we have a special show for you tonight a few months ago the logo channel aired a documentary called quiet heroes about a lesbian doctor in utah who was very early in taking care of h i v aids patients in the early eighty's she talks about stigma she talks about treatment she talks about the people it's very moving and then logo asked me to assemble a panel of lesbian aids activists to talk about our work in the epidemic and that round table is what we're going to show you tonight these are veteran lesbian aids activists and it's really moving show informative show and hilarious show so we're going to bring you that now and then we'll be back at the end logo has asked us to come here today to talk about lesbians and their work in the aids epidemic so i'm here with three colleagues and friends of many years standing who have done fundamental work and continue to do work on these issues i have on my immediate left stacy smith who works on housing with the currently with the westside federation for senior and supportive housing stacey has been arrested more times than i think anyone i know doing civil disobedience on aids and other issues and stacy is on the board of health gap and continues to work on these issues maxine wolf that is a legendary activist and organizer a veteran member of act up new york where she helped found the women's committee that worked on changing the definition of aids in women to get them proper treatment and coverage maxine was also a an early worker with the lesbian her story archives and is a coordinator there now and a co founder of the lesbian avengers she was a professor of environmental psychology at new york's kuni graduate center amanda lug is the director of advocacy at african services she works with immigrants mostly on a j v aids issues she is also on the board of health gap so i want to start you know we're all better and activists we've all worked on these issues for a long time but where did we come from in the first place before we ended up here stacey so i grew up in the deep south a combination of georgia mississippi and north carolina and what people call the bible belt and i grew up in a southern baptist family kind of a working class family not a political family at all but religious family and i actually came to new york city as a missionary with the southern baptist convention and the church at the church i was assigned to work at the met my first girlfriend and at some time later we decided to come out publicly to the church  my grandfather got most of the family out of coal and when he was elected fortunately my close family lived but not many others my family was not political at all but there were two things i remember bad for pointed me in a direction even though i don't think that either person thought they would one was my mother saying when i asked her if she was in the adelaide stevenson election no i'm not voting none of them are for us none of them are for the working people of course i was horrified because i was a first generation you know american and the second thing was a friend of mine in high school when i was very young in high school i was only thirteen when i started and she took me to hear peter singer sing when he was blacklisted and he saying this land is made for you and me and i believe family born again christian but not crazy american born again christian you know conservative english born again christian and i didn't have the  congregationalist i know it's about as mixed as it got in my family and i came from the very waspy suburbs all over the country my father worked for an airline and we moved a lot but  i went to private schools i was a boston debutant so i got over that and and i really you know i think of the first to you went to the pete seeger concert when i was in college in the late sixty's new york times writer harrison souls beurre came to campus and spoke and he read letters from soldiers in vietnam talking about the atrocities they'd committed and that was a big turn around for me because my family was very republican my mother always thought nixon got a raw deal and even though i had watched the civil rights movement on television and was horrified by people getting hit with fire hoses and dogs and and i had watched the fulbright hearings on vietnam and stuff i still i needed radicalization and that really did a lot per me so but you know why aren't any of us working for general  some other corporation how did we go from our various backgrounds to more social service or academic or you know activist lives maxine how did that happen for you i never  wanted or corporate america i have no idea why not but i think i think that i always saw in the fact that i did well in school as well it sort of like that was the way i can earn a decent living and so and my team you know nobody and i was in the academic track and my high school was like minuscule out of three thousand kids maybe in three years one hundred kids but i did well in school and my teachers kept pushing me and  when i when i went to college i didn't know a person in the world who went to i had no idea what you did every day and when i got there i was just so in thrall by the information in the courses that i took  then i just kept going and i did really well so everybody kept assuming i would keep going when i graduated i actually thought you could get a job with a bachelor's degree in psychology because to know and i went into the only place they had jobs which was like these corporations that did testing and they asked if i could type and i actually said no because i could but i'd be damned if i was going to you know like work oh that's the classic advice years i typed in order to get through school because i had to support myself you know it was a free education which i could just plug that i got went from my bachelor's degree to my ph d for free at the city university and everybody should be able to do that so you developed an academic career but how did you first step into activism actually i just the first thing i can remember of actually doing something  s in nineteen well i actually tried to join brooklyn quorum but it was right when they moved to being a congress of racial or you congress of racial equality and i couldn't go down to the south because i didn't have any money but in one thousand sixty four when people unseating the mississippi delegation to the democratic convention because they they were all white somebody asked me if i would you know would be willing to give out flyers and i said sure and i went on flatbush avenue in brooklyn and gave them out you know i always tell i always felt about civil rights i have no idea why i was horrified watching the mccarthy hearings when  segregation and those things