Fearless” campaign with fellow Texas activist Deondre Moore, celebrating being Black, gay and positive.

Although not positive himself, it was during the 10th Annual Black Pride celebration in Atlanta where Karamo shared more thoughts on the discrimination positive people deal with within the community. “I’m negative, but I have friends from both the gay and heterosexual communities who are HIV-positive. One thing that has always upset me is the fact that people in our community tend to ‘shade’ men who are open about their positive status. In my opinion, we can’t stop HIV from disproportionately affecting Black gay and bisexual men until we stop judging and start supporting those in our community living with the virus.”

The big piece of the mental health I do with my organization is that I believe mentorship is important. I believe in reaching back and making sure that someone younger than you has the information that you may not have had, but require now. Phill [Wilson] has been that way for myself and so many other people.

He fervently believes the path to ending the virus is through mental health work, inclusive of more mentorship within our community, something he notes has helped him immensely throughout his career.

“The big piece of the mental health I do with my organization is that I believe mentorship is important. I believe in reaching back and making sure that someone younger than you has the information that you may not have had, but require now. Phill has been that way for myself and so many other people.”

Karamo notes how fortunate he was and is to have mentorship in his life, and how mentoring can create a generation of youth who are stable and confident in their mental health when dealing with adversity. It was at this moment where we began to discuss another issue that not only affects those in the HIV community, but a problem that Black people, generation after generation, have failed to address within our families.

Black and brown people in America have faced health discrimination and disparities for several hundred years. Their bodies have been used as science experiments like in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, or been victimized and uncompensated for their contributions to science as in the case of Henrietta Lacks’ “Hela cells.” This discrimination has led to a lack of trust between African Americans and the medical community that continues to be a generational issue.

In 2017, Black AIDS Institute released a major report discussing the state of Black healthcare in America, where it addressed the issues of not only having access in urban communities, but the work that needs be done in increasing the utilization of those services, an issue Karamo attributes to work needing be done around mental health. “A big part of that is sometimes people are scared. Going back to the mental health aspect, you might have access to the medication or the healthcare services you need but you are nervous about how you will be judged when you walk into a certain place. I equate it to African American majority of the times being private people, we don’t want anyone in our business.”

Sometimes all it takes is for somebody to just walk with you so that you feel encouraged and know that it’s okay for you to go and take care of yourself.

Karamo discusses how he has been to numerous appointments with friends and associates, and how he doesn’t let the barriers of discrimination, stigma, and shaming play a part in his life, being a good friend to the ones that he loves. “I always try to walk through the process with them. Sometimes all it takes is for somebody to just walk with you so that you feel encouraged and know that it’s okay for you to go and take care of yourself.” He fully understands how these barriers tie into a person’s self-esteem and help prevent one from accessing the care and utilizing the services that they need to survive. “When we talk about access to healthcare, if I know I can access it but I don’t know how I will be treated or judged or if someone is gonna see me there. It’s a high anxiety to get over especially when your self-esteem is low.”

A high self-esteem is something Karamo has seemingly continued to carry throughout his thirteen-plus year career in the media eye. In addition to the work he is doing with his non-profit organization, Karamo currently hosts two shows, one on the History Channel called The Unexplained, where he investigates conspiracy theories, and another on MTV called Are You the One: Second Chances. Karamo will also be starring in a reboot of the iconic Queer Eye for Netflix as a Culture Expert, debuting in February 2018.

Even in his work, he continues to maintain the belief in helping his own community first, with a stipulation in his contract ensuring that more Black gay men have the opportunities in the industry that he has himself. “If the person coming behind you doesn’t have access to open the door, and you don’t prop the door open to let them come in behind you, then you are doing them a disservice. I’m all about being representation and living my dreams. I make sure that in my contract they must hire two to three gay African Americans to be on crew. I’ve done that now on the past three shows that I’ve been on and that’s important for me.”

Overall, Karamo is the living embodiment of what it means to follow your dreams while ensuring that others have the opportunity to do the same as you, doing all of this while remembering how fortunate he is as an HIV-negative person, and using his platform to continue the necessary work needing be done to end the virus one day. We ended the discussion with some powerful words around what it means for him to truly be there for his community and friends.

“I’ve had so many friends that have been diagnosed in the past year that I walk with to go get their medication, and go sit with them when they meet their doctors. I say that not that I’m not happy to support my friends, but to say that just because I’m there, people are going to think or assume I’m positive and I’m like ‘I don’t care,’ they can think what they want to think, I’m still gonna be there.”

I look forward to seeing Karamo be here for many more years to come.

For more information about 6in10, log on to: www.6in10.org.

George M. Johnson is a journalist and activist. He has written for Entertainment Tonight, Ebony, TheGrio, TeenVogue, NBC News, and several other major publications. He writes the Our Story, Our Time column for A&U. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram @iamgmjohnson.

Rewriting His Own Script
Mark S. King, One of the HIV Community’s Most Relevant Voices, Discusses Sobriety, Activism & Why He Is Making the Most of a New Lease on Life
by John Francis Leonard

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Holly Clark

So many extraordinary people fall under the banner of HIV/AIDS advocacy and activism today. There are some, like the incredible Mark S. King, who have even made it their life’s work. As a long-term survivor, he is unparalleled in his dedication to the cause with a long history of work for a major AIDS organization that began in the mid-eighties with a decision to sell his business when he himself was diagnosed. As Mark puts it, “It was a karmic deal. I thought I should do something positive and help some people—make a contribution to this world and score some points with the man upstairs before I die.” It wasn’t all smooth sailing from then on, however; drug addiction reared its ugly influences in his life once again and he lost everything dear to him, most especially his place in the community. But that was hardly Mark’s last chapter, not by a long shot. He began his three-time GLAAD-nominated blog, “My Fabulous Disease,” going on to inspire his original generation of survivors as well as subsequent generations with his humor, his insight, his humanity, and his talent as both a writer and a visual artist.

Mark grew up as the baby in a large family of six siblings. His supportive parents, who often have starred in his video pieces, had two sets of three children ten years apart, with a gay son for each set. His father was in the military so they moved often, but by the time Mark was in junior high, they had settled near Shreveport, Louisiana. Moving around a lot made Mark more outgoing; it’s true of many kids who do. No one’s childhood is perfect, but Mark knows that he was very lucky and says, “I was raised in a household where my parents told us we could do anything and believed in us, whatever it was.” There was an early propensity for performing and Mark found an outlet in public speaking and his parents came to see his speeches as often as they went to his quarterback brother’s games. Some of the video pieces on “My Fabulous Disease” that I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones featuring his gregarious and warm family. I suspect that this unconditional support made Mark’s future successes as a performer, business person, advocate, and activist possible.

One of the more interesting chapters in Mark’s life is covered by his 2007 memoir, A Place Like This. He writes of his move to Los Angeles in the early eighties, his acting career, and then his memorable stint as a phone sex line purveyor. That business brought him early financial success and a taste for a life in West Hollywood’s gay party scene, cocaine and all. These years also coincided with the AIDS pandemic that devastated the gay community of the time. Mark writes touchingly of friends lost and even more evocatively of the loss of his older brother’s longtime partner to the disease early in the crisis. Mark walked away from all of that with his own diagnosis. Popular wisdom of the time among the gay community said one shouldn’t be tested because of the stigma and prejudice. As he recalls now, “You could be discriminated against, losing your job, getting kicked out of your apartment.” This kind of ignorance wasn’t exclusive to conservatives either, as he recalls. Gay men were turning out roommates; everyone was afraid. Mark, knowing he had been exposed, decided that he had to know and in 1985 took the test and received the life-changing news.

And it was a game changer. Mark sold his company and began his career in advocacy and activism by working his way up the ranks at the legendary California AIDS organization, Shanti. But, first things first. It was time to break the news to his family and especially, his parents. In 1985, testing positive meant a highly probable shortened life expectancy, but as Mark is quick to remind me, the test meant only an exposure to the virus at some point. He never developed any symptoms, he never would, but it was still a terrible burden to carry and convincing his parents that he would probably be fine a tough sell. His mother was the toughest. He recalls, “Recently I asked her in a video I shot, ‘Did you buy it?’ She said nope.” His mother was a reference librarian at the time and was reading all the latest articles coming in from the bigger city papers and medical journals. He continues, “She thought there was a high likelihood I would die; she admitted this to me many years later in that same video. But, she admired my tenacity. My whole family has never felt self-conscious or embarrassed by my activism. They’re proud and would rather have a living AIDS activist in the family than a death statistic.”

Mark has another story to tell, one familiar to many gay men who fought the good fight against AIDS up until ’96 when combination therapy was introduced and that’s one of addiction, particularly crystal meth addiction. As he tells it, “1996 was a big year. With combination therapy you had this Lazarus Syndrome happening with all these people getting off of their death beds and people with HIV, like me, who hadn’t been sick, but always under the threat of it deciding it was time to celebrate.” There was finally effective treatment and celebrate many did. They hit the clubs and the dance floors and, along with that, came drugs. Crystal meth hit the gay community en force and, while some could eventually put it and the other club drugs down, others, like Mark, had a propensity for addiction and it devastated their lives. Viagra entered the picture at this time and enabled a second kind of sexual revolution—this one with an even darker side than the earlier one. As Mark explains, “Unfortunately, for people like me, who had addictive tendencies, it spelled complete disaster and in a matter of a few years, I went from going to the gym and bulking up to 250 lbs of muscle and dancing on boxes at circuit parties to being this really heavy crystal meth user going from one meth house party to another having sex and shooting up.” He went from a well known AIDS advocate working for a prominent agency to having repeated unsafe sex and mainlining crystal. It took many things from him, his health, his relationships, and his career, but most of all it robbed him of what he most treasured, the respect of his community as someone with integrity. It’s a story and a time familiar to many of us and it would be nice to say that era was behind us, but drug addiction remains one of the most pernicious problems we grapple with as a community.

The turning point was ten years ago when I had lost another relationship and found myself back at my mother’s house in Louisiana, with all my belongings in the backseat of my car trying to figure out who I was and what had happened to me. And how a nice guy like me, once again, found himself in a place like this.

Mark, however, was able to find his way back. He says, “The turning point was ten years ago when I had lost another relationship and found myself back at my mother’s house in Louisiana, with all my belongings in the backseat of my car trying to figure out who I was and what had happened to me. And how a nice guy like me, once again, found himself in a place like this.” It’s not a second chance he’s taken lightly either professionally or personally. This time, this second act, is one that Mark has decided to really make count and he finds himself again a highly respected advocate and activist. His professional salvation has been as a writer and a storyteller. He started writing and hasn’t stopped gifting us with his humor, his compassion, and a keen eye as a journalist writing about the issues that matter to him as an HIV-positive man and in turn for his audience. His blog “My Fabulous Disease” has been the home of his writing for the past ten years starting out at the invitation of a respected editor at TheBody.com. His editor also sent him his first flip video camera with which to record his experiences and it’s become a powerful tool in his arsenal. He’s been writing pieces about being HIV-positive since he was first diagnosed but now, is proud to actually call himself a writer when people ask that all-American question, “What do you do?” He not only covers the issues and experiences of living with HIV himself. At any national or international AIDS conference you will find Mark and his camera bringing the sights and sounds of the world of advocacy to those not able to attend. He doesn’t consider his video work, or his writing, for that matter, as straight journalism. What Mark enjoys most, and excels in, goes back to his early years as a performer—he provokes emotion and enjoys making people laugh. Interviewing Mark, one of his best qualities stands out—that’s his gentle, never sardonic or biting, sense of humor.

When asked what achievement he’s most proud of, Mark doesn’t hesitate for a second, “I’m most proud of helping someone who’s tested HIV-positive realize that there’s love and laughter and life and engagement after this diagnosis.” Mark keeps a file on his desktop of the thank-you emails he receives from the people whose lives he’s touched through his blog. When he needs to remember why he does what he does, or just needs a good cry, he opens it up and reads a few. “It sounds indulgent,” he admits, “but as you know, writers work in a vacuum and it’s nice to know you’re having an impact on somebody. I don’t know of many people outside of this field who, in their work, get letters like that from people who feel you have affected their life like that.” When asked questions like this, Mark really shows himself to be the humble, self-effacing person that he really is and I think that’s why people from all walks of life, but especially those that are living with HIV, can relate to his work. It’s because what you get when you read his blogs and view his videos is someone you can relate to, not someone who’s telling you what you should do, but someone who is showing you what is possible if you’re open to it. I asked Mark what advice he had for the newly diagnosed, his answer is that he tells them it’s ok to freak out. “People are going to tell you you will be fine,” he says, “and while that’s true, it’s still a life-changing experience, a life-altering event and you need time to absorb that and if you need to freak out, go ahead, but not for long.” He’s also quick to point out, as he has in his writing, that after freaking out a bit, it’s time for some serious work. It’s time especially to become your own healthcare advocate, after a deep breath or two, he adds.

Mark’s blog is a go-to source for information and articles on HIV/AIDS. He writes stories of inspiration and hope, acknowledges our losses, and isn’t afraid to take people in the HIV/AIDS community, as well as the wider one, to task. Two recent posts stand out. He takes both columnist Dan Savage to task regarding recent comments concerning Undetectable=Untransmittable, and pens another about just who should replace Kenneth Cole as amfAR Chair. A recent interview he had with a Black activist about race relations was honest, hard-hitting, and nothing short of the exact dialogue we need to be having about racism in this current social and political climate. Along with these serious pieces of journalism are always his advice and counsel on issues ranging from addiction to advice for those newly diagnosed. And always there’s his trademark wry humor in his human interest stories. It even peeks through in some of the more serious pieces, but never in an inappropriate way. I would say for certain that more than anything, he goes for the easy smile rather than the easy laugh. It makes his work and his message so much more relatable to his audience and many fans.

U=U is the most significant development in the history of HIV treatment and prevention since combination therapy came out in ’96.

One thing that I make certain to ask Mark about is a subject that is near to his heart and a message he feels is important to convey. That is the groundbreaking recent research that finally proves, categorically, that Undetectable=Untransmittable. Mark feels, “It is the most significant development in the history of HIV treatment and prevention since combination therapy came out in ’96.” He, like many of us, has felt for so many years as if we are tainted, as if we are disease carriers. It has defined us for too long, but he cautions that while we can finally believe in the campaign’s message, that it might take those who are negative some time to catch up. This said, he conveys, “I’ve had a profound psychic shift in the way I feel about myself. I hold my head a little higher. I feel whole in a way I haven’t felt as a person living with HIV.” He, and all of us can now know that if we adhere to our meds, which the majority of us have, that we cannot infect someone else. For Mark, and all of us, it’s a game-changer.

The other half of Mark’s second act is a new lease on happiness and success in his personal life. His close ties with his family remain, they were never broken. But in addition, he says now, “I’m so crazy stupid in love with my husband, it’s annoying. I try not to write about it or talk about it too much because it’s just damn annoying.” Like many gay men, he spent his life looking over the shoulder of the man in front of him for something better. He was selfish and unfaithful but has reached a point where he’s ready for the real thing and has found it. There’s no greater satisfaction in life than when you can find success in something that you love to do and happiness with someone that you love to be with and after many misfires and missteps, common to us all, Mark has found both. And that’s what resonates with Mark’s many fans, the fact that he’s so relatable.

Check out Mark S. King’s blog, “My Fabulous Disease” at: www.marksking.com.

For more information about photographer Holly Clark, log on to: www.hollyclarkphotography.com.

John Francis Leonard is an advocate and writer, as well as a voracious reader of literature, which helps to feed his love of the English language. He has been living with HIV for thirteen years and he is currently at work on his first novel, Fools Rush In. His fiction has been published in the ImageOutWrite literary journal and he writes reviews for Lambda Literary. Follow him on Twitter @JohnFrancisleo2.

The Art of Being
Driven toward auteurs, good scripts, authentic roles and the “right” ensemble casts, art-house queen and veteran ally in the fight against AIDS Chloë Sevigny stays on her non-sellout course, smashing stigma on both sides of the screen
by Sean Black

Ten minutes into our phone conversation and I accidentally drop the call on the leading queen of contemporary independent cinema. The soon-to-be breakout ingénue Chloë Sevigny delivered one of the most painfully memorable screen portrayals of rape after having just discovered her contraction of HIV in her role as “15-year-old Jennie” in Larry Clark’s provocative 1995 masterpiece Kids, written by Chloë’s now longtime friend Harmony Korine. The same Oscar-nominee for her dramatic turn as Lana Tisdel in Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and the actress who sparked humanity as Clara in Thom Fitzgerald’s 3 Needles (2005), a three-part film costarring Sandra Oh [A&U, October 2004] and Olympia Dukakis, which focused on the worldwide AIDS crisis, a cause clearly dear to Sevigny’s heart.

Seconds sluggishly morphed into long minutes as I replayed my inadvertent disconnect in my head. I had just hung up on one of the hardest-working artists in film, television, fashion and popular culture, and who had been working graciously with me through her publicist for nearly three years to make this interview happen simply because Chloë Sevigny is just that kind of human being.

Prior to our first glance, through the lens of my camera, at one of her many HIV/AIDS fundraisers back in 2015, Sevigny (Seven-nee) was in the thick of filming “Hotel,” Season 5 of the FX’s smash-hit series American Horror Story, as Dr. Alex Lowe. With numerous roles in popular television shows over the years like Big Love (2006–2011) and Portlandia (2013), along with a non-stop vitality in cinema: Trees Lounge (1996), Palmetto (1998), Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998) and again his Love and Friendship (2016) both co-starring Kate Beckinsale, along with mainstream psychological draws American Psycho (2000) and Zodiac (2007), just to mention a few. Her acting career hasn’t ever waned. She’s my go-to secret weapon in the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon [A&U, August 2000].

Last year alone, Chloë co-starred in six major films, including Miguel Arteta’s adaptation of a Mike White screenplay, Beatriz at Dinner, with John Lithgow, Connie Britton and Salma Hayek, and The Snowman in dual roles opposite Michael Fassbender, with recurring guest spots in TV series Comrade Detective and Bloodline. And if that wasn’t enough, she squeezed-in two personal writing/directorial projects Kitty (writing adaptation), and Carmen for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series, memorializing a side-splitting true story and Sevigny’s fondness of the work of director Gus Van Sant and cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards (both for My Own Private Idaho).

“To me, Carmen was very personal. It was a story about being an artist and giving so much of yourself and then sometimes getting rewarded and sometimes not.” She elaborates, kicking off the interesting tone of our phone interview.

“There is this convenience store scene, which actually happened to me when I was working out in California. I walked into this place and there are these two squatter kids who totally objectify me and then they ask me if I could buy them some beer. This was a fucking hilarious scene.”

Laughing together, Chloë (with the umlaut) and I first connected over the phone (prior to my f*up with an asterisk), literally breaking the ice as the forecasted winter ice storm in her current home, Manhattan, had just melted icy snowflakes into drizzle, and thus confirming Chloë’s New England acclimatization and her love affair with the Big Apple. “I am a snow-girl!” she boasts sassily before we commiserate over loved ones’ recent, “brutal” nasal surgeries.

And here is the trick about interviews, for me especially. Chloë was every bit as lovely and down-to-earth as you’d hope she’d be, pulling off that genuine, girl-next-door sweetness and the high-school BFF coolness that everyone imagines. So I go off-script and pitch a question that clearly needed a more developed segue.

“What is it that you hope to be remembered for?” was my clunky first question after scrapping the one I originally penned.

“I will [only] be forty,” she scoffs jovially so I know she isn’t peeved but maybe just caught a little off-guard. “I don’t want to think about that yet,” she admits honestly.

But then takes a longish, dramatic pause. “INTEGRITY!” she bolts back in a steady and emphatic voice.

“Integrity, in [my] being.”

Then I end the call (ugh!).

Dialing back frantically, Chloë and I were quickly reconnected as my heart pounded palpably in my chest.

“Hey, I lost you,” warmly chimed in Chloë, just after the second ring. Her friendly greeting and cheery, forgiving tone set me right at ease. Her gregarious air is signature and part of why her fans love her so much when eyes meet at red-carpet venues, such as the one where we initially connected several years back, amfAR’s 2015 Los Angeles Inspiration Gala honoring Ryan Murphy.

“Chloë Sevigny is a real champion of the fight against AIDS and has consistently used her celebrity to further the cause of HIV awareness and prevention,” shares amfAR Chief Executive Officer Kevin Robert Frost when asked to comment on the star’s steadfast dedication to the cause. “She is a longtime supporter of amfAR, generously donating her time and lending her presence to many of our fundraising events over the years, and we are immensely grateful for her efforts to help us develop a cure for HIV.”

Along with her appearances for amfAR Chloë has also been the face of M•A•C’s AIDS Fund when they recruited her for its tenth anniversary as one of the five new spokespersons for its Viva Glam line, along with Missy Elliott, Christina Aguilera, Linda Evangelista, and Boy George.

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Born and raised in Darien, Connecticut, Sevigny often took creative respite in nearby New York City. At just eighteen, one of these trips led her to an internship and a few modeling jobs for Sassy Magazine and x-girl, the urban clothing line created by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, thus kickstarting Sevigny’s march to fashion fame in the mid to late nineties. It was around the same time she made the cover of Interview magazine when writer Jay McInerney in The New Yorker hailed her as the “it girl,” which has stuck like glue. Her social media is aflutter with stylish snaps and the latest hot trends.

Designing for fashion house Opening Ceremony, founded in 2002 by Carol Lim and Humberto Leon (now creatively spearheading Kenzo), Sevigny is keen on melding life-saving messaging into contemporary culture.

