April 13, 2007
HOPE AND GLORY
|
Rajner receives his award from Christine Campbell and presenters Jen Bluestein and Stephanie Williams.
|
Last night, some 400 members of the Housing Works community and their supporters donned their spiffiest threads, slipped on their bling and turned out for a memorable evening at the Prince George Ballroom in Manhattan celebrating the third-annual Keith D. Cylar AIDS Activist Awards.
The night was a rousing success even before it began—the benefit gala raised some $100,000, bringing the total of the Keith D. Cylar AIDS Activist Fund to $1.6 million—but also had a poignant undertone. A television screen at the venue’s entrance playing clips of Housing Works cofounder Keith Cylar served as a potent reminder that these awards celebrate activists who dedicate their lives to fighting for people with HIV--and that no one was more dedicated than 2007 Housing Works AIDS Activist posthumous awardee, Mark Hayes, who passed away last week from esophageal cancer.
For a couple of hours before the ceremony got underway, old and new friends mingled to the sounds of live jazz in the front bar and soulful pop in the ballroom itself. Nick Serpe, a freshman at Columbia who got arrested in the recent ACT UP 20th-anniversary demo chatted with the evening’s International AIDS Activist Award winner Gracia Violeta Ross Quiroga about land-reform in her home country of Bolivia (he was writing a paper for school), while Virginia Shubert got to know Virginia Shubert Courage Award Winner Deborah Peterson Small. “It’s a courage award, and it takes courage to act on drug policy in this environment, as Deb has,” said Shubert. Small replied, “I’m happy to get an award named after a strong woman!”
Housing Works cofounder Eric Sawyer tearfully remembered his old pal Cylar. “It’s horribly sad that this is a memorial event, but it’s comforting to see people who came out because of love and respect for Keith,” he said.
Rajner’s fire
The ceremony itself started promptly at 8pm. The Chair of Housing Works Board of Directors David Cohen and Angela Burt-Murray, the chicly clad editor-in-chief of Essence, welcomed the attentive crowd sitting in a semi-circle under the carved, painted ceilings of the ornate Prince George ballroom. Rev. Errol Harvey, vice chair of Housing Works board of directors, set an inspirational tone with a brief prayer asking that we all become “empowered to be activists and follow the example of Keith Cylar and the four honorees.”
The Chair of the Housing Works Bookstore Café Board of Directors Jen Bluestein and last year’s U.S. AIDS Activist Award corecipient Stephanie Williams introduced this year’s U.S. AIDS Activist award-winner, Michael Emanuel Rajner. “When I was in the hospital,” the turban-wearing Williams recalled, going off-script, “Michael called me and said, ‘Hey, girl, we got a lotta work to do! You better get well.”
Rajner, the Florida-based national secretary for the Campaign to End AIDS, gave a fiery speech, praising Sen. Hillary Clinton’s support of science-based HIV prevention, decrying Sen. Tom Coburn’s endorsement of the opposite approach, and expressing frustration that Florida senator Mel Martinez wouldn’t meet with the Cylar delegation that hit Capitol Hill earlier this week. He ended by reminding folks of the near-600 person ADAP waiting list in South Carolina and quoting Cylar's slogan, “Compassion without action equals death.”
Unstoppable Ross Quiroga
Housing Works Board Member and HBO Senior Vice President Bernadette Aulestia and 2006 U.S. Activist Award corecipient Karen Bates introduced Ross Quiroga. Bates fumbled Ross Quiroga’s first name but recovered thanks to her incomparable Southern charm. She explained that she and Wiliams had missed the ceremony rehearsal thanks to nightmarish airplane journey from South Carolina and that “half our clothes are in the Netherlands somewhere.”
 |
Bernadette Aulestia presents Ross Quiroga with the International AIDS Activist Award.
|
Quiroga Ross got a spontaneous standing ovation before she even said a word to the crowd. Shining with emotion, her voice trembling slightly, she gave a poignant, extemporaneous speech. “I am an AIDS activist,” she said. “I became an AIDS activist because I had no choice.” She spoke fearlessly about being a rape survivor and the “connection between violence against women and HIV.”