always were meaningful to me and the first chance i had to do something i did and i should say that one of the things even then that got me was i handed  worker who was getting out of his truck and i said to mrs to unseat the mississippi delegation and he said no he wouldn't do it and i said why not he said mccarthy is not dead this was one nine hundred sixty four you know i just kept going from there ok stacy well just by the atrocities of the religious right i think the religion left me with strong sense of some social justice values that i had always grown up with and that combined with some of my own personal adversities in life i think led me to really want to commit to working on social justice i don't think i ever considered going into some other corporate kind of life so when i got kicked out of the church i still knew that i wanted to work on social justice i needed to just find a different way to do that and that way became activism and social work school and some other things and so it really wa or anything connected with business but i really had no idea and i kind of fell into catering like a lot of young people i was you know working as a waitress in a restaurant  extra money was high school and then ended up working a full time for the some failed some exams which should have got me into university and stuck with it glamorous places i was the first female chef at the playboy clu large areas very proud of what it was fabulous because there was there was no changing rooms for female chefs because i was the first one so i had to share changing rooms with the bunnies working in ha b i arrived in february of one thousand nine hundred three originally for six months just transferring transferring with my job as a chef to a restaurant here in new york and the aids epidemic really hit me for the first time and being as i was living in the east village you know partying and either the you know never going above fourteenth street i felt it to me it was like the land of the i just had it in my face and i couldn't believe like coming from london then we had and still don't have the same size that are in england as here in the u s but new york city then the epicenter as it still is college at the height of the vietnam war and watching the coverage it was a golden age of journalism and it was one of the small windows we've since discovered when journalists could tell some truth and put the war on television rawer and talk about atrocities and and there were a lot of women correspondents both print and t v at the time so i had some real role models there gloria emerson at the times or a ton of others and journalism just really grabbed me because i like to watch t v and i watched a lot of news and so it all made sense to me so i did find jobs in journalism out of college and i was very ambitious to have a big career in journalism but meanwhile i was marching against the vietnam war i was involved in the second wave rebirth of feminism in the early seventy's i was in story that we won't go into here but i was dabbling in activism at the time while wanting a big career and then when i got fed up with journalism and quit my job at c b s news in hundred seven and ended up totally accidentally without any real intention of taking a job as an aids educator to teenagers around new york city by working for the patrick martin institute for lesbian gay youth in the harvey milk high school and then stumbling into act up by made some important connections about the politics of that but before i go on about that state see how did you get so every monday i would walk through this meeting and they would hear these little snippets of people talking about like whatever action they had done the previous week and whatever else was going on and so that wasn't kind of my first exposure to act up just these little snippets and and then at the same time i was going to social work school and then i finish social work school work through this housing organization that began to develop an aids housing congregate foot facility and so i got involved with that  work and then later became the director of that which i did for the next eighteen years and but i decided at that point i had gone to some big giant marches but the other than that i went to the ninety three march on washington but i hadn't done any real act as an aside from like a giant like attending a giant march but i decided that i didn't want to just i didn't want to work in aid services only without also being part of the policy change this needed to happen so i wanted to get involved in activism as well as i really kind of had remembered all this packed up snippets and went and got involved at that point coalition for abortion rights and against sterilization abuse reproductive rights national network so i was doing a lot of different kinds of activism and then i when when the crisis hit i had actually been doing stuff with  i had started going to the lesbian her three archives in the beginning of the eighty's like eighty four because every other group that i was part of had formed a part like the reagan moment like killed a lot of things ok and i just needed some place to do activism you know i didn't specifically you know i had not specifically been doing very much less meaning and gay activism i was i i still always feel that there's defamation i went to some of the early meetings and i really turned me off because it was very top down which was not my idea of how to organize and i always tell the story because it's really funny that there were a lot of lesbians who said why are you doing work  aids you know and you know that's not our issue and and you know that's not import i said like hello you know they said you don't you don't know when you gay man which i happen to do but i said hey how many nicaraguans do you know  not it because to me what got to me about aids was the homophobia and you'd open up a newspaper and it would be screaming at you when those were the moments when what's his name buckley wanted to type to people  you know and to me that was like no you've got to do something it's not it's not just about it didn't matter at that time i didn't know even that women were affected by it i just felt like this is part of my community this is part of new york i have got to do we were behind act up and i saw act and i went up to one of the four women that i could see and i said are there women in your group and she said absolutely i said ok so that monday i showed up at the center  this was in june of one nine hundred eighty seven they started in march and i looked in the room and there were like four hundred gay men and four visible women and i didn't care i sat down and people were so willing to do anything and the sense of