“I did this collaboration with Opening Ceremony where we used Robert Mapplethorpe’s images [printed] on T-shirts and all of the proceeds went to his foundation. There are so many photographers [like Mapplethorpe] who’ve brought attention to the AIDS movement. I mean, [the early days] weren’t pretty but the work is very effective and moving. We hoped to reach younger generations that aren’t as aware of the disease and didn’t grow up in the time that we did. Working with them, I wanted to highlight that period of time and have them look at the images, be struck by them and then go and do research on their pocket computers and find out who he [Mapplethorpe] was and how he died. I was hoping to open up a conversation among young people through the power of a T-shirt campaign. Opening Ceremony has also done reissues of the original ACT UP T-shirts. They’re pretty active as far as trying to raise awareness goes.”

Back during her early trips into New York City, Sevigny also spent a lot of her time watching the skateboarders who convened in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park. It was there that she met young aspiring director Harmony Korine, which led her to being cast as the lead in Korine and Larry Clark’s collaboration Kids. [See Larry Clark this issue’s Gallery.]

About the director she shares in this time of the outing of abusive Hollywood power, “Larry Clark was very sensitive. He was really gentle with me. He was very encouraging. He set a really nice tone on set and knows how to make people feel comfortable and natural. I was really a big admirer of his work and I really believed the script and the story that we were trying to tell. I really adore Larry. I think he’s made better films since Kids. Bully is a great film, but that’s just my opinion.” Bully co-stars advocate Daniel Franzese [A&U, July 2015], a great friend of the HIV community as well.

I asked Chloë, a veteran who has worked with scads of brilliant people, to reveal things she’d like to see further improved in her industry. “I think there is stigma around the ‘indie actress’ title. People associate you with a certain type of film, and I think when you’re in that milieu it can be harder to break out of, into more mainstream roles. As an actor you want more opportunity and I think [typecasting] can limit those opportunities.”

I marvel about Chloë Sevigny’s admirable humility. “That’s why an actor like Steve Buscemi is very much identified as an indie actor, but he’s also thought of as a character actor. He gets to do the crossover into more mainstream work all the time. And I feel like actresses don’t have that crossover as much as male actors.” For me Chloë transcends not only her roles like her male counterparts but I’d argue that she may be one of the leading forces in destigmatizing the genre itself.

Her upcoming films are very mainstream, Lean On Pete and the long anticipated Lizzie, and she shares sneak peeks of both.

“Well, Lean On Pete is about a boy who has lost his family and he’s on a quest for home, whatever that means. He runs into a bunch of different characters along that journey. And my character is one of the people he comes into contact with, one of the few women portrayed in the film or the book. And she gives him some tough love. He’s of course, very attached to this horse. She leads him towards an important real-life lesson.”

The young actor, Charlie Plummer, who plays Pete, just won best newcomer at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. “He is so amazing and of course, so is the filmmaker, Andrew Haigh who made Weekend [2011], Looking [2014], and recently 45 Years. “Charlotte Rampling is really accomplished. [45 Years] is very moving,” says Chloë.

“I’ve always been attracted to original voices and auteurs for lack of a better word; towards writers/directors and just wanting to be a part of an ensemble more than searching or chasing specific leading roles. I think Lizzie is the first leading role I’ve ever had in my twenty-something-year career. So yeah, I guess I’ve just always been attracted to filmmakers that I believe in. I want to see them propel along with their careers and the stories that they want to tell. I’ve also had a really good run actually with first-time filmmakers, like Harmony, with Gummo, and Kimberly Peirce for Boys Don’t Cry.”

Nearing the closing of our interview, I attempt to sum up by asking how she originally came into the fight against HIV/AIDS and whether or not it was her role in Kids that drew her in, she replies. “I mean, growing up when we did, I knew people with the disease and people died from it. It was something that I witnessed and so whenever anybody asked me to get involved, I try and give as much time and energy as I can. I don’t know if I have or know what the specific genesis was, but it has always been in my consciousness.”

Asked about her staying power all these years: “Don’t do drugs!

“Jennie [Sevigny’s haunting Kids character] is totally compromised at the end [of the film] because she doesn’t have her wits about her.

“When I was growing up drugs were very prevalent and I always knew that perhaps I would like them too much, so I stayed away from them. Luckily, I grew up with a really strong family resolve and I’m not an addict, thank the Lord. I have lots of friends who are and struggle with it. I think that the stigma around addiction and mental health has to be lifted and there needs to be more programs and opportunities for people to get help in environments where they feel safe.”

Whether delivering tough love on screen or in real life, Sevigny is continuing her sharp focus. “I will be working on another short [film] soon about five women in their thirties or early forties and their relationship to their agency and how they can manifest power.”

“I’m just trying to do things that I really believe in and hopefully inspire others.”

For more information about amfAR, log on to www.amfar.org.

For more information about Chloë’s newly released film Lean On Pete, opening April 4, go to: https://a24films.com/films/lean-on-pete.

Sean Black is a Senior Editor at A&U. He photographed Karamo Brown for the February cover story.

Mighty Rivers
Melissa Rivers Is Definitely Her Mother’s Daughter But Also Delivers An Independence And Strength All Her Own
by Dann Dulin
Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

Melissa appears unannounced, gliding into her bright spacious living room. I’ve been chatting with her gregarious publicist when she enters—and then halts. Our eyes lock, Melissa points to me, and proclaims robustly, “Dann with two ‘n’s’!”

Immediately disarmed and captured by her beaming spirit, the tone is set for our time together.

Arriving earlier at her secluded multi-level Normandy-style home in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades, I find an open gate. CBS crewmembers are breaking down lights and equipment on the curvy, inclined street. They just wrapped a segment with Melissa for CBS Sunday Morning.

I enter the well-groomed lawn area, surrounded by lofty bushes, stepping over apparatus and ring the front door bell. It takes several ding-dongs before her publicist, Howard Bragman appears, lively and friendly.

It’s no secret that Melissa’s mother, Joan Rivers [A&U, October 1996], carried the torch from Day One for those living with AIDS, then called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). Joan, along with Debbie Reynolds (note: this reporter had an interview date set with Debbie just several weeks after her unfortunate demise), Elizabeth Taylor [A&U, February 2003], Shirley MacLaine [A&U, April 2000], Rita Moreno [A&U, October 2013], and Robert Guillaume were a handful of entertainers who stepped forward to offer their support. Other celebrities were petrified.

In March 1984, Joan hosted a black-tie fundraiser at the wildly popular disco, Studio One, L.A.’s take on New York’s legendary Studio 54. The event raised $45,000 for the newly established APLA (AIDS Project Los Angeles).

Melissa, seated on the eggshell-colored tufted sofa opposite me, grabs her recently published book, Joan Rivers Confidential: The Unseen Scrapbooks, Joke Cards, Personal Files, and Photos of a Very Funny Woman Who Kept Everything off of a wood credenza. It is an elaborate collection of her mother’s life and includes impressive photographs, personal mementoes, and magazine covers featuring Joan, all magnificently displayed. Joan Rivers’ fans will go nuts! (Other books by Melissa, Red Carpet Ready: Secrets for Making the Most of Any Moment You’re in the Spotlight and The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation.)

Melissa dons her black non-descript reading glasses and then flips through the large tome, showing me the poster for the 1984 AIDS event at Studio One. “My parents had death threats…,” reveals Melissa, interrupting herself. She asks if I want anything to drink then calls out to Sabrina, her assistant, to bring coffee for her.

“My parents thought we’d all die together. I was going to school with bodyguards!” Nobody knew at the time what caused AIDS. Those inflicted were pariahs. Much of the public believed that merely touching someone with AIDS was an instant death sentence. It was mass hysteria!

At another event, attendees paid $1,000 a plate to see Joan and Elizabeth Taylor together. This was the beginning of amfAR. Around this time, Joan posed for a safe sex campaign ad, “Can We Talk?” (Part of Joan’s estate went to AIDS services.)

Melissa worked with her mother through the years on charities that included APLA, amfAR, GMHC, PETA, Make A Wish Foundation, Waterkeeper Alliance, Pediatric AIDS Foundation, LA Mission, Lili Clare Foundation, Bogart Foundation, Children Afflicted By AIDS, and God’s Love We Deliver (delivering meals to those who have life-altering diseases), one of Joan’s favorite charities. In 1994 she became a member of its Board of Directors. After Joan’s death, they renamed their bakery The Joan Rivers Bakery.

A synopsis from God’s Love We Deliver website is worth quoting at length:

“Joan demonstrated deep commitment, compassion and generosity. In 2009, Joan won over $500,000 for God’s Love on the NBC reality competition, Celebrity Apprentice. The final challenge had the contestants putting on a gala, and we remember Joan, getting down on her hands and knees to roll out the red carpet, making sure it was perfect for the event. That’s the kind of woman she was—devoted, hard working, strong and always fighting for what she believed in. Joan volunteered absolutely every Thanksgiving, bringing her daughter Melissa and her grandson Cooper with her. Each year, she delivered holiday meals to our clients, surprising them with jokes and their special feasts, bringing warmth and care and brightening the holiday for so many.”

Altruism is in Melissa’s DNA, for she continues her mom’s legacy with God’s Love We Deliver. Melissa is active as well in Guide Dogs for the Blind, Our House Grief Support Center, and Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services (dealing with a variety of issues, including suicide prevention).

“I was raised by two incredibly empathetic generous people who never lost sight of how lucky we were,” Melissa, an Ivy League grad, says in a gentle cadence. “My parents were firm believers in taking care of those close to us and our communities—without question—supporting service organizations, like Guide Dogs,” she specifies. “My father had terrible vision and was always fearful of going blind.” (Her father, Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide in 1987 when his daughter was eighteen years old.)

Melissa crosses her legs, resting her coffee cup on her thigh. “It was in their makeup to take care of everybody, and I was raised in this atmosphere.”

Melissa instilled the same values in her sixteen-year-old son Cooper. (Edgar Cooper Endicott is named after his grandfather. His father, John Endicott, a horse-trainer, married Melissa in 1998. They split in 2003.) Last Thanksgiving Melissa and Cooper were scooping holiday meals at the LA Mission, and, since Joan’s death in 2014, Melissa has donated many of Joan’s clothes and personal items for charity auctions.

“About a year ago,” asserts Howard, who’s perched on the other end of the sofa from Melissa, with only two largish crimson pillows between them, “she was cleaning out [her mom’s stuff] and called me. ‘What do we do with this?!’ she said. It was this coat that turned into a rainbow flag, designed by a really famous Broadway designer…” He can’t think of his name. Melissa can’t either. She calls out to Sabrina, who can’t think of the designer as well. Suddenly Melissa eagerly blurts, “William Ivey Long!”

Howard continues. “Melissa gave the coat to Family of Quality Council, where they auctioned it off and got a truckload of money. Along with it was this signed picture of Joan. It was beautiful.” Howard leans in. “When you work with the Rivers’, you’re part of their family. It transcends an employer-employee relationship.” Melissa shakes her head in agreement, “It does.” Howard began working with them in 2014.

The Melissa you see on the tube is the same Melissa you see in person—authentic, gracious, energetic, and compassionate. Growing up in your mother’s shadow, particularly when your mother is Joan Rivers, is daunting. Now that Joan is gone, a sense of peace surrounds her, almost cocooning her with Joan’s spirit. Though an accomplished producer, philanthropist, host, and author, we haven’t seen the best yet from Melissa.

Looking homey in her tight, torn jeans and black cut-away top, it looks as though she could have just taken a quick hike around the neighborhood, freshly kissed by a sunny breeze. Her very straight hair is shiny and her impeccable skin glows. Her cutesy coal-black loafer sliders, with a big rose painted on them, are designed by Alessandro Michele. “I’m in a moment of Gucci. Everything Gucci, including shoes,” announces Melissa, cheerily.

The epidemic was always a topic of conversation at the Rivers household. “Growing up, AIDS was never hidden from me,” Melissa reflects. “It was so prevalent in my parents’ social circle. I remember when it was called ‘gay cancer’ or ‘gay pneumonia.’ It’s always been on my radar,” she says. “So many people who were close to our family have died. A lot!” She takes a deep inhale. “More than I think we even realized. There were a number of suicides, too.”

Deeply embedded in Melissa’s memory are hospital and hospice visits, and watching those she loved die. One of the family’s first losses was Jason Dyl, her mom’s long time hairdresser. In 1992, Alison Gertz [A&U, May 2016], who acquired HIV after having sex the first time, appeared on Joan Rivers’ talk show. Melissa became fast friends with her. “Ali Gertz and her family became a part of our world,” she informs, looking out a window that leads to her private patio deck and swimming pool, where just beyond the tops of the palm trees lies the Pacific Ocean, which is visible. Several months after Alison was on Joan’s show, she died. She was twenty-six. Her death was a jolt and left a deep scar on Melissa.

Unlike most of Rivers’ friends, she was savvy about the epidemic. “Sex didn’t scare me…I was educated,” utters Melissa evenly. Though she was regularly checked for illnesses, she was careful when it came to sex. “I was in relationships where I would not have unprotected sex until they were tested—and brought home the papers!” states Melissa proudly in a demanding tone.

Regarding the present generation of young people, Melissa is distressed that they have

such high rates of HIV infection. “Because it’s gone from a death sentence to a chronic illness!” she reasons vehemently. “… And that’s a problem.” Melissa scoots up on the edge of the sofa. “Everyone became too comfortable. This has led to a lackadaisical attitude towards prevention. It’s not the big scary word anymore. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of ambivalence and ignorance.”

Melissa goes on. “There’s a risk and it’s preventable. There are steps you can take to protect yourself.” She ponders, slowly rotating her glasses in her hand. “As to abstinence, two hormonal teens are going to think about abstinence first! Yeh, right,” Rivers mocks, as her expressive big brown eyes roll.

Melissa notes that some of her friends keep a bowl of condoms available for their teenagers. “I don’t know if I could do it,” she questions, with a slight wince. “I’m willing to buy them to protect my son in any way I can.” Cooper, who is sixteen, spends most of his extracurricular time playing lacrosse. “If he’s sexually active,” she says, “he hasn’t told me. We’ve only had the first girl and the first girl kiss because that we talked about.

“A little bit of fear is not a bad thing to keep kids safe. They should be scared when they do something wrong [like not stay on top of their sexual health].” Then Melissa points out, “You know, he’s a teen, he doesn’t want to hear this from mom. It’s embarrassing and it’s gross. He just wants to cover his ears!”

Melissa mentions that her boyfriend read an article recently about the difference between the Millennials and Cooper’s generation (Centenials?). “It seems Coop’s generation is definitely a backlash against the Millennials. They don’t have interest in learning to drive. They grew up with Uber,” she reports, rattling off from memory. “They’re not terribly interested in rushing into sex or relationships. They’re civic-minded; they’re not a lazy generation.” She pauses. “I look at Cooper and his friends and they have an occasional girlfriend or whatever, but there’s a lack of intensity.”

Melissa turned fifty in January and the irrepressible lady feels blessed, attributing her grit to her father, who was German. “I was Daddy’s girl,” she lovingly proclaims. From her mother, who was Russian, Melissa gets her drive. “That’s a hell of a combination,” she enthuses of her parents. “It means I’m stubborn and have a bad temper.” She grins, but means it.

Though Melissa considers Joan her mentor, her godparents also influenced her. They included a close female friend of her parents, Roddy McDowall, and Vincent Price and his wife, Coral Browne. Their framed photographs are displayed behind Melissa, on an elegant eighteenth-century chinoiserie secretary made of fine iron-red and black lacquer. Another photograph in the group catches my eye. An in-motion photograph of Melissa, dressed in equestrian garb, high jumping with her horse. Rivers is a skilled rider.

“It’s interesting…,” she hesitates, perusing the photographs, “I didn’t realize how great an impact some people had on me until some time had passed.” Melissa briefly fiddles with her gold Cartier watch, her nails colored a vampy dark red. “My love of art came from Vincent Price, and Coral was a second mother to my mother. She was the chicest…woman…alive.”

On the far side of the living room is a podium that supports a book, open to a page that’s written in bold type, “Melissa Rivers.” It’s from The Fabulous Photography of Kenn Duncan. One page has a full-length black and white photograph of five-year-old Melissa, already a fashionista, swathed in an elegant gown topped off with a long flowing bow. She looks like a little princess. On the opposite page there’s a smaller picture, a tender pose of mother and daughter head-to-head, Joan holding part of Melissa’s twelve-year-old head.

“I miss just talking to my mother!” exclaims Melissa, adjusting her glasses that have fallen slightly off her head onto her forehead. “I didn’t have to explain the back story to her. She knew it.” Melissa and I touch on the subject of death. What does she believe happens after we die? She takes a break, then a long sigh. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that,” she laments sincerely, then speedily adds, “I certainly hope you can eat without gaining weight and not have to go to the gym.” Right there. Right there in that subtle moment, her mom was present!

In 1994 the two women portrayed themselves in a TV docudrama Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story. They hosted E!’s Fashion Police, interviewed celebrities on the red carpet, and had a reality show called, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?, which also featured Cooper.

An award-winning producer, Melissa has a unique way of dealing with grief. She’s kept her mother alive—by becoming her. Let me explain. In the 2015 Jennifer Lawrence film Joy, directed by David O. Russell, Melissa portrays her mom. It’s the true story of Joy Mangano, the Miracle Mop inventor, who was on Joan’s QVC show. Russell asked Melissa if she’d play her mother. She was honored to do so, but her initial reaction was fear. She says the biggest challenge was not to make Joan a caricature.

“Melissa is a natural actor,” says David O. Russell, “who honored her mother’s memory by channeling her impeccably. She was literally a joy to work with, as she and [actor] Drena DeNiro performed on [the QVC] stage together.”

Melissa raises awareness through her public speaking and by her appearances on talk shows. She’s a board member on several organizations concerned with health and social issues, a spokesperson for PETA, and is ambassador for Our House Grief Support Center.

I ask Melissa to sum herself up in one word. In a soft monotone voice she replies, “Good.” She sits back and shoots off a contented smile. “My life is good; my son is good; emotionally I’m good; knock on wood, my career right now is good; and so is my personal life. I try to be kind, to be a good friend, a good parent—and above all, I try and do good.”

With the current political storm surrounding budget cuts, increasing healthcare costs, and the lack of empathy from the current administration, it’s refreshing to know that the Rivers family is a force that rides the waves of discord, ultimately landing onto buoyant seas.

Seven Questions for Melissa

What’s your favorite food?
It depends on the day. Today I’m feeling like a little Mexican.

Where is your favorite place to disappear to?
Anywhere I can sleep without my phone ringing! [She guffaws loudly.] Every August, Cooper, my mom, and I would go for two weeks to Wyoming. Nothing fancy. You’ve never heard of the place. There’s an old dude ranch in a tiny town called Saddlestring. [She takes a beat.] Then during the winter, Cooper and I take a week off to ski in Jackson Hole.

Have you ever been starstruck?
[Melissa replies instantly] Peyton Manning!

What posters did you have on your wall as a teen?
A was a huge Star Wars fan! OH MY GOD! [She takes a beat and waxes infatuation.] When I was little I wore my Mark Hamill Star Wars T-shirt everywhere. I remember meeting Mark Hamill. It felt like I had died and gone to heaven!

Besides your mom, whom do you consider a hero in the epidemic?
Mathilde Krim [she answers urgently].

Where are you dying to travel?
My father was raised in South Africa and I want to go there. My mother went a few times and saw the devastation of the epidemic. After Cooper graduates from high school, I want to take him on one of these National Geographic-like trips. We keep a running journal of places we want to go.

What comes to mind when I mention these few people who’ve touched your life: Howard Stern, Courtney Love, Oprah, and Margaret Cho?
Howard Stern is warm, caring, generous, and just…lovely. As to Courtney Love [there’s a slight lull when Melissa becomes emotional, taking a hard swallow]…She is awesome! Awesome! Awesome! I spoke to hear after mom passed and she had great humor and—she got it! We had never met before. And Oprah, can I just have a little bit of what she’s got??! Finally Margaret Cho, well, of course, love. Love.

For more information log on to: melissarivers.com.

Styling: Cary Fetman/Sean Black
Hair: Frankie Hernandez
Makeup: Denika Bedrossian

Dann Dulin is a Senior Editor at A&U.

Remembering Our Future
Wilson Cruz advocates keeping the past alive to make a positive impact tomorrow
by Dann Dulin

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

Around noon, Wilson Cruz unceremoniously enters the Café. He embraces one of the servers. A popular neighborhood restaurant, it’s located just a few steps from his home, here in West Hollywood.

Wilson’s ease, charm, and friendliness exemplify my afternoon with the actor-activist.

The solidly built actor is clad in a tight V-neck T-shirt, dark Jeans that are rolled up at the bottom, and black patent leather bucks. Sporting stylish short-short cropped hair, several days worth of trimmed salt and pepper stubble, and with his glowing complexion, he could have just stepped off the pages of GQ magazine. It’s obvious that he takes care of himself.

He greets me and then snuggles into my corner booth. The server sweeps by, inquiring about drinks. He orders café latte.

Wilson was fifteen when his life was powerfully impacted and radically changed. His artist uncle, Luis Angel Cruz, who lived with his family, died of AIDS-related complications caused by intravenous drug use. “It…was…shocking,” laments Wilson, “and it affected my whole life. I’ve never recovered….” This is evident as his sparkling eyes moisten. A year later, Luis’ wife died of the virus as well.

His uncle was thirty-three and was more like an older brother to Wilson, who’s the eldest of three kids. As fate would have it, two characters Wilson portrayed were named “Angel”—in the bio-pic Party Monster, on Broadway in the HIV-themed musical Rent; and, in the television show My So-Called Life, an angel follows his character Ricky around in the Christmas episode. “I wouldn’t be shocked that my uncle was a part of all that,” he admits, lifting a worldly brow. “We were extremely close.”