She also spoke movingly about Housing Works: “I travel all over the world, and I’ve never seen anything like Housing Works. You all are addressing issues of vulnerability. You are changing the condition of people’s lives.” When she added eloquently that, thanks to Housing Works, “I don’t feel alone—there is no sense of homelessness in my heart,” the spellbound crowd gave her another standing ovation.
Small’s big ideas
Housing Works cofounder Virginia Shubert then introduced her new pal Small. Shubert reminded the crowd that one of Housing Works original goals was to fight “policies designed to stigmatize and blame drug users” who had HIV, a nod to Small’s nonprofit Break the Chains, which seeks to mobilize people of color around harmful drug policies. Small, elegant in a flowing, gold outfit, explained that her AIDS activism began when she married a man who was HIV-positive “when people said you shouldn’t do that.” She praised Housing Works for reaching out to drug users even if they hadn’t gotten clean and talked about the devastating impact of HIV on women of color. “I envision a world without AIDS, where the life and dignity of everyone is protected,” she said.
Hayes’ legacy
Next was the posthumous award to Hayes, presented by 2006 Housing Works Activist Award Winner Julie Pena and Nuyorican Poets Café founder Miguel Algarin. Algarin lightened things up with some gloom-dispelling singing and noted Hayes’ extraordinary commitment to transgender rights, exclaiming in sympathetic revolutionary spirit “I’m a transgender mother f*****!”
A moving video about Hayes followed, featuring stories from Housing Works staff and clips and pictures of Hayes speaking to fellow advocates, getting arrested, dancing and protesting. “It was great to see him like that--in full health,” his sister Maura Hayes-Chaffe said later as she wiped away tears. “It reminded me of all his charisma and humor.”
Hayes partner Bill Keyes accepted the award on Hayes behalf and struggled past tears to give a touching speech about his late partner. Keyes quoted text he found on Hayes’ computer after he died, which read: “Keith [Cylar] and I used to have discussions about death and when is the best time to go. Keith said he wanted to go fighting, with his boots on. I argued back that when the time came I hope I had the good sense to be on a beach watching some handsome brown boy.” Keyes gamely noted that the words illustrated Hayes’ “enormous capacity for pleasure and fun.”
Keyes also spoke of finding Hayes crying in their kitchen on more than one occasion “because someone from Housing Works had passed away—he took everyone’s life as a precious gift.” Keyes choked back tears as he urged the crowd to “continue the fight and don’t let anyone keep you from fighting for a just cause.”
King closes
Last to speak was Housing Works president and CEO, Charles King, who wore a photo button of Cylar on his suit jacket. King said that the seven memorials Housing Works has had this year “belie the notion that HIV is a chronic manageable illness,” then spoke angrily about “supposedly progressive” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s unwillingness to expand city services to asymptomic people with HIV and Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s failure to reverse a policy that deprives low-income families struggling with HIV of supplemental income they receive if they have a disabled child.
He noted that George W. Bush has done more to fight AIDS than any other president but only to illustrate how little his predecessors had done. He cited statistics that half of all people with HIV in the U.S. don’t have access to health care and 13,000 people a day are infected globally.
Let’s dance
In a seamless transition back to celebration, King asked folks to stay for dessert and that "great Housing Works tradition—clearing the dance floor," which revelers did with amazing swiftness. The hip-hop began pounding almost immediately, and Cylar Awards head honcho and Housing Works development director Robert Cordero was one of the first to cut loose. “Tonight was elegant activism,” he enthused. “We’re going to build on this and make it even bigger and better next year.”
King was pleased too. “Each year these awards are special in their own way,” he said. “Mark’s passing made this year poignant but you still left with the inspiring message that you have to take action.” Housing Works New York City public policy director terri smith-caronia concurred. “Even in death, Mark gave us hope,” she said.
Help us achieve our goal of raising $3 million for the Keith D. Cylar Activist Fund. To learn more about the fund and make a donation, click here.
For more photos from the week's events, click here.