urgency and you know wanting to change things was so palpable that it was just amazing and you know if you had an idea you could do it and so i sat in this room where we're having done activism for that long in new york i knew nobody and i said and i i stood up at one meeting and said something and that was sent everybody said oh ok you know so i was there i was you know in the midst of it yeah and i had gone from journalism to working for hedrick martin doing and my job was to be an aids educator and to teenagers which was both the harvey milk high school within the agency but it was a social service agency that had afterschool programs and all sorts of things and an education department that had a contract from the city to do aids education around the city so i would go with a male partner to a school we do five classes in a row and and i can even say seven takings that the kids would say to us but we learned very quickly that no one of the big reasons for resistance to its education was homophobia so we quickly developed also a homophobia class where i go into classrooms hi i'm your local lesbian let's talk about it ask me anything and that was just fascinating you know dr reese in the documentary quiet heroes talks about how does she say she says aids saved her life i think and that she got into it because it was an interesting mystery and it was absolutely fascinating to be close to the epidemic and see what was going on and in the midst of this work i was doing very quickly i got invited to the war conference in virginia conference center it was a gathering of about two hundred l g b t leaders from around the country and i was only invited because i was working with some of these people that have trick martin and people got up at that conference and talked about act up and i thought oh my god i better go check this out and i walked into the room and i was like i had come home the first minute i was there it was id cranky individuals who are angry and creative and funny and and i wanted to do this work out in the streets and it took me i had been a little out in the streets for the feminist movement and for vietnam and so this was an opportunity to get back out on the streets to have a voice and to do it within my community so that was like the extra added attraction and  freedom of being a direct action activist working with people on an equal basis in a completely democratic organization no top down hierarchy and to be able to formulate what you wanted to do and go out and do it and challenge things on a direct basis was just so compelling and so satisfied that it really really appealed to me and i remember the first time i got were a leader of that thing it was like the first anniversary wall street actually i'd only been there for about a month and i thought and you know getting arrested i never meant arrested but when you get arrested with two hundred of your friends waiting for you it said iraq and that's very different than the people who are usually in place you know and what you're saying and in fact amanda you have found that you can't get arrested yes yes if i can just go back to  any home a sexual education or so it so funding for four organizations and schools were disallowed and also kissing same sex kissing was a crime ninety and so to so that was my that was my first that was my activism within the community so similar to the scene when i came to new york it was the homophobia and these are the reports i'd see on t v you know people picking kids at school and then there were no you know the laws were in place then around housing discrimination people losing their jobs  not necessarily a specific activism but i didn't really see it as separate and i got involved in an organization called fan of queer as i was part of starting and i got involved in the fight against the st patrick's day parade or the fight to be able to march in the st patrick's day parade and but i never saw a separation of like lesbians from gay men it was just this was part of my community aids was always part of my community that i had come to you know they had come out and you know maybe i'm a generation or so a little bit younger than you know so i was i kind maybe missed that seventy's feminist kind of thing so when i first went to act up there there were a lot of women i saw a lot of i saw a lot of like really strong women who were you know leading a lot of the activism you know when i was one of the things i always tell people is they always right and they say it was all gay men but it wasn't before and it more women started coming as women became visible and women were clearly the  contention was always the the reason it was perfectly easy to be in that room as a lesbian was that it was the one room where men were actually asking for direction and and training from us and so that was quite comfortable  the way that i you know when when i first came in there were so few women i can't work in an organization without knowing people so i started this thing called dinner which i still do once a year and then we would do it on a fairly regular basis but the one i remember clearly it was in my kitchen and we sat around talking about why were we as a group of lesbians working in aids and everybody had a different reason i mean my one woman this brother had  one person had worked in an organization where a lot of the men had become infected other people just did it because they wanted to work on women and hiv which i ended up doing a lot of work on but with not my reason for coming you  confront we didn't just do ideology we actually learned about how this thing functioned what how you know we taught each other the basics of everything like how would drugs approved how did this happen and one of the things that we did was a teaching on women in nature which was incredibly well attended by all of the men and for that we put together actually a photocopy booklet which we sent all over the world and eventually came to help us win the c d c campaign because people in other countries knew what the issues were and it was affecting them as well but we so we always did that when we wrote stuff so from that we ended up doing this book  go ahead and well my real impetus in getting involved in act up and street activism again was understanding the connections between the civil rights movement the vietnam war feminism and the aids epidemic that it was about people in power not caring about anyone else only caring about their own survival and being perfectly happy to let everybody else die and when i understood those connections i understood that this was the same  fight and that i had the opportunity to be on the front lines where the action was at the moment and i found that very appealing so