The tragic and complex situation was intertwined with Wilson’s own sexual identity. Sex and death were forever enmeshed. “You couldn’t have sex,” he says, “without having death, if not at the forefront of your mind, at the very least at the back of your mind.” The server returns to take our order and then dashes. “Back then we had to have the conversation, but we were kids—and we were horny. We didn’t want to talk!” He winces and flips a quick, bracing smirk.

Wilson first went for an HIV test at sixteen. “I began to have sex around that age, maybe a bit earlier. I was fast.” From then on he’d say a prayer every time he tested. Back then there was a two-week waiting period for the results. “During that time we would all be making these contracts with God,” he hiccups, wobbling his head, taking a sip of Joe. “It was crazy.” Today Wilson gets tested regularly.

“Guys my age were dying!” he passionately screams about the era, then begrudgingly ticks off, “They looked like me. They were young like me. I couldn’t sit still. I felt a responsibility to lend a voice about this disease, to protect my peers.” Wilson kept that commitment. For more than half his life, he’s been on the frontlines, combating this epidemic. Indeed, Wilson was featured in A&U in June/July 1995. He’s also a militant advocate for human rights.

“In the mid to late eighties, we were living the biggest battle of the war,” he says, bridling, placing a firm hand on his heart. “Literally, our lives depended on being involved, acting up, being loud, and lying [down] in the streets. We were a part of a generation who said, ‘Enough!’” Wilson stops. “Now we’re seeing it being played out again with gun violence. We’re reliving those days. Some people say, ‘Oh, they’re just kids.’ But it’s kids who change the world! It was youth who helped to end the Vietnam War, it was youth who rose up for LGBT rights, it was youth who fought to give women a voice about abortion, and it’s youth who are going to resolve this gun issue.”

He forks a portion of his spinach, mushroom, and tomato omelet into his mouth. Wilson looks up. “We live in revolutionary times. We need to support these kids the way we were supported when we were fighting in the early days of the LGBT movement and the war on AIDS. This is an important opportunity.”

Wilson’s involvement has been extensive. He’s made PSAs, has sung at the ending festivities of the annual AIDS Life/Cycle, performed many times in David Galligan’s [A&U, December 1999] S.T.A.G.E. and Sheryl Lee Ralph’s Divas Simply Singing! [A&U, August 2015], among others. He even has peeled onions at Project Angel Food. “My favorite has been the AIDS Danceathons!” he concedes, with gusto, waving his arms. “Rosie Perez and I would do them together, or sometimes she would be at New York’s Javits Center and I’d be at the Universal backlot in L.A., and we’d talk to each other during it!” Wilson is totally jazzed as he recalls those events. “Believe me, I do it as much for myself as I do for anybody else,” he confesses. “Volunteering gives me great pleasure.”

On the other end of the spectrum, exhaustion currently besets Wilson as he navigates in the icy waters of the dating pool. Announcement: Mr. Cruz is available and looking for a husband. There are requirements.

Marriage seems to run in his family. Not long ago, Wilson, an ordained minister (an accreditation which he obtained online), officiated at the wedding of his younger brother, Josh, and his boyfriend. “That was one of my life’s joyous moments,” he boasts with pride, his glistening peepers softening. “It was magical.”

Living in West Hollywood, with its predominant LGBT community, can be challenging. “I don’t think my husband is in L.A., but who knows, maybe it’s me,” he reasons with a resigned tone, noting that he’s considering moving back to New York. Wilson uses dating apps, but gets frustrated with them, and warns, “Don’t say hello with one of your body parts [pics], otherwise I will literally block you.” The server comes by to check on us and then leaves. “Look,” he declares, “I’m straightforward: I’m dating. I’m not here for a hook-up. Those days are behind me….”

He attributes not finding love to the demands of his career. Last year he was working simultaneously on Star Trek: Discovery (a groundbreaking TV series where he and Anthony Rapp play boyfriends) and 13 Reasons Why (Netflix’s gritty drama). One was filmed in Toronto and the other in San Francisco’s Bay Area. Wilson would spend two days in one city and five days in the other. “It was like that for months—and it was the most incredible experience I ever had!” genuinely raves Wilson, who then chuckles and adds, with a slight agitation in his voice: “Who the hell is going to put up with that?!”

Wilson has dated a variety of men, including guys living with HIV. “It’s always challenging when one person is and the other isn’t.” In a role reversal, Wilson played Dr. Junito Vargas on television’s Noah’s Arc, where he portrayed a doctor who worked in HIV medicine and was positive, and was in a serodifferent relationship. “He was one of my favorite characters! It was so exciting to be a part of this series,” he says.

Dating for someone living with HIV can be excruciatingly anxiety-producing. Wilson believes honesty is the key. “Be upfront and have a conversation. The negative person must create a safe space, so that the positive person can share their status ahead of time.” He fiddles with his big-faced classy watch and states, “It’s smart to get this out of the way before one becomes too attached and feelings are hurt. It’s one of the first things you talk about…your birthday, your favorite food, and your status.”

Unfortunately, prejudice abounds and lying on the Internet is effortless. “You have to take your well being into your own hands,” he emphasizes, punching his fist on the table, “Take every precaution.” He repeats deliberately, enunciating each syllable, “Take ev-er-y pre-cau-tion!”

AIDS has been around for nearly forty years—most of Wilson’s life—but it’s much different nowadays. “I’m forty-four; I can’t believe I’m that old!,” he hoots and hollers, “and to think I was once a part of the younger generation.” He munches on some juicy green melon. “Today there is less urgency, because it is not a death sentence. Some seem to think that if they become infected, it’s no big deal. The medication is not a silver bullet,” he proclaims forcefully. “We don’t know the long term effects.” (When the topic of PrEP comes up, Wilson wishes not to reveal if he’s on it, but feels it’s an important advancement in medicine and one should consider it.)

Concerned that the youth continue to acquire HIV, Wilson reaches out to them by sharing his history. “We don’t talk about our history enough,” he beseeches. “There are valuable lessons to be learned.” He scratches his head. “What’s that famous quote?” We both toss about some words and he finally utters, “‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’”

He eats more melon, wiping a bit of juice from his lips. “Those of us who lived through the AIDS crisis need to keep that history alive—along with the Civil Rights and women’s movement. “Some believe that Stonewall [New York, 1969] was the beginning of gay rights. But there were protests all over the country, including here in Los Angeles [before that],” he points out, touching my knee to make a point. “The first riot in L.A. was at the Black Cat bar in Silver Lake. I think it was 1967.” He repositions himself, putting one knee up on the seat, as his foot dangles over the edge. “This is important history! If people knew more of what happened, they’d work harder to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Wilson is on a riff, adamant, and revved. “It’s our job to see that we keep our experiences alive.”

Regarding his Latino roots, Wilson thinks prevention campaigns should be specific for each community. “The key is found in the way we talk about HIV within the community and to that community,” he advises. “Are we using the language they understand? Are we dealing with their poverty rate, homelessness, education, employment, and healthcare access?” As to that stereotypical Latin machismo, he doesn’t believe the masculinity issue is any greater in the Latin community than in the general population. “I think others tend to make it a bigger deal,” he says. “The real issue is the socio-economic for Latinos, African-Americans, and people of color. That’s the real issue.”

His smart phone goes off, screen brightly flashing, as it has several times before. Faintly annoyed, he promptly turns it off.

Of Puetro Rican heritage, Cruz was born in New York City and raised in San Bernardino, California. He’s been delivering memorable award-winning performances for more than two decades. His first professional gig was traveling the country using his gifted singing voice in the group, The Young Americans. He then became a leading man in My So-Called Life playing Rickie Vasquez, a pioneering role in 1994 as being gay was not completely central to the storyline. Rickie wore eyeliner and preferred using the women’s WC as well. All of this was uncommon at the time—very uncommon. The role rocketed Wilson to fame. (His TV debut was in 1991 on the series, Great Scott!, playing a choirboy, alongside Tobey Maguire.)

Cruz has co-starred in such films as Nixon, Johns, Beat the Bash, Joyride and After Louie, and other television appearances, NCIS, Party of Five, The West Wing, Pushing Daisies, and Grey’s Anatomy. There were times, though, when he weathered depression, due to no employment.

In the early 2000s, it got bleak. “Nobody wanted to have anything to do with me,” he recounts. “I wasn’t working and lived on friends’ couches and made it work. It got to the point where I almost started looking for something else to do besides being an actor.”

What kept Wilson sane during those fraught times was support of family and friends. He also exercised and meditated daily, read books, and watched I Love Lucy. “I have ‘CBS All Access’ and can call up those episodes right at my fingertips,” says Wilson, exhilirated. “Anytime I’m in a bad mood, when I feel like the world is unsafe, or I’m troubled by some shit that’s gone down in the Trump administration, I can rely on I Love Lucy to bring me back. It was also my safe space as a kid.”

As thorny as times got, he never gave up hope. “I always, always thought that I just needed to dig in and work a little harder,” Wilson says. “I believed that [more acting jobs] were going to happen. It was important to keep busy. I would try to sing somewhere, or get cast in a play. Getting through down times taught me that I was mining my path and getting better at it. I knew that the hard times would pass.” He cracks a Pepsodent smile (boy, his teeth are white!) and darts a deliberate look my way. “If you don’t know in your bones that opportunities will eventually present themselves—get the fuck out [of this business]!” He takes a breath. “If you don’t believe it, no one is going to believe it.”

One of those down times was when Wilson came out. His dad, whom he’s named after, asked him to leave the house and Wilson lived in his car for months. It wasn’t until this identical story was written into an episode of My So-Called Life, and his dad was secretly watching, that healing took place between father and son. Today he considers his father a hero, and Wilson made television history as the first openly gay teen actor to play an openly gay teen character!

When Wilson came out in 1993, he looked to Harvey Fierstein [A&U, June 1996] for inspiration. “Harvey was the only professional person I knew that was not only successful as an actor and openly gay, but using his art to tell the story of LGBT people.” When Wilson later introduced himself at an event, Wilson was shocked to learn that Harvey knew who he was! “He said some really beautiful things to me that day,” remarks Wilson, his voice cracking and tears blurring his vision. “I’ll never forget that. I think about him often. He’s been wonderful to me.”

What keeps Cruz on an even keel is honoring his mind and body each day, starting off with exercise and meditation, which he does for about twenty minutes. “I say ‘thank you’ that I have another day to try and get it right.” He ponders, looking out the restaurant windows onto Santa Monica Boulevard and WeHo’s City Hall. “I guess every day we all are just trying to figure it out and do the best we can!” He giggles, wittingly. “For me, this is a healthy way to start each day. It’s important to take care of me before I can take on the rest of the day.”

About ten months ago Wilson figured out that alcohol was not serving him, so he quit. “It didn’t bring out the best in me. I realized I was doing it for all the wrong reasons,” he confesses, offering that he drank all kinds of liquor. “I don’t miss it, and I’m leaner and my skin is much better.” To relax now, he uses cannabis, which “chills me out.”

Wilson’s face becomes reflective as if looking through into an alternate dimension. He’s interrupted by a busboy removing empty plates off the table. “I spent so much of my youth trying to become this idea of what I thought I should be that it’s nice to reach an age where I can appreciate exactly who I am right now. I earned this happiness,” says Wilson, as if quoting a Sanskrit from a Buddhist’s teachings. “I am a survivor.”

The latte steamer, emanating a shrill, irritating sound, forces Wilson to raise the volume of his voice.

“A light went off for me after I lost my step-aunt in the Pulse night club shooting,” reveals Wilson. “Soon after, I spoke at the National Council of La Raza’s [now called UnidosUS] national conference in Orlando. As I wrote that speech, I realized I had spent most of my life asking for permission to be in whatever space I was. If I were in an LGBT space, I would ask permission to be there because I am Latino. If I was in a Latino space, I would ask for permission to be there because I am gay.” He takes a beat. “To honor the memory of those Latino people who died in that shooting, I would no longer ask for permission to be anywhere. No more excuses.”

Wilson’s drive comes from his keen interest in personal growth and education, not only for himself but for others as well. “I get involved because I don’t want the moment to pass. This. Is. My. Moment,” Wilson says, firmly anchoring his voice. “There were people who fought in World War II. Well…I fought in the LGBT and the AIDS war. I am a soldier and I’m in the fight.”

Dann Dulin is a Senior Editor of A&U.

WILSON’S WORLD

What character are you dying to play?
I come from the theater, so I want to play Hamlet.

What is your favorite food?
Macaroni and cheese.

Where do you go to disappear?
It’s so pedestrian, but I’ve created a very lovely home for myself. I love closing the blinds and reading an engrossing book. That’s my happy place. (Currently he’s reading The Razor’s Edge.)

What posters hung on your bedroom wall during your teen years?
Michael Jackson, Prince, and Angela Bassett.

What happens after we die?
I don’t think you can create or destroy any energy in this Universe. Our souls are infinite. I think we come back.

Who would you like to meet?
Barbra Streisand. [The legend is his and his mother’s favorite songstress.] Oh!…and Bette Midler. Barbra and Bette. I met Liza a few years ago. I’m so gay (he flippantly roars).

Give a few words to characterize these people who have intersected your orbit:

Michelle Yeoh: Bad Ass!

Jared Leto: Surprising.

Octavia Spencer: Generous.

Lou Diamond Phillips: Musical theater nerd.

Margaret Cho: The funniest woman I know!

Carrying the Torch
Elizabeth Taylor’s passion for HIV/AIDS advocacy lives on through her grandchildren, including Laela Wilding & Naomi deLuce Wilding
by Larry Buhl

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

On Easter Monday of 1992, Elizabeth Taylor [A&U, February 2003] took the stage at Wembley Stadium in London to give a brief public service message at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness. She pointed a regal finger at the crowd and gave a passionate speech about safe sex. “In just two short weeks there will be as many new infections as there are people here tonight,” she said to the crowd of about 70,000.

“Protect yourselves, love yourselves, respect yourselves, because I will keep on telling you until you do,” she said. “I won’t give in and I won’t give up because the world needs you to live. We really love you. We really care.”

One of Taylor’s granddaughters, Naomi deLuce Wilding, was in the audience, and she told me it was a pivotal moment in her life. A few weeks earlier Taylor had called deLuce Wilding’s boss at her part-time job at a High Street clothing store in Aberystwyth, Wales, and asked if Naomi could get time off to come to London to see the concert.

“I knew that she was sort of a spokesperson for HIV and AIDS at the time, but I grew up in Wales, and [AIDS] was not in the news quite as much,” Naomi said. “The reaction of the crowd in Wembley Stadium was really a kind of a turning point for me of understanding how beloved she was in that community. The things she said, the reaction that she got, the cheers, there’s no way of describing that surge of support and emotion and togetherness.”

Flash forward twenty-six years. The glamorous, trailblazing superstar and business mogul has been gone for seven years. The number of new infections is down, and HIV/AIDS has highly effective treatment and prevention regimens, but still no cure and no universal access. And Naomi, the daughter of Michael Howard Wilding—Taylor’s son with the second of her seven husbands, Michael Wilding, is one of seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild (Finn McMurray), carrying on Taylor’s fight to spread HIV/AIDS awareness.

Taylor, who earned Oscars for her roles in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Butterfield 8, was described in the press for her beauty, her eyes, her glamour, and, when the reporters wanted to get nasty, her changing husbands and her changing figure. She was less well known for her activism around HIV/AIDS education and treatment, though many say one of her greatest roles was as an activist and humanitarian working to end the stigma surrounding the disease.

Except for the Wembly concert, Naomi had only seen her grandmother on the holidays. But in 1999, she was working as a fashion designer in a job she hated, just for the green card. Just before Christmas burglars took everything in her small Manhattan apartment, leaving her bereft and penniless. When she told her grandmother about it, she immediately invited Naomi to come to her Bel Air home to stay. Or more like insisted.

“She said, ‘I’ll get you a lawyer, we’ll get you a green card, and everything will be okay.’ I came to stay with her and I never left [California]. I lived with her on and off for about two years. You know, I had to go back to the UK when my visas would come to an end. It was very stressful, but it was also amazing to spend that time with her.”

Right now Naomi runs the Wilding Cran Gallery in downtown L.A. with her husband Anthony Cran, and she suggests that, even now, if her grandmother were alive, she would find a way to help out in some way.

“She rose to crisis. She loved to be needed.”

In the 1980s Taylor found an enormous crisis, and stepped right up.

In 1985 HIV/AIDS was spoken of in hushed tones or derisive shouts, if spoken of at all, but Elizabeth Taylor had been speaking up and reaching out, even before her great friend Rock Hudson died that October from AIDS-related causes. That year she raised an $1 million for AIDS Project Los Angeles, an unprecedented amount for an AIDS fundraiser, and co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), now called the Foundation for AIDS Research. For the rest of her life she spoke out for people who she felt were being discriminated against. She testified before Congress, three times, for the Ryan White CARE Act, and publicly excoriated President Reagan for not saying the word “AIDS.” And she raised money—nearly $300 million for HIV/AIDS causes.

In 1991 she launched The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF), using money she earned from photos magazines which paid for her wedding to Larry Fortensky. ETAF has, among its many initiatives, provided grants to organizations offering care to people living with HIV and AIDS, and has advocated for needle exchange programs, LGBTQ healthcare in the South, funding cancer screenings for HIV-positive parents in Haiti, and most recently, for reforming HIV criminal laws.

Taylor set up the foundation so that it would continue without her if need be, until there was a cure. While Taylor was living, it was a very small group of people, with Liz running the show. When she died, it was, in one sense, an opportunity for her grandchildren. They had been looking for a way to help out more through ETAF. Now they had a chance to do so.

As ETAF Ambassadors, they’re making sure that issues around HIV/AIDS are not lost in the 24-7 media noise. And they are quick to point out that every dollar the organization takes in still goes directly toward outreach, not overhead. Operating expenses are covered in perpetuity by Taylor’s trust. Did I mention that Taylor was a savvy businesswoman?

Taylor didn’t outright ask her grandchildren to take their place on the stage to spread HIV/AIDS awareness after her death. Several grandchildren were already waiting in the wings.

“Even though some of us family members were interested in helping in any way we could, in the work and advocacy, she didn’t need our help while she was alive, because she was pretty much a one-person show” said Laela Wilding, Naomi’s older sister and fellow ETAF Ambassador.

A Family Affair
Laela and Naomi explained that ETAF is unique in that family members who want to participate are invested in the foundation. “We are determined to support the legacy of our grandmother and let the world know the foundation is thriving, and is still working to help people living with HIV in education advocacy, and supporting people living with HIV around the world,” Laela said.

As ETAF Ambassadors, Taylor’s grandchildren participate in AIDSWatch, America’s largest annual HIV/AIDS advocacy event (ETAF is the title sponsor and AIDS United is the Lead Organizer). This past March, Laela and Naomi used the event, held in Washington, D.C., to meet Congressional staffers to push for the end to HIV criminal laws.

Naomi told me these laws “are essentially a way of enacting our discrimination because they are completely outdated and many of them were never appropriate in the first place. To criminalize spitting for a person who is HIV-positive, you can’t spread HIV that way.”

Naomi believes the meetings were successful. “Almost everybody that we spoke to didn’t know about [criminal laws]. There was light in their eye and they were like, ‘Wow, this is really interesting. Let me see what we can do about this.’”

Laela’s passion is sex education as it pertains to harm reduction.

“A lot of schools only teach abstinence-only,” she said. “But that is linked to [a greater number of] teen pregnancies, not fewer, and [a greater number of] STDs, not fewer. Comprehensive sex ed can include abstinence, but also should talk about ways to have safe sex and why. And it should include those with different gender expression and experience. Let’s educate young people with the truth but it also needs to be up to date. It’s not about morals. It’s about making an educated decision.”

In addition to meeting with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) [A&U, October 2012] while in D.C.—mainly to thank Lee for her work in spearheading the Real Education for Youth Act to promote fact-based sex education across the nation—Laela Wilding has written an op-ed and led a panel on ETAF’s work with the Malawi-based Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance at the International AIDS Conference.

There are many aspects of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and ETAF’s breadth of advocacy is broad. The Foundation has worked with PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) as well as with GAIA (Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance) in Malawi. Since 2008, nearly a million patients have been treated at GAIA/Elizabeth Taylor Mobile Health Clinics. Consistent with UNAIDS goals, the foundation is also committed to helping people living with HIV to know their status, and to helping people diagnosed with HIV access sustained antiretroviral therapy.

Laela and Naomi told me that, as Ambassadors, grandchildren can use their own perspectives, experience and passion to focus on one or more aspect of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

“We’re close as a family but we’re raised quite far apart and we have different family experiences and I think that that’s what makes us quite effective as a group,” Naomi said. “When we’re able to go into a room together, we seem to all have different strengths and I think that that’s quite a wonderful thing.”

Movie star, activist, grandma
“[Our grandmother] was very proud of the way she became a voice for people who weren’t being heard, early on in the HIV fight,” Naomi said. “She was proud that she made people listen, of the effect that she had on President Reagan. She felt that she really had made a difference personally.”

Naomi and Laela admit that even though they couldn’t, say, scold a stadium full of people into using condoms, while being cheered—who else could pull that off, really?—they are still inspired by their grandmother’s determination and compassion.

Naomi said she’s connecting to her grandmother’s message of service and compassion to help others beyond ETAF. She has been involved with GettLove, an organization launched by her aunt, Aileen Getty [A&U, December 2015], which provides services to the homeless community in Los Angeles. Working with GettLove might mean turning up on the street and serving out food, and coffee, and socks, she said.

Her grandmother would approve. She was all about eliminating stigma of those who are marginalized, no matter who it was.