the fact that the content was fascinating and the people were my brothers and sisters was fantastic but really for me it was about the politics of it and i still you know to this day all i want to do is attack and change the people in power and please make the all of those committees started early on and in fact led to what eventually became other organizations in the community and interesting only all those issues come up in this documentary to this quiet heroes documentary that airs on logo on the twenty dr reese talks about stigma talks about housing and food as issues talks about homophobia talks about you know government indifference religious stigma it's all right there i used to say  that i was one of those one issue activists if anyone asked me i was either a gay activist or or i was an aids activist and i guess you could almost say that the the epidemic help me evolve as an activist with the changing face of aids yes days when i started working at the housing program the italian facility that was a narrow nine hundred ninety seven so you know there were some medications there was the cocktail and there were as some people were starting to live longer and still many many problems and we definitely had a lot of residents who did not make it by ed's a lot of the activism became around housing because we of had learned that housing equals health care and while some people had access to medicine people who are homeless or formerly homeless did not have that access and so how many of our residents came to us not having had that access and they were  you know low income they were people with mental illness largely people of color a lot of drug use are people who in the acid dungeon abuse and they didn't have that they hadn't had the same kind of access and so we did a lot of activism with jennifer flynn who founded the new york city it's housing network so we did a lot of stuff that and and the city i think from some earlier activism a lot of them put in place or the city was required to house people same day people with aids same day that they presented to them and they were doing it so we were hearing lots of stories of people would go to this to be housed and they were being housed and so so we started a campaign that i think we called the essence watch where we just went to their hasa services administration of new york city so we decided we would just go to their office and every day we had this campaign went on for probably close to a year's day least six months to a year where every day we went to their offices and said we're not going to leave until you house every person who walks through the door today and we would follow them to make sure that house scene was actually there because sometimes we had discovered it wasn't always there that they would send them to and this went on for a while  ninety three march on washington maybe it was before then anyway eighty seven it was act now which was a coalition of aids activist groups across the country and we had little conference along with the march and  everybody said we should have like nine days about each and so we we had this ok and one was up in harlem one was one was about kids and one was about gay people and we needed one without women so that's a recent form the women's committee and we need to talk about what we're going to do and we came up with all kinds of weird ideas but two of the women rebecca call and this woman cathy they were both like incredible baseball fans and rebecca  let's go to go to a baseball game and we immediately like just played off one another and came up with all these slogans like no glove no love and don't block it safer sex if we do like they're ok and so you had to present your action to the floor of act up ok so we get there and up there and i'm presenting it and i say we want to go to shea stadium because we found out where there would be like in the opening day that was relevant to that week and it was at shea so we said we want to go to shea stadium and the room got deathly quiet ok like this room like four hundred men and totally quiet and then suddenly like some guy stands up and he goes like well you know that's not really a very safe place to go and you know they're going out and i'm saying now lots of people go there you know who you know kids go there and these people go there and have people go there and finally run goldberg stood at the back and  called on him and he said ok i am a closet baseball not and as soon as he said that like all these men who like baseball started talking about baseball ok so we went and it just it was an amazing thing first of all it was seen on television all over the united states and we got tickets like sixty in a bunch in and at the three parts of the stadium and we made a these banners with ranks to chris leon because we were going to make up by placards and he said no no no you just want banners so that if nobody shows up you can still hold them up ok and we had these banners and they and we decided that we would only unfurled them in the seventh inning stretch so that we wouldn't interfere with the ball game death and when it came up we started holding them and people started waving then we also put a notice on the board that said welcome national women aids day committee and we tried to get shea stadium to support what we were doing and they wouldn't but then they got this idea that we were going to don't ask me how that we were going to break up the you know get out on the field during the game so they called us and gerry well spoke to them and they said a stadium would like to help you ok so they just didn't want us to do anything they knew what act of did so they let us give out flyers at every entrance and condoms at evreux entrance we gave out ten thousand flyers at that game and all the flyers said it was also baseball lingo it said aids is not a ball game and then it had a score card and it said you know how aids kills women and how many women get it and stuff and it  things that creativity and i want to say that one of the things about that that i want to point out also is not just the creativity but that we always went to places that people did not go to who did activists in america that point back up the support so when we had i think one of my favorite actions was the naked action the naked truth about aids it was when george w came and they had the republican national a short for that action too are you going to get naked yes sir richard avedon he was doing a portfolio in the new york area that time around the election and they'd heard about it because we did make front page announce his candidacy for president and i had a favorite client from the ivory coast and she was a lesbian who came out at an early age and because of the shame of that decided to get pregnant so that it would lessen the shame on her family she met a businessman that she assumed would be safe and ended up with hiv she came to the us to visit her brother and that's where she got diagnosed and then she was stuck here and could never see her son could never go back and because she had medicine here and she would die there and i came to understand that the us had a large role to play and that is because the us had a large role to play in why these countries these developing countries didn't have access to medicine and they had al gore in particular had a relationship with south africa and with the us trade office where they had been put on a watch list for legally acquiring generic drugs blood they still had been sanctioned by the us government and they also were being sued by a group of pharmaceuticals so at the same time al gore decided to run for president and so he became our target and one of the things that i definitely learned from act up is how important it is to pick the right target and he was definitely the right target for the moment because also the time you know when you do something we went there totally expecting that we would be arrested in some and then as soon as he made the announcement and like your action there was already tons and tons of press there and as soon as he made the announcement we pulled out banners that we had snuck in that said aids drugs for africa girls gore's greed kills and then we new hampshire and got right behind the stage where he was talking and unfurled a banner that said same thing it's trucks for africa they were on the stage we're just right but when they got to argue those were the only seats la so about the key thing there was getting between him and the cameras to get yourselves on the air and for me of course it was stop the church where i got arrested inside st patrick's cathedral but we really have run out of time we are milking this  so i want just in a couple of sentences i know it's depressing to stop we could go on and on but how has activism affected your life in one sentence or two in every way i mean i do activism because it works i mean every positive social change that you can think of that's happened in this country of our see that's been put in place has started with activists didn't you know politicians don't wake up some day and say i'm going to create this wonderful policy it always starts with activists and it always starts with a combination of activists and organizing so i really believe in doing activism that is part of a sustained campaign of organizing i mean the one one time you know street painting are great too but really i believe in doing it along with a sustained campaign of organizing and it works and it's affected my life because it gives me a sense of hope in a sense  that you know you can create the change that is needed whatever the issue is policies are in place and social structures that are destructive are just put in place by people and people can overturn those i don't know anyone who doesn't get high it's the end of an action and the reason you get high and you want to celebrate is because you feel the power of the people and naturally is so important i don't the world you know the power structure was in the south and i saw you know presidents resign because of the vietnam war you know protests and i saw the c d c change the definition of aid so that women were included and could get the things they need and so i just always feel like that's what it does for me gives what you said it gives me a sense of home and despite the terrible people in the world it gives me faith that there are people in the world who want to make that change and that you know that one of the things that you do as an activist is that you're a model said somebody who looks and says i could do that too yes and that's the point that's the point is to pass it on activists are the best people present company that's it and yet it's the being able to see that change we didn't get too much of a chance to talk about the global  yeah and i go everything i haven't worked in good morning america c b s news i found it so much more interesting so much more fun some what's more satisfying to get out in the streets with  cranky activists who are so much it was so much more satisfying than doing any of that work and i've gone into that work because i thought i could make a difference by doing journalism and i'm back in journalism i would combine the journalism and the activism with my weekly t v show gay usa you can find it online if not on your local station but yeah you know i saw the civil rights movement change things not completely i saw a million people going to washington and the vietnam war i have seen what aids activists have done and now i see women getting out of the street spontaneously against the trumpet administration and people running for office and people making the leap of faith to do activism and it is i can't be a greater advantage alist for this it is so great to do this kind of work and so much better and if you don't you know i know that there were people who got our information about women in nature in all these other countries who then pushed in their countries for things you know so so you're always being that you know everybody thinks you need the internet for that but actually we did it without the internet and people you know it becomes a worldwide connection connector one of the most satisfying things for me for doing my t v show for twenty two years now every week is watching the movements around the world you know when i see trinidad and tobago is just had its first pride march or or what's going on to fight putin among gay people it's  stunning anyway thank you all thank you stacey smith thank you maxine well thank you amanda luggage too little time too much content but the continues the work continues to run continues and for all of you please watch quiet heroes on logo on thursday august twenty third eight eastern seven central it's a terrific documentary about the work of dr kristen race and raises a lot of these same for us to sit around and talk about what we've been through and where we came from i learned a lot by talking to them about their backgrounds some unexpected things i hadn't known that stacy came to new york to be an evangelical yes and that could mean good news but how anything can happen well this is this is going to be the big year stonewall fifty but he renew their activism probably so you want the women's march in january  and i really want to thank logo for letting us run this roundtable and you can see the documentary quiet heroes still online so look for that happy new year everybody and we'll see you next year