“My grandmother’s message was, ‘I’m using my celebrity to be of service to this community,’” Naomi said. “But we can all use something in our lives to be of service in some way. For some people that means writing an annual check to an organization that they believe in. For others, it means showing up and giving out a sandwich every day. Or it can simply mean that when you’re walking in L.A., connecting with the humanity in somebody else. I just recognized that we can all use something in our lives to help somebody else’s life.”

Neither Laela nor Naomi experienced Elizabeth Taylor primarily as a public health advocate, or even a movie star. She was first and foremost, family. And they say she liked to help out, even when she wasn’t asked to, for advice on wardrobe, styling, and boys. On boys, her dating advice sometimes went south, Naomi admitted, mostly because her grandmother was “an eternal romantic.”

“She was such an optimist that the rest of us might see a bad date, but my grandmother wanted to see love in every opportunity,” Naomi said.

“She liked cutting people’s hair,” Laela recalled. “She would look at you with a sidelong glance and say, ‘Oh honey get me the scissors.’ And she would start with a little snip here a little snip there. She was very artistic. She had a great eye.” Taylor also gave her female grandchildren suggestions on makeup—she favored the smoky-eye look—as well as wardrobe, where she urged her female grandkids to, well, accentuate their female assets, the sisters said. “She once said to me, ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it,’” Laela said.

Growing up in northern California and the Pacific Northwest—she’s a graphic designer in Portland, Oregon, now—Laela was closer in proximity to her grandmother than Naomi, and visited nearly every holiday, and some Sundays. Taylor didn’t play favorites, they said. Every child from every branch of the family tree was welcome at her Bel Air house, even for an informal Sunday hangout by the pool.

“She was very open-minded and open-hearted,” Laela said. “She extended her home, treated people equally with open arms. She wanted to draw people together.”

Naomi theorized that the career Taylor is best known for might not have been the career she wanted. “She was very outspoken, she had a keen sense for justice, she would’ve been a really good lawyer or politician. Being an actor kind of came to her. And sometimes I think she was very ambivalent about it. But at the same time I can’t imagine her not being in the public eye.”

For more information about The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, visit: www.etaf.org.

Makeup by Ruben Bermudez, celebrity makeup artist: www.beautybyruben.com. •
Hair by Toné Jackson, celebrity hair stylist: Instagram @tjstyles333.

Larry Buhl is a multimedia journalist, screenwriter, and novelist living in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter @LarryBuhl.

Living Truth
Danez Smith Shares Their Insights About Poetry as Resistance
by John Francis Leonard

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Brent Dundore–BrentDundore.com & BDPortraits.com

The poetry of Danez Smith, the young, lauded and accomplished genderqueer poet, transcends labels. As a poet, their talent smashes pre-conceived notions. They are the author of the poetry collections black movie (Button Poetry), [insert] boy (YesYes Books), which won a prestigious Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ poetry, as well as the transcendent Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press), which was a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry in 2017.

Don’t Call Us Dead is a deeply moving homage to young Black men, the violence they face and the shocking problems of HIV/AIDS that they deal with at higher rates than almost any other community. There is an urgency to Smith’s poetry, and they illustrate these very real problems in ways that make us all think and wonder at their senselessness.

Smith illuminates the mortality of the young Black individual due to systemic violence at the hands of white police officers or an HIV diagnosis poignantly in Don’t Call Us Dead in lines such as: “history is what it is. it knows what it did. bad dog. / bad blood. bad day to be a boy.” The beautiful poetry of “it won’t be a bullet” delves further into the issue of HIV: “i’m not the kind of black man who dies on the news. / i’m the kind who grows thinner & thinner & thinner / until light outweighs us, & we become it, family / gathered around my barely body telling me to go / toward myself.” It’s in lines like these that Smith via the poem’s speaker grapples with their own mortality as a person living with HIV. Their verse excels in the personal as well as the political.

Smith is active in poetry slams, the powerful, oral reading of their work and has twice been a finalist in Individual World Poetry Slam, placing second in 2014. In 2017 they won a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Along with Franny Choi, Smith hosts the Poetry Foundation podcast, VS.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Smith about influences on their poetry, writing in this newest wave of attacks on communities designated as Other, and how living with HIV shapes their perspective.

John Francis Leonard: At what age did poetry begin to interest you as an artistic genre? How did you begin expressing yourself through it, what was its draw?
Danez Smith: So, I began writing poetry in high school. There was a certain teacher who encouraged me. It allowed me to be serious and political and thoughtful in a way that allowed a fourteen year-old boy to be more than the class clown. It made something serious out of me.

You’re known for Poetry Slam and the dramatic reading of your work. I’ve watched your performance of several pieces through YouTube and they’re very moving. How important is the oral performance of poetry in your work? Do you write poems with their oral expression in mind?
It’s very important. I would like for people to not be bored when I read my poems aloud. I think anytime you get people to sit down and listen; it needs to be a good experience. Then I need to be at least decent at it. I understood poetry as a performance, but I didn’t start reading it aloud until college. My first experiences with poetry were spoken word. It comes alive when a poem is performed well on the stage. I come from a long tradition of spoken word artists, and I try to honor that tradition.

When you write poetry now, do you think of it in the context of reading it aloud to an audience?
I don’t. My job is just to write a good poem and afterwards I figure out if it’s a poem that lends itself to performance or not.

Let’s talk a bit more about that oral tradition of poetry that influences you.
There’s just a long tradition of folks; the Beat poets, the Black Arts Movement, the Def poets (my first heroes in poetry), many traditions. Just being Black is an oral tradition—how Black people pass on stories and family history. We are an oral people. So spoken word comes very naturally to me. I love watching the whole family tell stories all the time, watching and receiving the oral history of my family. Mostly through stories, sometimes through song. I feel like I come from many oral histories—so poetry just makes sense. And poetry is an oratory art. Writing poetry down is actually much newer than speaking it. Poetry is an oral tradition. It’s an old spoken art.

Tell me about The Dark Noise Collective. How did it begin?
The Dark Noise Collective is six different artists. We’re all the same age, all at similar points in our careers. Back in 2013, we got together and started supporting each other and our moves through the literary world. They’re my homies, my family. We’re just a collective of artists trying to figure it out and support each other

The subject of HIV/AIDS in the Black community, especially among young Black men, comes up often in your work and with much resonance. Is there not enough outreach? Is there a lack of access to medical care and information available?
I can’t answer the question about outreach because I don’t live everywhere that Black people live. I think some places have amazing outreach—in some, it’s not. It depends on where you are. Are you a rural Black person, or do you live in the city? Do you live in a city that’s progressive? Where is the clinic in your neighborhood? Does the clinic in your neighborhood have free services that you need, or is there another cross-town? I think there’s many questions you need to ask to answer that question—whether the outreach is there or not.

What are you thoughts about the alarmingly high HIV rates among young black MSM?
It’s sad. I think there’s a narrative there and that we can’t be lazy and assume that it’s just one thing or another.

How does your own community’s attitude towards HIV/AIDS influence the situation?
I’m not sure. I think that, again, there’s a false narrative that black people are more homophobic than other communities and I think that’s complete bullshit. But I also think it’s real for some folks. There’s a lot of shame that you have to move through. If you can’t move through the door of being openly queer, then how can you move through the door of being openly HIV-positive? I think there is something to be said for that, but I don’t know. Is it a lack of outreach, is it a lack of knowledge, do some folks think that crack is not a thing that exists? I meet folks every day who don’t know what crack is, who don’t know that there are programs they can have access to. I don’t think it’s about the Black community; it’s about America. It’s about class. It’s about religion. I don’t think it’s about Blackness; it’s about Americaness. And it’s about America not providing for folks that have limited access to resources. I don’t think you can single out HIV as an epidemic for Black people. We need to think about things like child mortality, income disparity and all the different health concerns that are facing Black folks across the board at higher rates.

For you, why is it important to talk about HIV/AIDS in your work?
I don’t know how to write what’s not going on in my life. For me, it was my own process, my own understanding of myself, problem solving for myself. All of that I have through poetry. So it was a thing that was happening in my life and I had to write about it.

Tell me a bit more about your personal experience with HIV.
I was diagnosed in April 2014 at a clinic. I received HIV the old-fashioned way. It was a really hard time; I was depressed for a while. Thankfully, I had health insurance and was able to go on medication. It made me get in touch with my life, connect with my mortality. I thought a lot about being Black in America and all the times my nation had tried to kill me. It was a hard transition, but it made me know that I was alive and that I was glad to be alive.

Race is another subject that you tackle in your work, especially in your latest collection Don’t Call Us Dead. Why do you think that we’re having this reckoning with race and our attitudes towards it in our culture right now? I knew racism still existed, of course, but I think many of us are upset at just how much there is. Were we naïve?
When have we not had a reckoning with race? America’s whole history is a reckoning with race. It’s nothing new; there’s no reckoning. Maybe white people are realizing they suck. Racism is a very real thing. There’s nothing different now than what was going on a hundred years ago. Nothing is new, maybe these Nazi rallies are new, but to a Black person, racism isn’t back, it isn’t retro, it isn’t having a moment like the eighties. Just because white liberals sort of looked away doesn’t mean that shit stopped happening. So I’m glad white liberals are realizing something. Maybe Trump was a good thing—it made folks realize that Obama was the U.S. president and shit still sucked for a lot of people. There is no reckoning, maybe an awakening for some folks, but I’m not someone who’s been awakened.

With all this hatred and blowback coming from the right in this administration, what are your hopes for the LBGTQ and Black communities? What do we need to do?
The most protected of the white folks might be waking up with this new awareness of race. There may be a lot of scary conversations folks need to have about a revolution. It’s scary. It’s not like Black folks and queer folks are silent people. We already have a strong sense of activism. We need to keep fighting and fighting in ways that are more inventive. We also need to think about what we’re not going to have time for. Because, the way America works, we’re going to have to show up at the midterm elections, make things tough for them. Get some folks in the House and Senate and, in 2020, in the White House that will continue to move us forward. Towards a culture that is plentiful for everyone, not just for some.

In reading Don’t Call Us Dead, I was especially moved by your words describing the aggression and violence perpetrated against black men and boys by law enforcement. What role can poetry play in raising awareness of this epidemic?
I think cops are unneeded and unnecessary, and along with them the prisons. There are tangible steps but I don’t think that I, as a poet, am the one to be giving them. There are political figures and leaders I look to for these answers and not other poets. I look to organizations like Black Lives Matter, to political thinkers. I think there are a lot of answers, but people just don’t want to listen. There’s not much conversation to be had when the pattern is clear. I’m bored with these conversations and ready to get to the next steps. How do we reshape our society into a place that does not necessitate the death of my people? And that’s what rubbed me the wrong way about this reckoning, we only see some of it. The peaks and valleys of when the media is interested in the death of Black Americans. A reason BLM came around and was popular in the media was because Black death piqued the public’s interest. But it had always been happening. Who’s hearing about it now, white people? We’ve been going to those funerals, burying these bodies, packing up the victims’ belongings. Just seeing the accounts of these murders doesn’t satisfy me. What will satisfy me will be them putting a stop to it.

You’ve been shortlisted and won some major literary awards. Do awards and accolades mean anything to your work?
It makes me proud. I work really hard and it’s nice to be recognized that way. It doesn’t make me write any differently. An award for something you’ve done is great, but it doesn’t affect future work. Maybe it’s confirmation that I’m doing something right, but it’s not going to make me write a better poem. My concern is that at the end of the day, you have to ignore the awards and not let it get into your head. Just put your head down and write, write better than you have been writing.

What’s ahead for you in your career; what are you working on now?
I’m working on a book of poetry called Homie that will come out in about two years and that book is about friendship. I’m really, really focused on friendship. That makes me giddy; I love my friends. I’m also working on a novel that will be ready in a year, or a decade [laughs heartily]. I want to try my hand at different things like stand-up, try my hand at the visual arts. I know I’ll be a poet for the rest of my life, I’ve got a good handle on it. But I want to go out and try to mess up at other things.

For more on photographer Brent Dundore, visit: BrentDundore.com and BDPortraits.com.

For more information about Danez Smith, visit their website at: danezsmithpoet.com.

John Francis Leonard is an advocate and writer, as well as a voracious reader of literature, which helps to feed his love of the English language. He has been living with HIV for fifteen years and he is currently at work on his first novel, Fools Rush In. His fiction has been published in the ImageOutWrite literary journal and he is a literary critic for Lambda Literary. Follow him on Twitter @JohnFrancisleo2.

Champion for Equality
Brian Sims, Pennsylvania’s Out and Proud Lawmaker, Is Making His Mark Advocating for LGBTQ Equality, Equal Access to PrEP and PEP, and Pay Equity for Women
by Chip Alfred

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Holly Clark

There’s no denying Brian Sims is a trailblazer. He’s the first openly gay NCAA football captain in history. He is the first out person ever elected to the Pennsylvania legislature. He’s also one of the first elected officials in the country to include photos of himself with his same-sex partner in a marketing campaign.

A charismatic, rising star in the Democratic party just shy of his fortieth birthday, Sims has garnered national attention and racked up an impressive stack of accomplishments and recognitions. But you won’t hear him tooting his own horn. This dedicated public servant measures his success by the impact he’s having fighting for equality and improving the quality of life for the people he represents.

After knowing Sims for nearly ten years, the one thing that impresses me most about this man is his ability to remain true to himself. He’s still the same warm, engaging, genuine guy I’ve always known, passionate about his beliefs and living his life on his own terms. Whenever you hear him deliver a speech, it’s always coming straight from the heart, because he’s addressing issues he sincerely cares about.

A native of Washington, D.C., Sims was an Army brat, the child of two Army officers. Along with his three siblings, including a fraternal twin brother, Sims lived in seventeen states before the family settled in Chester County, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. Sims acknowledges that having a twin helped with the constant adjustments to new surroundings. “I think of the years when I hated having a twin brother around all the time. Now I look back and think thankfully I had somebody my age, going through what I was going through.” From a young age, Sims knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. “When I was a little kid, if you asked me I would have told you I would be a feminist lawyer,” he tells A&U.

He attended Downingtown High School, an institution known for its championship sports teams. Describing himself back then as “kind of a fat nerdy kid,” he joined the football team as a lineman. Sims went on to play football for Bloomsburg University in central Pennsylvania. “A lot of people’s college experiences are the most formative years of their life,” he says. “It was a time where I established some of the best friendships I’ve ever had.”

Sims became captain of the team and led the Bloomsburg University Huskies all the way to the 2000 Division II National Championship game. It wasn’t until his last semester of college that the inevitable question he feared for years would finally come. It happened after a fraternity-run Jell-O wrestling competition at rival Shippensburg University. Covered from head to toe in red Jell-O, Sims was walking back to his car with a few of his teammates when one of them turned to him and just blurted out, “Yo Sims, are you gay?” Needless to say, he was caught completely off guard.

“All those years I played ball I always thought at one point my teammates would ask me. I thought I’d have a really great response by then, and I just said, ‘Yeah, man, thanks for asking.’” Naturally, what followed were a whole lot more questions. “They just asked me everything under the sun you could ask a gay guy.” Sims explains that for most of these guys, he was the first friend they ever had that had come out. “Today, these guys are still my best friends; their children are people I know well. It’s really great the relationships I have with them.”

After college, Sims enrolled in law school at Michigan State University, earning his J.D. in 2004 with a focus on international and comparative law. After graduation, he moved to Philadelphia, where he took the bar exam and started doing legal work. In 2008, he was named staff counsel for policy and planning for the Philadelphia Bar Association. But it was a man named Dan Anders and his introduction to the Victory Fund that would change the course of his career. Anders, the first openly gay man to run for judge in Philadelphia, approached Sims about co-chairing his election campaign. “When Dan ran, he wanted to run with the Pride flag,” Sims shares.

What Sims quickly learned working on the campaign was that Anders had been paying his dues in the LGBTQ community a long time before that. “When Dan got elected to the bench in 2008, he had spent nearly ten years as the LGBTQ lawyer on everything,” Sims observed. Anders had served on multiple boards, and he held leadership positions on several of them. “When he left, there was this big vacuum.” That’s when Brian Sims was tapped to step up to the plate.

Sims took over as chairman of a struggling GALLOP, the LGBTQ lawyers association of Philadelphia. He was elected president of Equality Pennsylvania and spent several years working to rebuild that organization. At around the same time, Sims was approached to join the board of the Victory Fund, a national organization focused on increasing the number of openly LGBTQ officials at all levels of government. Sims joined the Victory Fund board, made some key connections, and learned about what it takes to get an out LGBTQ candidate elected.

Eventually, his professional colleagues started asking Sims if he would consider running for office. At first, Sims was hesitant. “It just wasn’t what I thought I was looking for. I was on a number of boards, I was running a couple of different organizations that all were impacted by our lack of LGBT elected representation and the lack of LGBT rights.” In 2011, Sims threw his hat in the ring for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives representing District 182, which encompasses mostly Center City Philadelphia. In 2012, with donors from across the nation and an aggressive local grassroots campaign, Sims was triumphant, after unseating a twenty-eight-year incumbent in the Democratic primary.

One of the first people to talk to Sims before he decided to seek public office was David Mixner, who he identifies as one of the founding fathers of contemporary LGBT rights in America [see our interview with Mixner in this issue]. “It’s a common thing when we talk about HIV and AIDS to talk about a missing generation,” Sims explains, but Mixner’s perspective gave Sims a clearer picture of the historical context. “Specifically, when it comes to advocacy, we’re not just missing a generation, we’re missing a generation of many of the greatest advocates that the LGBTQ communities have ever known. There was a recognition that they fought for my identity, now I needed to fight for everyone’s.”
Since Sims took office, he has been a devoted advocate for LGBTQ rights and equal access to HIV treatment and prevention. Sims has been a staunch PrEP and PEP proponent from the beginning, focusing on public awareness, facilitating community forums, and educating his constituents and colleagues about the barriers to access. The biggest challenges we face with PEP and PrEP, he says, are making it easier for everyone to access the medications, and making them part of the normal conversation between a patient and a medical provider. “I want PEP and PrEP as readily available as birth control. When my doctor talks to me during an intake about my sex life and the precautions I’m taking or not taking, I want him to make a risk assessment that says, ‘Brian, you might want to consider going on PrEP.’ I want it to be that simple.”

Sims acknowledges we’re still not talking enough about PEP and PrEP. “There is still a sex-shaming component to it all.” He points out that the lack of education and specific trainings for medical providers on how to prescribe PEP and PrEP can also be a roadblock to access. “We need to reengage how HIV/AIDS is taught in medical schools. I don’t think the average medical school professor wants to be ignorant to a thing that has public health implications for a minority population.”

In 2017, Sims introduced a bill that would make it mandatory for all insurance companies doing business in Pennsylvania to provide coverage of PrEP and PEP. At press time, the bill has not yet come up for a vote in the House. Sims concedes this bill will likely face an uphill battle. “This is a state legislature that doesn’t even believe in basic LGBT equality,” he declares indignantly.

Every year he’s been in office, Sims has co-sponsored legislation to ensure LGBTQ non-discrimination in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations. “In Pennsylvania, the fact that we don’t have LGBTQ non-discrimination in our human relations act is a travesty of justice.” he states. And you can be sure Brian Sims isn’t giving up on this battle.

Nor has he given up on his childhood dream of being a feminist lawyer. Sims is one of the few men who has been teaming up with his female colleagues as a key supporter of gender pay equity. “It’s impossible to not understand the power of women in all places and not also understand that this comes hand in hand with having that power devalued or ignored. Often, one of the most identifiable ways is with pay,” he says. Sims has also consistently opposed funding cuts for Planned Parenthood in a state where it’s constantly being threatened. In 2014, Sims was honored with the Champion of Choice award from NARAL, a national pro-choice group.

The following year, Sims was named to The Advocate’s “40 Under 40” list for his commitment to advocacy. The magazine cited Sims for “his rare ability…to see outside his own experiences and connect the struggles of all.” Upon receiving the recognition, Sims told The Advocate, “Not only do LGBT rights and women’s rights go hand in hand, I feel similarly about racial and ethnic justice issues. This is about equality in a larger sense, but it’s also about to what degree do you believe the government should have control of your life.”

Sims, who will run unopposed for reelection for a fourth term in 2018, says he’s focusing his time and fundraising efforts this campaign cycle on identifying and training out LGBTQ candidates in Pennsylvania. He recently supported a two-day training in Harrisburg with representatives from the Victory Fund, and nineteen candidates or campaign staffers from around the state. He stays in touch with all the out candidates in the state right now, and he anticipates eleven of them will be running for the House. Currently the sole out gay Pennsylvania legislator, Sims is hopeful there will be a few more LGBTQ candidates elected to join him next year.

His approach is being as present and accessible to prospective candidates as possible, attending as many public events as his hectic schedule will allow. “Visibility matters. It is proven to be 100-percent true in my life. Every time I go anywhere, somebody walks up to me and says something about thinking about running for office, or they have a friend who is,” he asserts. “I’m in so many rooms where I’m trying to convince people why instead of looking for the perfect candidate, they might become the perfect candidate.”

In late 2015, Sims briefly entered the race for Congress representing Pennsylvania’s 2nd Congressional District. A few months later, he withdrew from the race, citing the challenges of running for reelection in the PA House at the same time he would be launching a campaign for Congress. Is Sims likely to run again? His response, “I don’t know. It’s not something that I’m actively considering.”

For now, his focus is on his next term in the House and pushing forward his legislative agenda. “Access to PrEP/PEP, LGBT non-discrimination, gun control legislation, a ban on gay conversion therapy, equal pay for women; these are issues I care deeply about. I don’t want to have been the guy that worked on them and got them right up to the finish line. I want to see these things pass, so I’m here for that.”

Sims has settled into the life of a state legislator, shuttling between Harrisburg in session, an office in Center City and a Philly Gayborhood apartment. In his spare time, he enjoys running, playing sports, camping, and exploring the city with his partner Brandon. Last fall, as he was posing for a campaign photo shoot in Philly’s iconic Rittenhouse Square, Sims saw an opportunity to get a new picture of him and Brandon, the man he calls his “Disney prince of a boyfriend.” So, he asked the photographer for a favor. “My boyfriend works about three blocks away, can I call him, and will you take a picture of us?”

Brandon popped over and the photo of the couple walking arm-in-arm gazing into each other’s eyes was such a hit with the entire campaign team, it became the official image used in the email marketing campaign. According to Sims, the image and the campaign were very well-received. “So many people who know LGBTQ people know us in a sort of an asexual vacuum. They don’t know our relationships. They don’t know our touch. They don’t know our love. They don’t know what it looks like. Well, it’s an act of defiance to some people; to me it’s an act of familiarity.”

When he’s working, Sims says he’s become accustomed to frequently being the only out LGBTQ person in the room. “In the same vein that I know the amount of responsibility that comes with that, I also know enough to know that I could never represent the LGBTQ community wholly. No one person ever could. There’s a reason the rainbow flag is our flag, because we are literally of everyone. I try not to look on it with such a 10,000-foot view. I mostly just try to be in it, and work.”

For more information, visit: www.facebook.com/RepBrianSims, @BrianSimsPA.

For more information about photographer Holly Clark, log on to: www.hollyclarkphotography.com.

Chip Alfred, an A&U Editor at Large, is the Director of Development & Communications at Philadelphia FIGHT.

Sew What?
Using fiber as one of his media, queer artist Ben Cuevas takes a softer route in his art practice to deliver hard-to-swallow concepts on HIV/AIDS & more
Text & photos by Sean Black

In recognizing the work of artist Ben Cuevas in 2016 for his vital, creative contributions to the discourse surrounding the AIDS pandemic, New York Times heavy-weight art critic Holland Cotter gave Cuevas a hefty nod. His art review, “Art of the AIDS Years: What Took Museums So Long?,” gave Cuevas a shout-out that cemented him as one of the artists who is “adding work that is politically complicated, referential without being nostalgic and absolutely unambiguous about the desirability of difference. Not bad.”

Good for Ben. He is making colossal strides by weaving into the mix, life-saving dialogue among hipsters and blue-chip artists alike and being rightfully lauded. The aforementioned article notes Cuevas alongside the ranks of A-listers such as Keith Haring, Ross Bleckner, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andres Serrano.

Originally, using knitting as a meditative practice which he learned from a close friend, Ben began to explore and challenge the gendered constructs and physical limitations of his craft excerpted from his website. “From the political to the metaphysical, my practice is steeped in queer feminist ideologies, with an awareness of the mind, body, and spirit. My work spans a wide range of disciplines including installation, sculpture, photography, performance, video and sound. Often incorporating several of these elements into any given piece, I make use of digital media as a means of documentation.”

As one of the more active member artists of Visual AIDS’ Artist+ Registry (which is open to all HIV-positive artists) Cuevas is availing himself frequently to speak about his work in order to raise awareness. Artist+ Registry is the largest database of works by artists with HIV/AIDS. Through the electronic repository of works housed by Visual AIDS, it offers a unique resource to inspire and educate the public. Visual AIDS assists artists with HIV/AIDS, while preserving a visual record of their work and helping them reach new audiences. Its mission is to utilize art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV-positive artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.

Visual AIDS’ Program Director Alex Fiahlo has worked on a number of occasions with Cuevas, notably in the recent joint fundraising publication DUETS: Ben Cuevas & Annie Sprinkle in Conversation. Recognizing Cuevas for his efforts Fiahlo shares, “Working with Ben Cuevas has allowed Visual AIDS to deepen our work in important directions: from an intergenerational perspective by highlighting Ben’s experience as an artist living with HIV born in the 1980s, and as an extension of our network from our New York office to Ben’s Los Angeles art worlds. Ben’s conversation with Annie Sprinkle ranges from topics including art, knitting, postporn, ecosex, HIV, love, loss, risk, activism, feminism, go-go dancing, orgasms, humor, death and more; during this moment of political tumult, it’s a provocative and political breath of fresh air.”

As Cuevas is an active activist-artist on both coasts and places in between, I was fortunate to attend one of his recent talks about his latest PILLows project.

“You are welcome to touch them and to lay on them—please interact with them as much as you would like,” Cuevas set the comfy, relaxed tone at his recent artist lecture at ONE Archives Foundation Gallery in West Hollywood. As part of the closing walkthrough of “Lost & Found: Safer Sex Activism Exhibition” on Sunday, July 1, along with fellow exhibiting artist/activists Kim Abeles (HIV/AIDS TAROT Cards) and members of Clean Needles Now (CNN), the group discussed safer-sex practices and harm reduction activism in the Los Angeles metro area.

“The piece is called PILLows with a capital P. I. L. L.” Word-play and thoughtful puns are prevalent and very much intended in Cuevas’ work. PILLows was originally created for Viral Illumination, a one-night, art event curated and produced by Elijah Mckinnon and Vasilios Papapitsios that intended to celebrate the work of artists and creative people living with HIV/AIDS as well as their allies.

“Since it was a very celebratory atmosphere, I was imagining work that I could create that wouldn’t be overly serious, although it is a very serious issue and we can’t ignore that. Luckily today we have so many advancements in treatment and prevention. There is a lot to celebrate. We are very much carrying on the legacy of the work of artists and activists who have been engaged in this conversation since the beginning of the epidemic.

Rising up to the challenge of a soft-sculptural work to be sewn rather than constructed through knitting (a first for him for Viral Illumination), Ben worked with his team of collaborators: Vasilios Papapitsios, Daniel Aston, and Danimal Oh. “They all have amazing insight and experience,” shared Cuevas.

“I think we all really had the intention of creating a space that made people feel comfortable talking about HIV and AIDS, and prevention in particular. There aren’t enough conversations happening around PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and TasP (Treatment as Prevention) and those are some of the most revolutionary tools that have come about in this epidemic.”

“Being an HIV-positive person, I feel that my existence is indebted to the work of those people who have come before me in helping bring about these pharmaceutical interventions; such as the work of ACT UP and all of the activism that happened around making early drugs available and then getting better drugs developed. I think there is still a lot of work that needs to happen, so I wanted to create a comfortable space that helps give people license to talk about all of these things. My work is influenced directly by my identity—all of the pills in this piece I have taken at some point—the blue one at the bottom is Truvada and the pink ones are Isentress, which was the first regimen I was on. The green ones are Genvoya which I am taking now. I like having that personal connection in my work. I also greatly admire and hearken to the work of David Wojnarowicz and Ron Athey. I love how confrontational their work is, especially in the context of the early years of the epidemic. This idea of confrontation was really important because the general public wasn’t confronting the issue of HIV. Since then, HIV/AIDS has become a part of the cultural conversation in a bigger way, but a lot of people still aren’t comfortable with it. There is still this fear that hangs over people’s heads around HIV and AIDS and it’s there for a reason—the epidemic caused a lot of harm—but I think today we live in a time that is much less scary and we can be a lot more comfortable talking about these things. In a way, you could say I’m confronting people with comfort. So, those are some of the ideas that went into the creation of this work. Since Viral Illuminations PILLows has gone on to be shown here [ONE Archives Foundation Gallery]. Vasilios also took it to the festival, MIX NYC, and incorporated it into a large-scale video installation.

HIV remains a serious public health issue for the Hispanic/Latino community and because of the disproportionately high rates of new infections the Latino Commission on AIDS (LCOA), the Hispanic Federation along with other service organizations put together this day of awareness to build capacity for non-profit organizations and health departments to reach these communities, promote HIV testing, and provide HIV prevention information and access to care.

For this year’s 2018 NLAAD (National Latinx AIDS Awareness Day) people are encouraged to use the hashtag #NLAAD2018 to remind us that “Ending HIV is everyone’s job.” National Latino AIDS Awareness Day takes place on October 15, the last day of National Hispanic Heritage Month, which starts on September 15.

Informed about the facts, Cuevas shares, “Latinx HIV/AIDS awareness month is important to me because it affects my community and targets one of the cohorts most directly affected by HIV/AIDS today: Hispanic and Latinx men who have sex with men (MSM). This group is one of the demographics with the most, new HIV diagnoses, second only to Black MSMs.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) further reports that Hispanics/Latinos account for about twenty-five percent of new diagnoses of HIV in the United States in 2015, despite representing about eighteen percent of the total U.S. population. The CDC furthers that stigma, language barriers, and limited access to health care are among the factors that contribute to the higher rates of HIV infection in Hispanic/Latino communities.

Gaining a respected and growing presence in the world of art activism, Ben was recently invited to be a visiting lecturer this past August for the 2018 Summer Fire Island Artist Residency Program, awarded to LGBT artists where he presented the trajectory of his work and its themes from his earliest knit anatomical sculptures to his most recent PILLows installation, and lots in between.

“It was great having an opportunity to delve into the politics and concepts that underlie my practice: the body, HIV, queer theory, intersectional feminist theory, pop culture, etc. Meeting with the artists in residence was wonderful too. It seemed like my work really resonated with them, as their work resonated with me when I got to do studio visits and see what they were making. It was exciting to see what such a talented group of artists were doing with their time in residence at FIAR.”

In his popular, visually and cerebrally intriguing Tweetables series, Cuevas creatively subverts our Commander-in-Chief’s seeming inability to restrain himself on social media. Through Cuevas’ exploration of identity, pop, and the Internet, which carries through these works, “The Tweetables Series: Knit Text in 140 Characters or Less,” revels in the interstices of language and syntax where Ben “merges contemporary language and aesthetics of social media with the anachronistic softness of knitting and yarn.”

He notes: “Art as activism is more important than ever. Given our current political climate, it is clear there is so much work to do still. Artists play an important role in making change, raising awareness, and engaging communities. One positive of living in such trying times: people are paying attention to political art more than ever.”

The final panel in his piece, Twitterstorm, takes a direct stab and pierces the President’s winning campaign slogan. Stitched onto a Democrat blue-hued field, it reads “…all for some idea of greatness that never was. #NotMyPresident.” The pointed reality of these words masquerading as a sweet knitted sampler is unsettling. It pulls the “home sweet home” rug right out from under our feet or rightfully slaps us in the face.

Direct impact in order to affect political and social change is vital to Cuevas who contends that his work is influenced by his identity as a gender queer, male-bodied, HIV-positive artist. “I want people to think about the intersections between the body, politics, identity, and culture. Specifically, at this point in time, if I may get on my activist soapbox, I want to get across that we still need to expand [and safeguard] government and private support for HIV/AIDS care and prevention. Testing, PrEP, and TaSP need to be freely available to all who need it. We need comprehensive sex education in public schools that teaches students about consent and goes beyond heteronormativity. Queer history and culture are worthy of preservation. People of all genders, races, sexual orientations, physical abilities, ages, and income brackets deserve respect, autonomy, and opportunity.”

Speaking about the new trajectory of his work he furthers: “It’s going in a few directions. This fall, I’m lucky to have been invited by BOXOprojects to be an artist in residence with them in Joshua Tree. I’m looking forward to seeing how that unique location inspires me to make art and engage with the desert’s creative community. Also, I’m working on a new photographic body of work called ‘Reinserted.’ For this series, I’m culling through archives to find images of sex workers and public cruising, and digitally reinserting the archival photos’ subjects into the images’ modern-day locations. This work will be included in the upcoming group exhibition ‘ON OUR BACKS: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work,’ curated by Alexis Heller at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, opening September 2019. I also plan to continue my Tweetables series of knit text in 140 characters or less, and likely do some more knit sculpture and installation exploring the body and identity.”

Thoughtful and ambitious. Not bad.

For more information about Ben and to see a wider breadth of his previous work—such as “Knit Veins,” a biologically intimate piece that underscores Cuevas’ fascination and interest in blood or “Jockstrap,” a performance piece where Ben sat nude in a men’s locker room and knit himself a jock strap from start to finish, thus exploring notions of woman’s work versus man’s work and appropriate activities within gendered spaces—log on to www.bencuevas.com. “Jock strap” was performed at the Queer Biennial exhibition, at the Hotel Gaythering, in conjunction with Art Basel Miami in 2014.

To learn more about Visual AIDS or to purchase a copy of DUETS: Ben Cuevas & Annie Sprinkle in Conversation for $10.00 go to www.visualaids.org.

Sean Black is a Senior Editor of A&U.

Moving Images
Writer & Producer Our Lady J Brings the Realities of the Trans Community to Television Audiences
by John Francis Leonard

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

Looking at the life of Our Lady J, it would be natural to assume that she’s led the charmed existence of the beautiful and accomplished. A prominent member of the trans community, she’s been a writer and producer for two critically-acclaimed hit television series: Amazon Prime’s Emmy Award-winning Transparent and this year’s breakout hit on FX, Pose. She’s also a classically trained concert pianist and recording artist who has played Carnegie Hall and for both the acclaimed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the American Ballet Theatre. Speaking to her by phone, I found her to be both incredibly poised and gracious, more gracious than any of the incredible subjects I’ve had the privilege of interviewing for a story. But speaking to her in depth, one realizes that that incredible confidence was not always with her and that her remarkable success was hard won.

Lady J was born in a village of 200 people in Pennsylvania—a village that even for its small size, had many divisions. There were the Evangelicals, the secular, the Mennonites and the Amish. She says, “I couldn’t wait to get out. I didn’t see myself reflected anywhere neither in my village or in television or media.” She knew she was trans from an early age, but she didn’t fully understand just what that was. She describes it herself by saying, “I didn’t know what the word trans was—I just knew that I enjoyed being a girl.”

It was a lonely and confusing time but did bring with it one great gift, the piano. Starting at an early age, initially as a means of escape from a world in which she was bullied and misunderstood for being femme, she lost herself in playing the piano. It turns out, as she herself puts it, “I was freakishly good at it.” Years of dedication to her art led her to a way out of her small town for her junior and senior years. She earned a scholarship to the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan. It changed Lady J’s world, to put it mildly. She found herself among like-minded people. The arts have long been a haven for the different, people who were artists were often LGBT, were often different, who were isolated from their peers. This welcome change of scenery came at fifteen, and she would spend her junior and senior years at Interlochen.

In 2000, like so many LGBT people, she felt the pull of the large, urban centers and made a move to New York City. Lady J found success there doing what she loved to do most, playing the piano in concert. Even when she played Carnegie Hall however, all was not well; there was something elemental to her happiness and fulfillment missing—the puzzle was not complete. As she puts it, “What I didn’t have were the tools for a fertile development of my identity. Music only took me so far; there was only so far I could go before I felt lost.” She wasn’t living her authentic life and, even though she was playing Carnegie Hall, even if she looked like a success from the outside, there was something fundamental missing. She continues, “I was lost because I had so much confusion about my identity and so much confusion and shame about my trans identity. She started meeting other trans folk, others like herself, and she knew that this was who she was.

The impetus for change and her claiming of her identity came from a point of crisis. She received her diagnosis in 2004 at a point where, as she puts it, “I was a complete mess, I hadn’t been tested in over a year and was living in denial, from my gender to the state my life was really in.” This diagnosis served as her wake-up call. It was what she needed to turn her life around and claim her true identity. “I had so much fear to acknowledge my body and my trans-ness that I had completely let it go to waste and was very unhealthy,” she remembers. “But HIV woke me up.” She had 200 T cells and more than one opportunistic infection. She tells me, “My doctor was at St. Vincent’s and he told me that I was malnourished and that I wouldn’t make it if I didn’t change my life.” He gave her six months to a year if she didn’t. “I had to choose whether I was going to live or die. It would have been very easy to die at that point.”

She decided to stay alive. She went on meds and responded to them quickly—boosting her T cells and rendering her viral load undetectable. As I listen to her story, I’m struck at how frank and honest Lady J is about her life. There’s no self-pity here, no drama, just candor and the apparent fact that she’s now at peace with herself. She faced her demons and found support groups all over the city that supported that sobriety and others that helped her come to terms with her gender. She began to thrive and began her transition to the person she knew herself to be. As she puts it, “It was during that time of getting my life back into shape that I was honest with myself about my gender for the first time. I remember saying to a friend of mine—I said why not? Why not be the person that I was meant to be? It was within a year that I began transitioning.”

Through all of this, she managed to keep her music career going. But it was this final change, this final transition that put the brakes on that career. She lost a lot of work because she was trans. Shockingly, some of the resistance to her identity as a woman came from the LGBT community itself. Lady J recalls, “I’m an artist, so I’m constantly surrounded by LGBT people and yeah, I think a lot of the work that I lost in the classical world—those decisions were made by gay men.” Trans individuals are still seen as “less than” by far too many people in our community. She wasn’t thwarted, however. “All that mattered was that I was open to myself and that light that I found through rigorous honesty and the dedication to living my authentic life eventually was the light I needed to soar into the future that I live today. A successful, abundant, HIV-positive trans woman,” she says with evident pride. She was undetectable, healthy both physically and emotionally and it was time for a new opportunity as an artist.

That opportunity soon came calling in the form of a hit Amazon television series that followed the life of a middle-aged man coming to terms with being trans and embarking on her own transition. Lady J had hit a wall with her career as a pianist in 2013 with an album she had poured herself into but which just wasn’t a commercial success. The glass ceiling just wasn’t ready to be broken for a trans artist. But she noticed something happening in television with the actress Laverne Cox [A&U, June 2014], a close friend of many years now, starring in Orange is the New Black and gracing the cover of Time, as well as the new show Transparent on Amazon. Its creator, Jill Solloway, asked Lady J if she could write when both were in attendance at the GLAAD Awards. She thought, “Why not?” She had always written, journaling had been encouraged at Interlochen. She was encouraged to take her voice beyond playing music and to write lyrics, short stories, theater pieces, she had even written an opera when she was very young. She submitted a short story to the producers at Transparent and they asked her to take a screenplay workshop to see if it would be something she was good at. She happened to be very good at it and soon joined their writing room as its first and only trans writer at the time, eventually being named a producer. “It felt very easy,” she tells me now, “it felt natural—to take the shows I had been doing as a singer-songwriter and translate that into television.” She brought her own experience as an HIV-positive trans woman to the screen with the show’s breakout character Shea, played by the incredible Trace Lysette. In one episode drawn from Lady J’s own experience, Shea, a trans woman, is about to embark on an intimate relationship with the show’s central character Josh, a cisgender straight male played by Jay Duplass, but has to disclose her positive HIV status. It’s a tense, dramatic moment which anyone who’s positive can relate to and both the writer and the actors illuminate it beautifully. She says now of this experience, “I felt like my voice was accelerated because of that. In a way it was a blessing to have that pressure on me because I had to refine my skills really fast. It was on the job training and the stakes were very high.”

1 of 3

With one acclaimed hit series under her belt, a new challenge presented itself. She was approached by television producer Ryan Murphy about joining the writer’s room at his new FX series Pose. Both she and renowned LGBT activist Janet Mock were asked to come on board and punch up the pilot. Pose is a weekly drama which centers on NYC’s ballroom scene in the late eighties. Its incredible cast features many talented, authentic trans actresses, over fifty in all, playing trans women of the time struggling with many of the issues of the community. In addition to joining the writer’s room, Lady J is a producer on the show and her influence helps make the stories real and compelling. She wanted to tackle HIV/AIDS head on; it was a defining issue for the trans community of the time. “I was proud that I was able to use my own experience with these characters,” she proclaims. The numbers are astounding, with trans women fifty times more likely to be positive. It’s criminal. The show’s main character Blanca, played with great heart by actress Mj Rodriguez, is TV’s first trans woman of color living with HIV in a lead role. Soon it became two positive leads and Lady J is very proud of the writer’s room for saying yes to that. This compelling and dynamic portrayal of a community that thrived in spite of many obstacles has been a critically acclaimed hit and been renewed for a second season. But Lady J notes that “[i]t doesn’t seem like it’s an HIV-positive-centered show—it’s a show about family, about finding abundance in the world when the world has no acceptance for you. So I’m really more proud of Pose than anything I’ve done and I hope that everyone tunes in and finds inspiration.”

Our conversation soon turns to trans issues in general as well as the current political climate. As far as trans issues go, Lady J is struggling with the medical community and the insurance companies catching up to the health issues trans people face. She is cognizant of the fact that for her, the countless surgeries involved in her transition haven’t been the issue that they would have been for someone who’s not a writer and producer on two hit television series. She’s quick to point out, however, that the idea that being a trans woman is all about bottom surgery and taking hormones is false. There’s a lot more to it in her estimation. She can hardly count the surgeries she’s had to align her body with her gender and before any of these there was a need to come to terms with her trans identity, for her a long struggle. She’s currently advocating with her own insurance company to cover the medical services needed by trans individuals.

Lady J and I end our incredible talk with her thoughts on the current political situation. She says it’s insanity and that at times she just doesn’t know what to think but does say, “It’s important to not join the mass hysteria because that just clouds our judgment and gets us nowhere.” She leaves me with some final words on this, words that had a deep affect on me. “I had a show in L.A., recently,” she tells me, “I talked about this from the stage. Where I have to commit to keeping my heart open. And keeping my heart open in these political times feels dangerous and awful and yet I have to do it every day. Otherwise, I’ll go back to that place of fear and nothing comes from that place.” Inspirational words for us all.

Makeup by Cetine Dale • Hair by Johnny Stuntz • Photo Assistant: Jessica Murray

John Francis Leonard is an advocate and writer, as well as a voracious reader of literature, which helps to feed his love of the English language. He has been living with HIV for fifteen years and he is currently at work on his first novel, Fools Rush In. His fiction has been published in the ImageOutWrite literary journal and he is a literary critic for Lambda Literary. Follow him on Twitter @JohnFrancisleo2.

Universal Access
How One HIV-Positive Man, Greg Owen, Became a Global Spokesperson for PrEP
by John Francis Leonard

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

What is that moment like? That moment that you realize that you’re not just an accomplished advocate for a cause you believe in, but that you’ve become its very public face. For Greg Owen, one of the U.K.’s most vocal proponents of PrEP, it was summed up in a recent very humorous and wry Tweet he wrote about no longer being able to hook up anonymously. It seems that all that any guy who he meets online wants to talk about is taking Truvada as a prophylactic. Great news for a cause in which he so passionately believes, but not always the greatest news for his sex life.

Greg grew up the eldest of six children in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the height of the troubles. He remarks of it now that “my childhood was in the eighties and my teens in the nineties, it was very interesting to say the least.” He left Belfast behind in the summer of ’98 for drama college in London, graduating in ’01. In 2015 he found himself working in various bars and clubs and sleeping on the sofas of various friends. Greg knew many friends who had become positive and was well aware that he himself was at risk and decided to do something.

It all began with a new friend. Alex Craddock had recently returned from the states and filled Greg in on an amazing new prevention tool called PrEP. PrEP is a drug called Truvada, which has long been taken as part of HAART to suppress HIV in those who were already positive. It was now being prescribed as a prophylactic with up to a ninety-nine percent efficacy rate according to the drugmaker’s research, a significant improvement over the condom which can often fail and is not always used. It was a game changer in the U.S., but was not widely available in the U.K. Greg and Alex wanted to change that and started building a website in Alex’s bedroom that would educate people and enable them to obtain the drug privately. That website, IWantPrEPNow.co.uk, launched in 2015 with an initial 400 hits in the first twenty-four hours and the count ballooned from there, eventually being taken under the umbrella of the U.K.’s most prominent AIDS organization, the Terrence Higgins Trust, which provided access to much needed funding as well as legal representation. Due to his subsequent HIV diagnosis, it was too late for the drug to make a difference for Greg, but it ignited a passion. He saw little reason why, with a drug that was almost 100 percent effective in HIV prevention, there should be anyone, man or woman, receiving the diagnosis news he had.

But the drug still had to be obtained by purchasing it through private health insurance, an option not open to many. Britain’s NHS (National Health Service) provides medical care, including prescription drugs, universally. They had begun looking at PrEP in 2014, dragged their feet for two years and finally said no in 2016. They insisted in court that preventative care was the job of local government. Meanwhile, according to the Terrence Higgins Trust, an estimated seventeen people a day were becoming infected with HIV while PrEP was being delayed. PrEP was seen as a “lifestyle drug.” Even some prominent gay men saw HIV only in terms of reckless and irresponsible behavior. Why should government fund £450 a month to prevent it? Things are changing, trials have begun in limited circumstances, but activists like Greg still fight every day. He appears regularly on talk and news shows, informing the public about the fight for a drug that he believes all people should have access to. A documentary about Greg and Alex, and others, The People vs. The NHS: Who Gets the Drugs? aired recently on BBC2. He continues to run I Want PrEP Now and its website, building on its successes and enabling many to access this game-changing preventative care.

The news out of the U.K. concerning HIV and its treatment and transmission is remarkable. According to Public Health England, HIV transmission rates are down by a third nationwide, forty percent in London alone. A large percentage, ninety-six percent of those diagnosed (eighty-seven percent), are on treatment with ninety-four percent of those being virally suppressed. People are accessing testing and treatment in large numbers, but as Greg is the first to admit, it’s a group effort with many coming before him who fought on the front lines for this good news to be possible.

I recently spoke to Greg by phone from his home in London. One of the first things that struck me was the speed at which he talked. But what also struck me was just how much he had to say and the heart-felt passion which he has for the subject of HIV prevention. And it’s this focus on prevention that makes Greg so unique as a positive man. Not only prevention among his own demographic, but prevention amongst all key groups, some of whom aren’t seeing these recent successful numbers.

John Francis Leonard: What were your earliest experiences with HIV/AIDS?
Greg Owen: I tell this story sometimes when I do speaking events. My first memory was as a very camp kid. I used to do my mum’s hair and I did it quite well actually. My mom and dad were talking to my uncle at a family BBQ and somehow that came up in conversation. Someone asked who had done her hair that day and she said that Greg had done it and that maybe he’d be a hairdresser one day. My dad turned to her and barked, no son of mine is going to be a hairdresser and die young. There was a duality to that comment. I was very aware that something wasn’t sitting right with him. First of all the fact that I was gay and effeminate and the second thing, which I didn’t quite understand at the time, that that somehow meant death.

I make a joke of it now, I mean who were all these hairdressers dying of accidents at work? [Laughs.] But obviously he was talking about AIDS. That was the time of Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury’s fight with the disease. So those are my earliest memories of HIV/AIDS—that my sexuality was very much entrenched in death and infection as far back as I remember. I also share a birthday with the late Princess Diana who had such a hands-on approach to AIDS patients at a time of great fear, so I always took an interest in her.

What brought you to your work in HIV prevention?
Early on, I had wanted to do a campaign about undetectable meaning untransmittable. I wanted to get involved [before my own diagnosis]. It involved people I was close to and people I would see out. I myself was out in and around SoHo, going to sex parties, and I would see a person who was recently diagnosed at one of those parties left alone in a corner or asked to leave the party altogether and my heart would break. Not just for that person, but for the people I loved who were in the same situation. I didn’t expect to become HIV-positive myself and be in the role that I’m in now, but even so all the crossroads in this journey and all the decisions I made made it incredibly personal for me.

Didn’t you initially want to go on PrEP yourself?
Yeah, that’s the whole story and kind of why I ended up as one of the most visible PrEP advocates globally, I guess. I had been looking at things [about PrEP] on Facebook from the States and had been thinking about it in 2014/2015. I was initially going to go to a clinic and use post-exposure prophylaxis (Truvada plus other medication). Then a friend of mine said that he had two months of Truvada [as PrEP] left and that I could have it after I posted on Facebook that I was thinking about PrEP and it was perfect and saved me from lying and getting PEP. I went to pick it up that weekend. Soon after, however, I myself was diagnosed HIV-positive after testing negative just earlier that same year. When I came off PEP, I had thought I was negative, but I came to PrEP just a little too late. [Editor’s note: To use PrEP effectively, it is important to first be tested negative and access it through prescription.]

Even though you yourself are already positive, the biggest drive for you is still prevention. Tell me a little more about your motivation as well as your fight for PrEP in the U.K.
It makes really, really clear sense to me and I think it’s something that a lot of people didn’t get when I first started. It was something that I was driven to do because I found that the situation that I found myself in was needless. It didn’t need to happen. I could see a solution that could prevent transmission, but not for everyone because everyone couldn’t afford to buy PrEP, so it wasn’t equitable. But it seemed to be the only solution when nothing else was on the table—so I acted out of necessity. So for me, it’s not a even a case of the fact that I myself can’t take it.

Also, what people didn’t get when I first started was that if you become HIV-positive, why would you not want to help other people to prevent the same thing happening to themselves? That was something that jarred me, that people would be surprised that this is my focus. But the important thing is that above and beyond the fact that this drug can prevent people from becoming HIV-positive, is that it reduces stigma. And if we’re reducing stigma and starting to have these conversations to remove this divide, and that’s the progression within our community—then it would make sense that in the general community, sexual, social and mental health would increase as well. I don’t see one standing in isolation of the other. It’s all part and parcel of the same package in addition to U=U [Undetectable=Untransmittable]. I have the access to incredible medication, which is lifesaving treatment, due to the people who came before me. So it makes sense to pay that forward myself. That’s why I do what I do.

With PrEP and U=U, the battle against HIV/AIDS has changed, what are your thoughts about that and why are condoms still such a sticking point for some people?
I hate that conversation about condoms! In the absence of any viable alternative, you really have to drive home the one tool we can use. Abstinence doesn’t work [because sexual people eventually have sex] and monogamy, if it even exists, is flawed, so we need to be real. The only tool in our hands and the only tool we could see in our hands during the sex we were having and the sex we were accountable for was the condom. So in the absence of any viable alternative, of course, condoms had to be emphasized and of course people had to modify their behavior. But I have a real problem with that because people didn’t always want to use those tools. Now that there’s a viable alternative, where we find ourselves [with PEP and PrEP] is in a biomedical age of HIV prevention. We have the tools and can have those conversations in our communities, with each other, and with our health care providers. And also, I think that if we instill in ourselves that condoms are the only safe way to have sex we are asking a generation, and I’m talking specifically about gay men now (particularly my own generation and above who lived through the actual trauma of a plague), to un-think everything they learned in a climate of fear and death to start to unlearn those things. Asking them to really get their heads around that. Then it’s not surprising that there’s pushback because generally most people act out of what they think is right or good. They’re behaving in a way that they think is the right way to behave. You’re almost asking people to go against what they feel is the right thing to do and that’s going to take some time and effort. But it’s not helped by muddying the conversation by always talking about other STIs or by always bringing morality, judgment, or sexual behavior into it. We need to separate that into two different conversations.

What do you see as the future of HIV care and prevention looking like? What are we looking at now as opposed to ten, twenty years ago?
I can tell you what is different now and I can tell you what I think is going to be different in the very near future. I’m new to this sector. I’m paying my dues to the people who came before me when there was no hope and nothing much to hope for. They did their best in very trying circumstances. We’re only beginning to see effective HIV treatment and prevention. Not too many years ago, we were seeing HIV rates rise and that’s changing now, changing quite rapidly. But the change is being driven by a decrease among gay and bisexual men, but not all gay and bisexual men, so there’s a huge inequity still there. The interesting thing for me, being the new kid on the block, is that this inequity thing is historical; it’s not going to be a quick fix, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the responsibility to fix it. The epidemic is about to change. That inequity is among black gay and bisexual men—they’re fifteen times more likely to be infected. But we have access to free healthcare here. In the States it might be driven by financial situations or access to insurance, even geographical concerns. But here in the U.K., we don’t have that excuse. It’s free healthcare to anyone who chooses to access it, so it’s definitely something cultural. It’s there for everyone and it’s our job to make sure everyone gets that care.

There’s a real problem here with late diagnosis and the black, African, heterosexual community is within that demographic. In the future, if we continue to see the drops in MSM over the coming years our jobs will still be really hard. It’s suddenly going to be an epidemic for women and people who have heterosexual sex who aren’t aware of the risks. It’s going to be much harder to target those groups and cost a lot more money and be a lot more resource heavy. But I think our work will change from quantity into quality. There’s going to need to be some very, very targeted work. And again, it’s not necessarily work that a white, cis, HIV-positive gay man should be doing for people who aren’t like me, but I’m happy to mentor and share knowledge and support. But these are the kind of campaigns and projects that need to be run and delivered by the people who they’re for. There’s only so much I can do. But I think that in the U.K. we’re at the cusp of the epidemic changing so it would make sense for us to invest in those other groups and those other communities and do some of that highly targeted work now so we’re ready when things do change in the very near future.

How is the battle with the NHS and full coverage of PrEP going? I know this has been a major focus for you and your organization.
Oh God! I just can’t! [Heavy sigh.] I’ve made a lot of noise, but I can’t take all the credit for that. There’s been a lot of effort including legal action. In Scotland, PrEP is free to anyone who needs it. In Wales, it’s an uncapped trial.

First of all, in Scotland, it’s only available in sexual health clinics, and we know here in England that women don’t really access those. So until it’s integrated into G.P. [general practitioner] services, reproductive health, and drug and alcohol treatment, it won’t make a difference. It’s the same in Wales. There’s no cap, but there are huge waiting lists for PrEP. In Northern Ireland there’s a trial, but again, you can only access it in one place and in one hospital. That’s a four or five-hour car ride every month for a lot of people. In England, we’re turning gay and bisexual men away from clinics with no PrEP and we know of many men becoming positive either because they couldn’t get it in time or they were turned away because there were no spaces. It’s a total mess. There are many men self-sourcing, many out of social conscience because they can afford it, so we don’t actually see accurate sales figures. But still many men can’t get on the trial and can’t afford to buy it themselves. In a nutshell, it’s a hot mess, makes no sense to me, and I could scream most of the time.

John Francis Leonard interviewed writer and producer Our Lady J for the November cover story.

Black Is Beyond Beautiful
Stepping down, Phill Wilson, Founding President & CEO of the Black AIDS Institute, bequeaths a legacy of love to successor Raniyah Copeland
Text & photos by Sean Black

“Raniyah Copeland is Bold, Brave, and Brilliant.”

These were the proud words spoken by her soon-to-be predecessor at this year’s annual Heroes in the Struggle gala hosted at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2018.

Gearing up to unveil his replacement to a room of brilliance, all in black-tie, Phill Wilson, a long-term survivor, has beaten incredible odds, odds that many of our loved ones never got to see. He represents hope and always has and now he shepherds a shared dream into capable hands of next-generation advocacy and leadership. Phill Wilson is realizing closure and the accomplishment of greatness.

In his speech, he reflected back to the time when he called upon friends (some present that night), to assist in actualizing a loved one’s dream; the launching of an organization that would engage Black people in efforts to confront the AIDS epidemic in ways not previously done.

“We knew two things,” solemnly remembered Wilson. “(1) Black People were dying, and (2) Nobody could save us, but us.”

1981 marked the onset when GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) was reported in The New York Times as a “contagion” isolated to the homosexual community, mostly white. Sadly and only too late, it was revealed that the disease and its dread could impact anyone. It didn’t discriminate. Delayed timing in public awareness was a critical misstep of this mounting health crisis, mostly because of the bigoted ignorance of the Reagan years. HIV/AIDS began disproportionately impacting communities of color, most notably Blacks. And now some, thirty-eight years later, the CDC (July 5, 2018) reports that African Americans continue to have the most severe burden of HIV over all other racial/ethnic groups in the United States. Blacks account for a higher proportion of new HIV diagnoses, those living with HIV, and those who have ever received an AIDS diagnosis, compared to other races/ethnicities. In 2016, African Americans accounted for forty-four percent of HIV diagnoses, though they comprise twelve percent of the U.S. population.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s HRSA (Health Resources and Services Administration) confirms: “The lifetime risk of HIV is far higher among African-Americans than any other ethnic group. Black women have a 1 in 32 chance of acquiring HIV in their lifetime, compared to White women, who have only a 1 in 588 chance of HIV infection. Black men are at even greater risk, with a 1 in 16 lifetime chance of acquiring HIV, compared to White men, who bear a 1 in 104 risk.”

Alarmed by the catastrophe unfolding within their silenced community decades ago, Phill Wilson and close friend Reggie Williams propelled themselves into action.

“I knew when Black people understood the science of HIV—the epidemiology, the biomedical, and the behavioral—we would be more likely to get tested; better able to protect ourselves; more inclined to seek treatment, adhere to those treatments, and stay in care; and less likely to engage in stigmatizing behavior.”

Fast forward to the present, Wilson humbly green-lights his departure, marking it as a time for change. Wilson has never remained stuck in a problem. As a mentor to many ,Wilson sees opportunity and people at their best.

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“Raniyah Copeland brings a vigor and vision to the AIDS movement that, given the current political environment, is desperately needed,” remarked Wilson, on the night of the recent gala fundraiser, cautioning the audience in these uncertain times while underscoring the dire need for Black female leadership.

Copeland, who began working at the Black AIDS Institute in 2008 ascended from her role of Training and Capacity Building Coordinator to the organization’s Director of Programs, where she has served for the last ten years. “I never imagined that I would be standing here preparing to assume the role of President and Chief Executive Officer of this extraordinary organization,” she humbly shared during her acceptance of the esteemed role.

Married to Bryce Copeland, a business manager for Sony Pictures Entertainment, she and her husband have two young children (Ahmad, four, and Aydin, one). She earned a Bachelor of Arts in the fields of African American Studies and Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Masters of Public Health from Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science. She is a member of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., an AmeriCorp Alumna, and a Co-Founder of the African Black Coalition.

Beyond the qualifications of her education and tenure, Raniyah Copeland exemplifies exactly the kind of leadership which Wilson urgently calls upon. In their most recent, December 31st issue, Forbes quantified in an article, “Leveraging Black Wealth Power and Influence,” the importance and advantages of female executive and leadership roles pay back noting a 2018 study by McKinsey & Company revealing “companies in the top-quartile for gender diversity on their executive teams were 21 percent more likely to have above-average profitability.” The margins reported increased dramatically when also factoring in cultural and ethnic diversity as well. Similar outcomes can only be hoped for when the assets of the organizations are health and well-being of human beings rather than profit and capital growth.

Clearly understanding the necessity of elevating healthy women of color into power roles and doing something about it, the Black AIDS Institute, with support from Gilead Sciences, recently launched an “Ambassador” program to build engagement and movement around HIV and sexual health for Black women, a prime focus of the organization. Upward mobility and opportunity can only stem from the empowerment that comes with feeling good, self-care, well-being and stable health. This ambassador program will consist of a cohort of twenty Black cis and trans women, some who are living with and some without HIV, who will receive training about HIV, sexual health, and how to build engagement through social media. Further, from a press release, “These women will utilize social media to expand knowledge of and access to biomedical tools among Black women. The program will destigmatize conversations about sexual health and HIV, normalize utilization of biomedical interventions among Black women through social media, and build power among the women ambassadors and their social networks. The ambassador program will include participation in training programs, town hall meetings with topics geared towards prevention and helping women amplify messaging about their sexual health. Normalizing HIV biomedical usage among Black women not only improves the health for Black women but normalizes biomedical interventions for all Black people and combats stigma associated with HIV.”

The deliverables and impact of these programs at The Black AIDS Institute will now fall onto the shoulders of Copeland, who, like Wilson, warns about our political state.

“I was raised on the West African concept of Sankofa. Sankofa literally means, ‘go back and get it’. As a value, it meant we had to always remember our past to protect our future. We have such a strong foundation to stand on.

“The Black AIDS Institute, this year alone, tested over 1,500 people, linked more than 100 Black Angelinos to PrEP, connected over 40 people living with HIV to care, launched a Black women and HIV initiative, trained over 10,000 people, worked to save Obamacare and expand healthcare access, along with many other projects that are directly ending HIV.

“This team kills it on the daily and I’m honored to lead you,” she announced to cheers. “I am grateful for the tremendous opportunity and humbling responsibility the board of directors has entrusted me with to lead a world-renowned twenty-year-old organization who has been the unequivocal leader unapologetically working to end the AIDS epidemic in Black America.

“As a mother to two children who are Black boys, the lives of my children have been endangered by white supremacy before they were even conceived. As a mother, the fear I have can be debilitating. There is great fear of what can happen when my children will be forced to engage with police, or how their teachers may marginalize them in school, or how they will be oppressed if they are trans or same gender loving. But, instead of operating out of fear I choose to operate out of love and passion. Fighting for a world where we are all free. Free of HIV, free of stigma, free of oppressions based off who we are. The concept that we can lay down, that some of us don’t have to fight for the freedom of all is a pillar of white supremacy. As a Black woman, I stand on a legacy of resistance. My commitment to ending HIV is not only about honoring those who came before me, it’s about ensuring that all Black people have the rights and freedoms afforded to humanity.

“It is because of those whose spirits and efforts remain ever-present, we can say we have the tools to end the HIV epidemic in the U.S. The horror of today is that we know how to end this epidemic, and yet the epidemic is not over. If it was not same gender-loving men, folks of trans experience, Black cis women, poor Black people…if it wasn’t us being affected, there would be outrage across the country and the headlines and media would give this epidemic the attention it deserves. We’ve got to do better. We can do better. We have to ensure Black communities know about the tools we have to end HIV and make sure healthcare providers and institutions are culturally humble and ready to provide quality services to Black communities.”

Copeland, a cis woman, is committed to inclusion and intersectionality. Her promise, embedded in the following remarks, was met with resounding applause and a standing ovation: “HIV is a disease of syndemics [based on the work of renowned scholar and HIV scientist Merrill Singer, PhD]. You can’t address the HIV epidemic without addressing racism, homophobia, transphobia, mass incarceration, intimate partner violence, mental health, substance use, education and income inequities, and patriarchy. The challenges we face today are those that are inextricably linked to systems of oppression that have been present since the first slave ship entered the Americas. The challenge is steep but there is no movement and group of folks more poised to face this than us.”

The Board which has stood faithfully behind Wilson is set to double-down on its support for Copeland. The Institute’s Board members include retired U.S. Representative Donna M. Christensen, Dr. David Cook, David Munar (President and CEO of the Howard Brown Health Center, Chicago, Illinois) and Southern U.S. Community Leader Gina Brown; Under the leadership of Jussie Smollett and Vanessa Williams, along with their “Black Hollywood Task Force on AIDS” (Ledisi, Karamo Brown, Taraji P. Henson, Alfre Woodard and Van Jones).
Copeland closed her speech that evening by recounting the eloquent words of her charismatic predecessor from his retirement letter; the mantra of a leader who is as equally bold, brave and brilliant in every way.

“Believe me when I say we will honor your legacy. The day when the AIDS epidemic is over is coming. And when it comes, I promise you, they will know. We were not all monsters. We were not all cowards. Some of us have dared to care in the face of it. Some of us have dared to fight because of it. Some of us have dared to love in spite of it. Because it’s in the caring, fighting, loving that you will live forever. And you, my friend, will live forever.”

Make-up: Juan Tamez.

For more information, log on to: blackaids.org.

Sean Black photographed Greg Owen for the December 2018 cover story. He is a Senior Editor at A&U.

Radical Presence
Sur Rodney (Sur) talks about redressing AIDS lies through art
by Larry Buhl

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

I like to have a good idea of who my subjects are before interviewing them. This is to avoid saying, “How do you, um, define yourself?” before moving on to something more incisive.

My first stop was Sur Rodney (Sur)’s website, where I found pages that would have been amateurish even in 1995—text-based, with every section (curating, writing, archiving, and performance) grudgingly providing a 250-word synopsis of his involvement in those areas and starting with the same line: The enigmatic Sur Rodney Sur…

“The site is a joke,” Sur tells me, explaining that was his nod to the common notion that nobody will take you seriously without a website. So he took conventional wisdom and used a technique he preferred in his early art; he parodied it, here, with generic text frozen in time.

“People want to say I’m a curator, filmmaker, a performer,” he says. “Some of the worlds don’t collide. The black art world doesn’t know about the gay literary world. AIDS and art doesn’t tie into my literary work. On film projects, I’m a producer working behind the scenes so that people don’t recognize that I’m involved until they see the credits roll.”

Sur says his late partner, Geoffrey Hendricks, who collaborated on a series of cultural projects relating to art and AIDS, wanted to be recognized for who he was, while Sur prefers to be recognized for what he’s done.

“But,” Sur adds, “I don’t wear my biography on my sleeve. I’m a modest person, and I don’t announce who and what I am because I’ve never cared about that. Eventually the things I’ve done, people will catch up or not.” Though he breezily mentions that People magazine celebrated him as one of the most intriguing people in 1985. Many might still consider him a most intriguing person. Definitely enigmatic.

When anything was possible, where everything was likely
Sur moved to the East Village in New York City in the summer of 1976 with a degree from Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design, flat broke, just like the city. This was not long after President Gerald Ford denied federal assistance to save New York from bankruptcy. But from urban adversity arose artistic opportunity. Because it was cheap to live there, a community of artists, writers, poets, visual artists and photographers, outsiders to the rest of the world, thrived, without worrying too much about making it big in order to cover the rent. Sur, checking off several of those boxes, quickly became part of the East Village art scene before it was officially a scene.

Sur says one word best describes the art world of New York in the seventies and early eighties: kaboom. “We thought anything was possible. We did our work and we didn’t expect the New York Times to cover it. They were square anyway. We didn’t need to be endorsed. We didn’t have the same financial pressure as today, because you could rent a store front for $600.”

“In the eighties we were figuring out what worked and didn’t. A lot was a comment on what was bad and we parodied it. Like parodying a woman having an abortion. Try doing that today. You can’t. But then, if we bombed, who would know about it? Twenty, fifty people. Now fifty people are taking cell phone video and it goes around the globe immediately. We were experimenting and there wasn’t a fear of being politically correct. We were so incorrect.”

In the eighties, the dust from the seventies art big bang began coalescing into art stars, with press orbiting up-and-coming artists, and big money started flowing in. Star-chasing soon followed, and that subdued innovation, Sur laments. But in the queer art world, and to a certain extent among queer artists with AIDS, the creativity never stopped.

Instead of chasing the star-maker machine, Sur went in a slightly different direction. He became an art curator. With his business partner, Gracie Mansion, Sur co-directed the Gracie Mansion Gallery from 1983 to 1988. The gallery was key to establishing Lower Manhattan’s East Village as an internationally recognized art district, and there Sur cultivated young and edgy artists, including David Wojnarowicz.

Preserving art
Much of Sur’s writing, video and performance work was done before Internet search engines—I’ve looked for them—and live on only in lore. You won’t find the Sur Rodney Sur Show, which he hosted on Manhattan Cable TV. His work as a multimedia performance artist in the Blackheart Collective evaporated into the ether. His writings in publications such as The Road Before Us: One Hundred Black Gay Poets (1991) and Words of Fire (1995)…good luck finding them. YouTube does have links to his series of “free advice” videos from 2008, where Sur provides, from a roadside table with a handmade sign, expertise on a variety of topics.

But the fact that much of his work is gone and maybe forgotten is fine with Sur, because his career emphasis changed, from making art to archiving and preserving others’ art. It was a career course correction spurred by devastation.

By the mid-eighties, AIDS was like a neutron bomb in urban communities. There were no approved medications. Hospitals treated AIDS patients like pariahs. Nurses refused to treat them. People just disappeared. It became clear to Sur by 1988, once his friends began getting sick and dying, that the energy he’d spent on the gallery for five years needed to take another direction. So he walked away from Gracie and became a full-time caregiver.

“I was not involved in any of the political activism,” Sur says. “A lot of my friends were in ACT UP, but I was at doctor’s offices, lawyer’s offices, homes or at a memorial.” And most of his friends, both well and sick, were artists. And he wondered, when they died where would their artwork, papers and files go?

“Many artists asked me to care for their work, because they thought their family would just throw it away.” Sur became a repository for a lot of these artists’ histories, until that effort became overwhelming.

So he asked for help from Visual AIDS, and in 1996 Sur co-founded the Frank Moore Archive Project along with his partner, Geoffrey Hendricks, and Frank Moore. The project supports artists with HIV/AIDS in the management of their estates, with the understanding that, if they couldn’t collect all of their work, and they couldn’t, at least they could document it through photography. Later, in 2012, Visual AIDS established the online Artist+ Registry, the largest database and registry of works by visual artists with HIV/AIDS.

Not long after Archive Project was inaugurated, the fever of the initial AIDS crisis broke. The cocktail was out, people were living longer, and articles came out saying, incorrectly, that AIDS was over. Activism waned. But Sur understood that saving the work of artists with AIDS was even more urgent.

“Visual AIDS became a necessary institution for keeping art and AIDS alive,” Sur says. “If not for Visual AIDS we would know much less than we do now.”

AIDS redress and truth telling
Sur still sees his primary role as truth teller about the AIDS crisis and the artists who were lost to it. AIDS in the eighties, Sur maintains, didn’t stop the art-making. Instead, it turned off people from wanting to deal with artists with HIV/AIDS. “People just wanted to push it away because it was too sad and ugly but also dangerous.”

And that shunning continued for decades. Sur recalls an art exhibit in the nineties that featured a work by artist David Wojnarowicz, where Sur was asked to write wall text explaining the imagery of a photo where the artist’s head was buried in the earth. “I wrote about the body and mortality and an artist living with AIDS. They came back and said, ‘I’m sorry we can’t say this; it’s too upsetting. Can you take out any reference to AIDS?’”

“You couldn’t talk about anyone’s work. Like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS, and his lover died of AIDS. The foundation that represents him will not include him in any exhibitions that deal with the HIV/AIDS pandemic because they do not want him categorized as an AIDS artist, because they think his work is more universal. They think as soon as you mention his relationship to AIDS, that’s what he becomes.”

It takes years of redress before it sinks into people’s minds, Sur says. What needs to be redressed? For one, the revisionist history, he says, that AIDS activism is at the behest of white gay men. “The women were the organizers of the biggest ACT UP demonstrations, the church, the Wall Street fake money event and throwing the ashes on the White House lawn. The guys in ACT UP had all this energy wanted to do this but they had no organizing skills.”

“Then all the women fighting for the recognition of people with AIDS to get certain services. Huge contingents of women but you never know about that there were women a part of that. There were a lot of women and mothers [in ACT UP] and they’d bring their kids because they couldn’t get babysitters. You never see any film about AIDS activism where kids are present, or people of color. The reality was a lot more complicated.”

“For a long time if you were a person of color you couldn’t get into a drug trial, because there was this thinking that you’re not reliable enough to take your meds. That kind of racism, a lot of people don’t know about. We need a fuller picture of HIV/AIDS past, present and future.”

The eighties are dead; long live the eighties
Sur admits that he’s “stuck in the eighties,” and says that it’s a good thing. He insists he has a mission to keep the queerness and fierceness of that time alive and enlighten a new generation of artists and art fans.

“When I was organizing a show for Visual AIDS’ twenty-fifth anniversary, I asked these young people, kids in their early twenties, what do you remember about artists and AIDS in the eighties. They mentioned the same few names, Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring. And then I tell them the queer thing in the eighties was driving the art world. I mentioned these huge cultural icons in the eighties that are dead, and I showed them their work. [The kids] got angry and said, ‘Why didn’t we know about this?’”

He points to a “fracture” of a quarter century that keeps younger generations from grasping what happened in the 80s. “They are not going to understand it in one show,” he says.

“With AIDS and queer culture, if the mainstream doesn’t have a use for it within the capitalist machine, then they don’t talk about it. Because you haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”

Sur explains that AIDS, and society’s response to it, cut the cultural transmission of one generation to another. “When people began dying, people started de-queering. Being gay was then seen as bad, unhealthy, irresponsible. The generation coming up then, their parents didn’t want to talk about it. They were protecting them from family infected with AIDS because they thought it was too sad, and they pushed it back and forgot about it.”

Sur tells me that there’s a big difference in art made by people with HIV/AIDS in the eighties and nineties and art made about HIV/AIDS today.

“Most artists making art in the eighties were not making it about their condition. Kids today are. There wasn’t a network or a community of people with AIDS making art. And they’re angry. The way people expressed their art in the eighties was very subtle and coded, with the exception of Wojnarowicz. Now it’s not subtle or coded.”

Sur says that part of that artistic freedom—or is it a mandate?—to create explicit works about HIV/AIDS, or queer art, or both, comes from the rise of queer and cultural theory. And he suggests that cultural theory can cut both ways. It can lead to greater truth-telling, but it can also direct artists in ways they don’t want to go.

Sur explains that, artists with HIV/AIDS or self-identified queer artists in the eighties were on a creative [roll] and wanted to keep doing what they were doing, no matter whether their art was explicitly about themselves, or HIV/AIDS, or not. “Now, a queer artist will think they have to figure out how it’s relevant to society. Because the whole teaching about AIDS with queer and cultural theory has changed how people consider art. In the eighties it was a free-for-all. We were trying an experiment. Now there isn’t that will to experiment. You have to be focused.”

Not to mention the cost of renting a storefront has increased more than tenfold nearly anywhere in New York.

But, Sur says, he doesn’t want to preach to the younger generation. Rather, he says he wants to educate them about how things were and what was important, but to also understand what they’re dealing with and experiencing now.

“Back then you would see someone with KS walking around looking like a skeleton and a week later they’d be dead. These kids today don’t understand anything like that. You can’t make them understand. The older generation shouldn’t be talking at them, when their experience is very different. We need to hear what they have to say. That’s important to our survival moving forward.”

I couldn’t help noticing that Sur does preach to the younger generation—a bit—when it comes to safer sex, and he has choice words for people who think PrEP gives them a get-out-of-AIDS-free card. “People from my generation are saying ‘why would you infuse chemicals in your body to have a joy ride just because you can’t think of a more creative way to have sex without exchanging body fluids?’”

Rather than an older guy’s rant about promiscuity, it may be a fatherly need to take care of others. “AIDS is not over,” he says. “It’s still as urgent and difficult to manage as it ever was. People are getting infected. There is HIV criminalization, and there is a lot of people who don’t want to get tested. What about all the people walking around thinking they’re negative? We need to remember that AIDS is still with us and still a stigma.”

Larry Buhl is a multimedia journalist, screenwriter, and novelist living in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter @LarryBuhl.

Without Borders
Brothers Arash Alaei & Kamiar Alaei Advocate for Human Rights & HIV Prevention
by JoAnn Stevelos

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by JD Urban

The Alaei brothers started their medical careers following the advice of their father, a Professor of Persian Literature, to “not follow money, but to follow their community, because then you will benefit from a better environment.” So they were shocked when they were seized and detained in Tehran’s Evin prison. The brothers had returned to Iran after their medical and public health training in the U.S. to set up a needle exchange program to stop the transmission of HIV in their hometown, Kermanshah. Arash was arrested at a gas station and Kamiar was arrested at their shared apartment. They said, “It was harder on our families than ourselves; it was nearly three months before our families learned what had appended to us.” They were charged in a secret trial on December 31, 2008, for conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian government. Kamiar was imprisoned for two and half years, and Arash for three years and two months. The brothers’ arrest was part of growing trend at the time to crackdown on human rights activists in Iran.

These are quiet but hopeful days for the Iranian-born Alaei brothers, Arash and Kamiar. They spend their days advocating for human rights, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs in the Middle East and Central Asia.

I met up with the Alaei brothers at a public library in our mutual city, Albany, New York. Arash and Kamiar were affable, unassuming, and as fluent in poetry, quoting Rumi, as they are in the language of their professions. Our conversation flowed from HIV prevention and treatment, to medicine, human rights and to the philosophical intentions they bring to their work.

Raised in Kermanshah, Iran, Arash and Kamiar witnessed the ramifications of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. One of these was an increase of intravenous drug use and the acquisition of HIV, even among high school friends and classmates. As young men they decided to enter medical school when authoritarianism emboldened government officials to deny that the AIDS epidemic affected Muslims. Arash said during the first years of the epidemic, the government insisted that “the Muslim community was good and that AIDS was a bad Western disease of the gay community. The government said Iran didn’t have this disease. They chose to ignore it.”

But the brothers, medical doctors and active members of their community, kept their eyes and hearts open. In their own city, they saw that HIV was spreading rampantly. They became concerned about the lack of acknowledgment of HIV/AIDS by their government and unnecessary deaths among young people due to ignorance. Then, as luck would have it, a professor who studied HIV/AIDS in Paris began to mentor them at their university in Iran. For two years Arash and Kamiar were able to focus on the study of HIV/AIDS with Dr. Davood Mansouri. They presented their work in 2002 at the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona and soon after they were awarded a fellowship form the Ford Foundation in 2003 to learn about HIV care at the NYS AIDS Institute. Later in 2004 Kamiar received a full scholarship to continue his education at Harvard School of Public Health and Arash continued his work in Iran.

The Alaei brothers have been recipients of many awards including the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award from the New York Academy of Science, the Jona-than Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights by the Global Health Council, and the first award for leadership in Health and Human Rights by PAHO/WHO, and the Inaugural Elizabeth Taylor Award in Recognition of Efforts to Advocate for Human Rights in the field of HIV. Arash is currently a Senior Consultant to the National AIDS Program, Tajikistan Ministry of Health. Kamiar is currently Associate Dean for Global and Interdisciplinary Research, Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Health Policy, Management and Behavior, and the Director of Global Institute for Health and Human Rights at the University of Albany.

JoAnn Stevelos: New York, we have had considerably fewer new HIV/AIDs cases than other places. Why, and how does that compare to what is happening globally?
Arash Alaei: In New York, we have fantastic progress. In 2003 we learned many things about HIV research, policy, and practice. We are in the the middle of strong progress that has culminated in New York being on its way to zero new cases in 2018.
For many countries, it is a different story. The history of HIV programs started in 1980s. But many governments ignored the epidemic, and now they are twenty years behind in prevention and treatment. It has not been a financial or resource issue; if a country asks of help to work nonreducing HIV infections, the Global Fund will help them set up programs, etc. And the Middle East is very wealthy; they could have funded programs and research. It is the stigma, discrimination, and ignorance that has blocked many countries’ progress and increased the numbers of infected people. Now still after all these years, science is driving the progress, we have tests and medicine; it is the political and cultural issues that keep people sick without access to some of the very best drugs and practices.

What are the influences of polices on HIV-related health coutcomes?
Arash Alaei: In New York, there are fantastic research and resources, but there is a gap in how healthcare workers and service providers interpret the research and use it locally. To think about the drug [user] thirty years ago it was a huge stigma, but now the stigma is reduced. Can we do the same thing for sex workers?

The simple question I ask here in Albany: Can we have a medical van to distribute methadone in Albany? No, I am told—the city doesn’t allow it. Albany has a policy against using medical vans to distribute drugs. Why is that?

In Tajikistan and other countries, they will put the drugs in a van and take them to the people who need them. A very successful program that works to help stop the spread of HIV. We have opiate substitutions that save lives but we can’t get the politicians to pass a policy for a medical van to bring medicine to people who live too far away from a clinic.

You have worked all over the world, with people form all walks of life; how do you navigate the many cultures and context in which you work?
Arash Alaei: This is the beauty of medicine and health. Doctors want to reduce pain. Pain doesn’t have culture. Pain is pain in any culture. HIV does not have culture.

Kamiar Alaei: We use a patient-centered approach that promotes empathy. If we listen to our patients they will tell us what they need from us. Our core values of respect and empathy help break through stigma in many different cultures.

Arash Alaei: In some environments people live in an authoritarian culture, where they see the doctor as an authority figure and the doctors act as such. Take this pill, do this thing. Our approach is to share information with patients then come up with a solution with the client. We may share with a patient that during sex with people who have HIV/AIDS is one way you can become infected and using a condom could protect them. But that solution may not fit their culture. We need to be flexible, we have to ask them how they think they can protect themselves given the information we shared.

If you had a young person sitting here with us, what are the top three things you would share them how they can prevent getting HIV/AIDS?
Kamiar Alaei: This is a very hard question. As doctors we said we have to be good listeners. We can’t write one prescription for different patients. We need to change attitudes and behaviors so our approach is more personalized.

Arash Alaei: For me I think about three things, I want to say, be happy to reach your goal. When you reach your goal be happy. After you reach your goal be happy. What is the meaning of that: Many young people, they want to have sex. This is their goal. I say, okay, reach your goal but be happy. When you wish to have sex be happy. While you are having sex, be happy. After you have sex, be happy.

Sometimes people think they want to have sex without any idea to protect themselves from disease. When they reach their goal, afterward they are not happy. Three times they can be happy, when they wish for sex, while they have sex, and after they have sex; if they plan and protect themselves, they will have no worries.

Our younger generation is very smart. They can find information easier than any other generation. So for our healthcare workers, we don’t want to change their goal if they want to have sex; we want them to be happy to reach their goal in a safe and supportive environment.

Did being in prison affect how you conduct your work? And did it change the way you do your work now?

Kamiar Alaei: Prison did not change our goal because we do this work for our own hearts, not for any organization. When I was in prison, especially solitary confinement, I thought about how many lives we have saved, how many new babies were born healthy, how many wives we helped not get HIV from their husbands. We never regretted what we did. So when we were in prison, we continued our work. When we were released, we can’t continue our work in Iran, but we could on the border, in other countries, and in the USA.

If you are honest about your goal and your passion you will never be disappointed.

Arash Alaei: Prison can be many things, tomorrow it could be a contract with this university or this organization—prisons are places that restrict your goal, dampen your passion. Changes in environment happen. The message to me was—if you have this passion, and you believe you are in a good way to reach it, it doesn’t matter how this life goes up and down. It doesn’t matter if you are director of a big institute or in prison in a solitary cell. If people trust you to serve them that is more important than having a high position. I learned to not give up, be flexible, look for opportunity to fulfill my goal.

In prison it was a good opportunity for us to learn from prisoners. As healthcare workers, we provided basic care as best we could. We learned from the people we were in prison with, drug [users], homeless, everyone. We learn how to care for people in prisons. It doesn’t matter if you are in a fancy clinic or a prison and you can always support your community and benefit.

You were definitely in the field doing fieldwork!
Arash Alaei: Absolutely! We call it a practical PhD. Be in practice and learn from your community.

The work we do in public health can feel immensely sad sometimes, and as a doctor and public health practitioner, I imagine there are times when the work can feel overwhelming or sad? How do you find joy and how do you bring joy to your work?

Kamiar Alaei: The key to your question is whether I feel sympathy with or empathy with my patients. If I have sympathy I will feel a distance between me and my patient. and want to help them. If I have empathy, I am in the middle of the situation with them. I say, okay, if this happened to me, my family member, my friend, what would I expect others to do? This is the immediate reaction—empathy. I don’t think about whether it is joyful or not, it is what I have to do to fulfill my goal. When I see the outcome, when I can help change the lives, this is what gives me joy.

Arash Alaei: When you look at the face of your patient, that is the best gift. When a patient comes with questions and I can answer even some of them—I am happy. This is a gift, it is refreshing.

What are you worried about in your work? In the future of HIV/AIDS? In the U.S.? Are funders still funding and demonstrating a commitment to issues?
Kamiar Alaei: I am worried that sometimes good practices are influenced by some private sectors that have their own agenda.For example, pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) is when people at very high risk for HIV take HIV medicines daily to lower their chances of getting infected. Currently there is a huge movement advocating for everyone to take PrEP, including teenagers. Do we need to provide PrEP to this extent or do we need to provide more education and access to condoms? My opinion is that we have been educating for thirty to forty years about safe sex with much success. If we promote the PrEP intervention, it may help people feel confident they won’t get HIV, but PrEP won’t protect them from other sexually transmitted diseases.
Arash Alaei: I worry about something we have experienced directly that inhibits our work—the intersection of politics, change, science, and human beings. Under authoritative, conservative leaders the environment for science to help our communities changes. For example, in Iran, we had a successful methadone program 1970 to 2000, but, in 1979 the program ended after the Islamic Revolution. A reformist party leadership changed to a conservative president who was a more authoritative ruler. The conservative party closed down the program.

It is my worry for the U.S. that they are short-sighted. Health is global; it doesn’t have borders. We have to contribute resources to science and health programs to have global safety for all people. In the Middle East we don’t have issue for resources, [as we have] rich countries, but, because of politics, there is no priority for HIV services.

How do you like working together?
Kamiar Alaei: The good thing is that Arash and I are complementary, not identical in our skills. Arash is more creative, innovative, and I like to think about how to get his ideas started. We have the same values, even though we have different approaches.

Arash Alaei: Because we have a different approach it improves our skills. We are a team, we work very well, we challenge each other and increase the likelihood that we will have good outcomes. This is very important concept for the young generation to understand. Some young people think if they find a match they will go faster, they will reach their goal faster. Perhaps, but when they work with people who don’t match them, they get the opportunity to look at issues from angles.

There are so many issues going on in the world.What brings you hope? How do you get up every day?
Arash Alaei: When I wake up I want to see a message from key people like policy makers or decision makers that they see people living with HIV the same as they see themselves. And that we all have the same goals: to be healthy and happy.

Kamiar Alaei: The hope for me is when you have the opportunity to see people in disadvantageous situations, you appreciate what you have, physically, financially, emotionally, and philosophically. My hope is that each day when I wake up I understand I could be that person, but instead I am are here and I have the opportunity to help that people living with a HIV/AIDS.

Arash Alaei: Rumi said “Maybe your language is Turkish and mine is Farsi; we can’t communicate with one another with words, but we can a have common heart.” Rumi [also]has a poem that says, “Even if you are very far from me, your heart is close to me. But, if you are very close to me and your heart is far away, you are far away.” Hope is to have common heart, common vision, without judgment, and to help each other.

For more information about the Institute for International Health and Education, log on to: https://iiheus.org/.

For more information about the photographer, log on to: www.jdurban.photography.

JoAnn Stevelos, MS, MPH, has over twenty years experience in leadership roles such as directing the New York State Center for Best Practices to Prevent Childhood Obesity, evaluating the Alliance for a Healthier Generation’s children’s health programs, and for the First Lady of the United States Let’s Move program. She is currently a public health consultant for several children’s wellness programs. Visit her online at: www.joannstevelos.com.

And the Winner Is….
Persistence and faith took Evvie McKinney from background singing to the winner of The Four
by Candace Y.A. Montague

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

On February 18, 2018, the first season of the Fox network, primetime singing competition The Four: Battle for Stardom was coming to a close. Four finalists had performed their hearts out hoping to be win a spot in the iHeartMedia’s “On the Verge” artist development program, receive coaching from the industry’s top producers and get their music airplay across iHeartMedia radio stations. It was a rapid competition with only eight episodes airing on Thursday nights. As Diddy announces “the winner of this challenge is,” Evvie McKinney’s face is stoic. When her name is announced, she folds over and cries. She made it. Evvie was the winner of season one.
What was behind those tears? What has she endured at just 21 years of age? Evvie McKinney is a rising star who doesn’t mind paying her dues and gladly gives credit where it’s due.

“It’s in my blood”
Evvie McKinney was born the youngest of seven children on June 27, 1998, in Memphis, Tennessee. She’s a proud Southern belle who beams with pride when she mentions growing up there with that sweet Southern twang. She describes her mother, Maria McKinney, as a strong woman who reared her children as best she could. Her father was a gospel and blues singer named Tony McKinney. In spite of his battles with drug addiction, Evvie fondly remembers him being the rock of her family who kept her focused on her faith. “My dad struggled with drug addiction but he was always a believer. So he instilled faith in me from when I was a little girl. When I was four or five years old I would sit on his lap. He would ask me ‘who you love?’ And I would say ‘you’. But he would ask me again and again until I said Jesus first and then him.” Tony McKinney died on December 30th, 2005. Evvie says losing her dad deeply affected the McKinney family, “it was kind of like a halt was put on everybody’s lives. Everything was different and it would be for the rest of our lives. Still, to this day, I cry when I think about him. I think about him every day.”

Although the McKinney family struggled there were two constants in their midsts: God and music. Evvie grew up singing in the church. Her brother Gedeon had a band called Gedeon Luke and the People which Evvie frequently joined in on. Gedeon says that Evvie has always been a benevolent girl with big dreams. “Evvie was always an open minded person. She always listened to all of her sisters and brothers. That’s probably why she was so successful. Growing up she was very sweet, very smart, focused. She always knew what she wanted.” Coming from a household where talented people sang and played instruments, Evvie was destined to be on stage. “It’s in my blood,” she exclaims.

Made in Memphis
Evvie’s hometown is a fascinating dichotomy: a playground for entertainment and a battleground for justice. Memphis, Tennessee, is a city where blues, jazz and rock and roll intersect. A city along the Mississippi River that houses Graceland, the Rock and Soul Museum and the famous Beale Street where music serenades the crowds daily. Memphis is also a municipality steeped in Black history. The National Civil Rights Museum is hosted at the Lorraine Motel, the site of the assassination of civil rights icon Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The McKinney family started life in Orange Mound, a neighborhood in southeast Memphis. It was the first neighborhood in Memphis built for and by African Americans. Crime, drugs and blight stunted the community’s growth during the 1980s and 1990s. But in the 2000s Orange Mound started rebounding.

In 2001, when Evvie was five years old, her mother wrote a 500-word essay to Habitat For Humanity to apply for a home. Her wish was granted just as the family was being evicted from their place in Orange Mound. The McKinneys moved to Nutbush, a neighborhood located in north Memphis. Evvie recognizes that her living situation was less than ideal but it never shook her faith. “I grew up in the projects. I grew up in the hood. But one thing my family has always acknowledged is the word of God.”

From “no” to The Four
Evvie was no stranger to the competition circuit by the time she auditioned for the show. She had tried to get on The Voice, American Idol and The X Factor multiple times. Her mother would drive her from tryout to tryout hours away from home. “I would get all the way through the process to the point where they put you in front of the camera and record your audition. But I always got a ‘no’,” she recollects. In August 2017, while she was touring with Frayser Boy and Boo Mitchell, a family friend called her and asked her to try out for this new show called The Four. She was weary of competitions by this point but decided to give it a shot. “He connected me to this executive producer named Nicole Marion. We talked on the phone. She gave me the concepts of the show. She said if you’re interested send over some videos. So when I got back to Memphis I recorded some videos and sent them in. And I never heard back from her.”

The tour continued on and Evvie moved right along with it not giving another thought about The Four. In November 2017,the Frayser Boy tour went on break and Evvie returned to Memphis. Shortly after returning home, the tour manager called Evvie and told her they couldn’t afford to bring her back on the show when it started again. “I was telling him I had put two months aside for the show. I couldn’t book any other gigs because I already booked these months with them. And he was telling me that he couldn’t even afford to pay me. So how was I supposed to pay my bills for January and February.” She was devastated but not defeated. Evvie continues, “Let me tell you how God works. When I got off the phone with him she emailed me and asked me to send some videos in. Baby, I put on my makeup, I put that camera on and I did those auditions for her. And she said ‘ you are amazing. I am presenting you tomorrow to the executive producers of the show.’ And when she said that I kept praying because I knew that God was taking me into something that was farther than what I could see or understand. But I knew that if He brought me to it He can bring me through it.”

Her adhesion to her faith paid off in a big way. Days later she received a plane ticket to Hollywood to audition in person. After returning home, she received the call. “My producer called me and said “pack your bags. You’re going to Hollywood.’”

She came in on the fifth episode and gave an “electric” performance in front of Sean Diddy Combs, DJ Khaled, Meghan Trainor, and Fergie. “They saw something in me. They really enjoyed it. Whenever I feel like I’m going through something I remember where God has brought me. Sometimes a ‘no’ isn’t really a no for good. It’s just a no for right now. So if God gives you a ‘yes’, can’t nobody say no. No matter how much they want to God will always come through for you. You just have to believe and keep the faith.”

Heroes in the struggle
Memphis has certainly not been missed by the HIV epidemic. According to AIDSVu.org there were 6,202 people living with HIV in 2016 in the city, eighty-four percent of whom were Black. Black females are 13.8 times more likely to be living with HIV in Memphis than White females. The state of Tennessee has very strict rules surrounding sex education in schools. Sex education must stress abstinence and can only host limited discussions about contraception and sexually transmitted disease prevention. A law passed in 2012 that allows parents to sue instructors who stray from the abstinence curriculum. Evvie says she learned about HIV in health and wellness class during her high school years. They learned about condoms. Her biggest takeaway from that class was learning to just “be careful.”

As a performer on the lineup for the Black AIDS Institute’s annual Heroes in the Struggle Awards Ceremony in December 2018, Evvie learned much more about HIV and the people who live with it every day. “When I went to the AIDS benefit I heard so many stories about how people who had HIV and so many testimonies. One thing that really touched me was that they all had kinda the same story about how people treated them because of something they had. It really touched my soul,” she recalled. She said she felt inspired that night. “These are people who are living with something that could possibly kill them. But God is making a way for them. Those are some very strong and special people. Just being there in that atmosphere and taking in all the information that I heard about the black community having HIV and AIDS and a lot of people having it and they don’t know. It really inspired me.”

Empowered Evvie
Gedeon Luke describes his sister as a big person. “She loves God and she loves people. Her main focus is Jesus Christ and she’s always looking after her neighbor. Her neighbor is anyone who comes to her. She is very generous.” Her positive spirit seems to draw in the audience. But it’s her love for God that empowers her and she thinks all women should share that same spirit. “Women’s empowerment starts by knowing that you are loved by God first and foremost. We have to be careful with comparing ourselves to other women. You don’t know what kind of insecurities they have or what they’ve been through. But look at yourself in the mirror and say God chose me to look the way I look, have the hair I have, the eyes I have, the lips I have. I am fearfully and wonderfully made in Jesus’s name.”

Evvie has had strong, effective female role models in her life starting with her mother. She’s also admired trailblazing female singers like Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, and the Staple Singers. Evvie may be young in age but her mindset is old school. She boldly explains how gender roles make women dynamic. “It wouldn’t be no world if it weren’t for women. God gave things to a woman that he didn’t give to a man. The man pays the bills. He is the provider. He makes sure everything is all right. We make sure that everyone is okay. We cook and clean. We have the children. We give birth to the nation. We are the nurturers.”

Family is also something that empowers Evvie to go on in her pursuit of her dreams. She says that although they may not all be in Hollywood with her they keep her grounded from afar. “We are a very spiritual family. My mother and grandmother have been soldiers for Jesus for a long time. They know the word of God. They send me scriptures. They pray for me. They call me. They know that I am on a vigorous path. They remind me of God’s grace.”

What’s next?
Her first album is in the works. A release date is unknown for now but Evvie is working hard in the studio and accepting her new life in Hollywood gracefully. Her confidence and self-awareness are unfailing. “Me being a twenty-one-year-old Black woman I’m learning that no one will believe in Evvie the way Evvie believes in Evvie. I can call DJ Khaled or Diddy, or Meghan but if I don’t believe in me that’s when it gets dangerous.”

One thing is for sure: the lady has grit. And now that her foot is in the door she won’t quit until the world knows who she is and what she stands for. Get ready for Evvie rising.

Follow Evvie on Instagram and Twitter @evvie_music.

Hair/Make-up: Juan Alan Tamez @boomkackmua.

Candace Y.A. Montague is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. Her work has been featured in a number of print and online publications including The Washington Post and The Washington City Paper. Follow her on Twitter @urbanbushwoman9.

Role-Model Realness
Triple threat actress, singer, voguer Mj Rodriguez is poised to uplift the transgender community one stage at a time
Text & photos by Sean Black

As morning light beamed through loft-sized windows over the gaffer’s tape and the seamless paper roll that my photo assistant Julie and I were securing to the studio floor, I glanced a gentle presence entering from the door, left slightly ajar precisely for early arrivals. Flowing into the downtown L.A. space in a loosely fitted, royal blue dress, her hem swept over the sealant of the polished concrete floors casting glossy waves. Like an urban-clad Venus wearing vintage combat boots, she formally announced her arrival by lifting her chin and presenting us with the sweetest smile. Mj Rodriguez was in the house.

On a press tour from the East Coast where she was born and raised, Mj was in Los Angeles anxiously gearing up for the Golden Globe Awards, couch-surfing (by choice) with friends and showing up for HIV awareness, a cause dear to both her and her mother Audrey who tagged along for the majority of the trip.

Bursting into stardom mainly because of her recent role as Blanca in Season One of FX Network’s hit Pose, Mj Rodriguez embodies her character—tender, nurturing and selfless; all desired qualities in a good mother and much like the person who stands before me, forty-five minutes early with an entourage soon to fill the room. It was nice to spend the quiet minutes getting to know this gentle soul.

Although a headstrong outsider at times within her own tribe as Blanca, her onscreen persona shines with maternal light. A young, newly diagnosed runaway, she is determined in her quest to re-create the family she and her “children” long to have. Settling for second best isn’t an option for Blanca and it is a signature trademark that endears her character right from the start. Wanting better she launches her own “house” (The House of Evanglista) sparking competition and rivalry between her former house, The House of Abundance, spearheaded by Mother Elektra Abundance slayed by Dominique Jackson.

Set in 1987, Pose is a stylish and bittersweet time capsule brought to life by masterminds Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Steven Canals. Pulsating with freestyle jams and sassy sound bites à la Pray Tell (Billy Porter) it recalls Manhattan’s ball culture in tandem with the AIDS epidemic and the devastations of the plague years. The series has been lauded for its scope and telling of trans and non-binary gender individuals. The transgender community has long dealt with slights in media.

Through grace, her character is subtly rewriting and righting years of negative stereotypes ultimately transcending truth about the lives of transgender people akin to the persona brought to life by Daniela Vega in her critically-acclaimed performance in last year’s Oscar-winning foreign film, A Fantastic Woman, by Sebastián Lelio. Trans visibility is taking a serious and welcome turn in television and film.

Mj Rodriguez’s role is legendary and toe-to-toe with Vega’s, bringing a welcome and unprecedented mainstream voice to transgender awareness, broadening the representation and thereby imparting a desperately needed depth to this marginalized community. The same can be said for Rodriguez as expressed by Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw in his review of Vega at the time. Like Vega, Rodriguez beams through Blanca who seems to always be caught “in the act of transcending loneliness, heroically defusing the internal opera of pain, rising above the thousand petty little indignities and hostilities that the world now wishes to add to the ordinary agony [of her life].” Not the death of a lover, Blanca’s burden is a recent HIV diagnosis and I fear for her because of the story’s harrowing timeline.

Fans of Pose are in the know of Jennie Livingston’s important, groundbreaking film Paris is Burning (1991), depicting the underground, fashion subculture of Black and Latino gay and transgender New Yorkers still resonating nearly three decades across the visual arts like contemporary film, music, theater, cultural studies, and politics. When originally screened, the critically acclaimed documentary piece won a Sundance Grand Jury Prize, a Berlinale Teddy Bear, and was recognized on ten best-films-of-the-year lists including those of The Washington Post, L.A. Times, Time Magazine, and NPR.

Pose appropriates and picks up the crucial dialogue that Livingston originated, “examining the intersections of race, class, and gender in an image-conscious, wealth-obsessed society reflecting American anxieties about fitting in and measuring up.” There are no coincidences either that the foreshadowing of our current Trump Administration which looms greedily in a day-trading sidebar enmeshed in Pose’s well executed script.

Refreshing to discover in our candid interview is that Mj Rodriguez’s real life is thankfully a faint cry of that of her characters. Born and raised in Jackson Township, New Jersey, Mj’s travelling companion and mother Audrey is employed in the medical finance field and her father. Michael, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, works for a national parcel service.

“I was just a ball of energy when I was younger, and they knew there was something different about me. And when I say ‘different,’ I don’t mean it in the context of like something bad. I mean it in the context of something beautiful.

“My mother told me a story of when I was very little and how she and my aunt Deborah, who, God bless her soul, just passed away, were in the car listening to Jodeci and the next thing they hear is me in the back seat singing along, ‘Talk to me, talk to me, talk to me, baby,’ mimicking his R&B hit ‘Come and Talk to Me.’ When I got to my early teens and my parents saw that I really, really was happy and serious about singing they enrolled me into the Summer Youth Performance Workshop at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. That’s where it all began.

“I met my godfather there. Terrance L. Kennedy was my vocal coach and he taught me for many years in Rhythm and Blues (R&B) training. I earned minors in acting and dance. From then on, I just carried it onto my life. I mean, I had that structure early on from those wonderful teachers and took it with me as I got older through high school until now, in my career.”

She is a graduate of Newark Arts High School and later attended Berklee College of Music where she was a 2009 Star-Ledger scholarship recipient and a 2009 Young Arts first level scholarship recipient.

Years of hard work paid off when she landed the role of Angel in the 2011 Off-Broadway revival of Rent, for which she won the Clive Barnes Award later that year.

She recently sang and brought a beautiful rendition of “Home” live at Sheryl Lee Ralph’s 27th Annual charity benefit Divas Simply Singing! alongside Pose writer/producer Our Lady J [A&U, November 2018], an acclaimed pianist providing accompaniment.

Sheryl Lee [A&U, August 2015] is a Tony-nominated Broadway legend and renowned HIV activist who first began her anti-AIDS work in the late 1980s despite resistance from others in the entertainment industry; encouraged by Elizabeth Taylor to continue her important work, she forged ahead with The DIVA Foundation and created DIVAS Simply Singing! Conceived as a “living memorial” to the many friends and co-workers she’d lost to AIDS, DIVAS Simply Singing! is the longest consecutive running musical AIDS benefit in the country. Ralph is currently planning her 28th Anniversary charity event.

The show also featured performances by some of the most talented DIVAS in entertainment, including longtime supporter and fellow Dreamgirls cast member Jenifer Lewis (Blackish) [A&U, May 2005] who in her usual rare and raucous form served up laughter and antics from the red carpet to the showroom floor. Joining the entourage was rising Mezzasoprano sensation J’Nai Bridges who performed a number from Carmen while handing out roses to the audience. Mj was later joined by Pose cast members including Indya Moore, Halie Sahar, Dominique Jackson, and Lady J.

Amid all of the awards-season buzz Mj took some time out to chat with A&U.

Sean Black: What have you been up to since Pose’s Season One success?
Mj Rodriguez: Fashion shows! [She sweetly giggles then sighs as if slightly overwhelmed.] There have been so many that I have gone to. I think the reason why I am invited is because of the success of the show and that there are so many aspects and nuances derived from the fashion scene and embedded within Ballroom and Ball Culture. It’s literally an underground fashion show blended with performance art. So, I see this culture growing up and becoming more mainstream. I think that’s why we [the cast of Pose] are now being embraced and invited to be a part of this increasingly more visible part of our culture and the overall fashion industry.

You mentioned being allowed by your parents (in real life) to attend balls in your teens?
Well, see, it wasn’t so much that my parents actually allowed me to go to balls. [More chuckles.] They found out because I eventually confessed to my dad that I was sneaking out of the house. But, yes, I did get involved in the ballroom scene at around fourteen years of age mainly because of this man I met by the name of Timitheus J. Smart. He became my House Father and he was from the House of Jourdan. It was one of the first houses that is no longer around. He scouted me when I was in high school. He would come to the classrooms and host fashion shows and teach a lot of us kids how to walk runway. He would also bring garments and accessory pieces along with some of the students who knew how to make clothes and sew. Like I said, I was lucky, because my parents knew I was different and unique, and being middle-class they sacrificed a great deal to send me to quality art programs and art schools.

Any special moments or memories?
I remember one day, when Timitheus saw me ‘walk,’ he came right up to me and said, “That’s my daughter.” And that was that. From then on, I would go into New York City with him. He brought me to the place known as Ripley-Grier, where I auditioned at a whole bunch of times. It was the place where my fellow house members taught me and him how to vogue.

I imagine that liberation and support of your family and school helped shape the talented person we see today?
I think it did. It helped me in a way to develop my confidence and I got to own who I was at a very young age. My high school was very, very well-versed in the arts and in people like me. They had a slew of programs in drama, dance, voice, instrumentals and cinema that were geared towards artists, and it was a space for me to feel comfortable and confident in myself and I have always been very confident in my artistry.

When did you realize you were different or unique?
For me, personally, I’ve always expressed myself as someone who is just simply ‘me.’ I never really aligned or labeled myself with a particular gender per se. I just saw myself as a being walking through the spaces of life, and that’s what has made me so confident ever since I was a kid.

When did you first learn about HIV/AIDS?
HIV/AIDS came on my radar when I was very young. My mother Audrey had diverse friends. I heard stories from her. She would tell me about friends who were HIV positive that developed AIDS and then passed away. I remember her telling me about the brother of a close loved one who died. There were so many people during that window of time that were dropping off completely, like one, two, three, twelve at a time. Of course, I remembered seeing about it on the television as well and in the news and also trying to do my own independent research. I remember thinking, “Wow!, this is something that needs to be taken very seriously. There was this moment back then where I thought, hopefully when I get a chance, I’ll have a platform where I can emote my feels and create awareness around this through my art, or be able to speak about the struggles that my mother had to go through witnessing friends that passed away so young. Just disappearing right before her eyes.”

I finally got that opportunity in my role as Angel in Rent. So, it came to full fruition, being able to be a voice for people who are dealing with HIV/AIDS and making sure that they know that they are not alone.

When we first met at our photoshoot you spoke candidly about the importance and responsibility in taking care of our sexual partner(s). Can you continue this dialoague for our readers?
I have always thought no matter the situation that it is important to take into consideration the other person or other people. Regarding sexual intimacy I think that it is important to know your status and get tested. Be responsible. I think then you should also always share your status with your partner before you indulge in anything, especially when it comes to pleasure, because sometimes people get lost in the moment and they don’t think clearly.

Selflessness is a great act of kindness because when you are selfless, you are acting out of the care of the other person. You never really know what the person might tell you or what they may say, but most importantly, you know and hopefully they’ll appreciate you more.

Makeup: Anton Khachaturian for Exclusive Artists using M•A•C Cosmetics
Hair: Kat Thompson for Tomlinson Management Group
Photo Assistant: Julie Shafer
Wardrobe/Styling: The amazing Viktor Luna www.viktorluna.com
Shoot Location: Apex Photo Studios www.apexphotostudios.com

For more information about the Divas Simply Singing logon to: http://divatickets.com or follow on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DivasSimplySinging/.

For the latest about Pose on FX Networks follow @Poseonfx.

Sean Black photographed Evvie McKinney for the April issue.