May 8, 2008
BIG TEN
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Epstein, Steinberg and Cohen at the Housing Works Bookstore Café |
On Tuesday influential authors Helen Epstein (The Invisible Cure and Jonny Steinberg (Sizwe's Test) spoke to a packed house at the Housing Works Bookstore Café about what is hindering AIDS prevention and treatment efforts in Southern and Western Africa. The discussion, moderated by Jonathan Cohen of the Open Society Foundation, was one of the AIDS advocacy components of the Housing Works Bookstore's 10th anniversary celebration. For a list of upcoming 10th anniversary events click here.
Before the event got underway, Housing Works President and CEO Charles King took a moment to explain the role the bookstore played in Housing Works ability to provide services in Downtown Manhattan. The Housing Works Bookstore Café was founded ten years ago in conjunction with Housing Works' syringe exchange program on Crosby Street. “Crosby Street was the toilet of SoHo," King said, and neighbors complained about the needle exchange. King promised that "far from making Crosby Street worse, we would contribute to its gentrification." And he was prophetic. Today everyone from fashion glamazons to Housing Works’ clients to world-famous literati flock to the Bookstore’s chic Soho location. As Cohen noted, "I think every needle exchange throughout the world should have a bookstore attached."
Seeing clearly in Africa.
Steinberg and Epstein have been widely praised for breaking through the piles of books on AIDS in Africa with fresh ideas about the epidemic. Steinberg is a white South African who in Sizwe's Test followed a man in a South African village where antiretrovirals were newly introduced. Epstein's The Invisible Cure argues that the AIDS epidemic's spread in Africa is largely due to the fact that both men and women are likely to have more than one partner concurrently.
During her remarks Epstein noted that well-meaning Western prevention efforts don't address the issue of long-term multiple partners. She said prevention efforts are too focused on "commercial sex workers and truck drivers," when one study showed that for black South African women in one village the chances of contracting HIV were the same whether they were a commercial sex worker or not.
"South Africa has incredibly low numbers of commercial sex workers. Yet a lot of programs target them. That's important, but it's done at the expense of things that are putting everyone at risk," Epstein said. She also criticized abstinence and condom campaigns for not addressing the fact that most people are getting infected by long-term partners and don't see themselves as being at risk.
"Throughout South Africa, there were billboards promoting condom use that made it seem like AIDS is about raucous, reckless people. Where really it's the pastor with two wives," Epstein said. An American scientist who once worked on an unsuccessful AIDS vaccine, Epstein passed out packets explaining the scientific reasoning why concurrent sex partners are more likely to pass along the virus than in Western countries. In the West, where serial monogamy dominates, HIV is largely spread through sex work, intravenous drug use and men who have sex with men.
Steinberg noted that prospective South African President Jacob Zuma has four wives and cemented his stature as a populist figure after being acquitted for the alleged rape of an HIV-positive woman. Zuma said that as a Zulu it was his duty to pleasure a sexually aroused woman, a claim that many African men agreed with. "He was speaking to men who feel marginalized," Steinberg said. According to Steinberg, both men and women have concurrent relationships, but for women it is more of an open secret. "It's a practice so well-tolerated as long as it's done in silence," Steinberg said. "But AIDS lit up a trail because a woman came home with a disease."
But Steinberg said that white people telling black people why they are getting AIDS is politically touchy, especially in South Africa. He noted that only 30 percent of people in South Africa who choose to get treatment when it's available are men. "And here we are saying African men are the problem," Steinberg said.
Epstein, a believer in the power of information, noted that in Uganda, infection rates fell from 18 percent in 1992 to six or seven percent today. Though there has been a lot of discussion around the abstinence, monogomy and condoms prevention campaign—the so-called "ABC" strategy— "the success is not from abstinence," Epstein said, "but a strong home grown, feminist campaign, talking about sexual behavior and women demanding monogamy from their husbands."
April 25, 2008
THE AWARDEES HAVE SPOKEN
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Diane and Reggie Williams |
The locations just get better and better—but the love, family spirit and activist dedication to ending AIDS are always the beating heart of the best activist party of the year, the Keith D. Cylar Awards and Benefit Gala. This year Esther Boucicault, Gloria González, Diane Williams, Paul Davis and Asia Russell were honored with Cylar Awards at the regal Times Center on Thursday, April 17. The honorees' incredible stories of bravery in the face of AIDS stigma (told in three different languages) prompted standing ovations, laughter and tears. The gala was the culmination of a week's worth of activities associated with the Cylar Awards, given to AIDS activists who demonstrate extraordinary courage and commitment in the fight to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The award is named for Keith Cylar, the cofounder of Housing Works and a legendary AIDS activist who died of AIDS-related complications in 2004.
Special guests included the ceremony emcee, TV personality and celebrity stylist Bev Smith, POZ editor-in-chief Regan Hoffman, CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston, Assembylman Dick Gottfried, and 1998 Miss America and current star of Broadway's Legally Blonde star Kate Shindle, who hosted the cocktail party before the awards ceremony.
Chair of the Housing Works board David I. Cohen introduced Smith, a master improviser who immediately broke the ice with a well-timed crack about a useful trip to the open bar. After an invocation by Reverend Violet L. Dease, Housing Works President and CEO Charles King presented a tribute to 2006 National AIDS Activist Awardee winner Stephanie Williams, who died last October. With her friend Karen Bates, Williams spearheaded the creation of the South Carolina Campaign to End AIDS chapter. "Stephanie was one of a handful of women in the state who was open about living with the virus," King said, choking back tears. "She told anyone who would listen that she had HIV, often doing impromptu outreach to young people on the streets. Her generosity was seemingly boundless."
Esther Boucicault, International AIDS Activist Award
After the moving tribute, Pinkston gave a powerful history of Boucicault's work in Haiti and introduced her daughter Michele Maegnan. Maegnan was one of three children who would introduce an activist parent that night. King later remarked to the Update, "This year's Cylar Awards was particularly special because it so visibly highlighted the roles of families impacted by the AIDS epidemic, and the strength that families give to advocacy."
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Boucicault accepts award |
The quadrilingual Maegnan introduced her mother and gave her mom a fierce, lingering hug before Boucicault accepted the $10,000 Cylar Award amid a rousing standing ovation. In a series of interviews in 1998, Boucicault became the first person in Haiti to publicly discuss living with HIV. For more than a decade, she has run the successful Fondation Esther Boucicault Stanislas, the only organization in Haiti that provides psychosocial services to people with AIDS. "This special occasion which fills me with great joy also strengthens me to see the light and bright sun that lightens new horizons in the world of AIDS," Boucicault said in French as a screen above her displayed her words in English. Before leaving the stage Boucicault invited her fiancé Cesar Vincent to join her. Also HIV-positive, Vincent met Boucicault when he received services at her foundation. He and Esther were a powerful pair when they hit Capitol Hill last week with the other Cylar awardees.
Gloria González, U.S. AIDS Activist Award
Next up POZ Editor-in-chief and Kenneth Cole anti-stigma-campaign model Regan Hoffman introduced González, a former injection drug user from Fajardo, Puerto Rico, who now works to organize injection drug users in the shooting gallery she frequented as an addict. "Gloria's work makes it clear that there is no coherent government policy for syringe exchange, treatment, support and housing of injection drug users," Hoffman said. González plans to use her $10,000 prize to develop a cohesive program that addresses the complex social problems that lead to drug abuse.
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Hoffman and González |
González's 12-year-old son introduced his mom in English that improved astronomically in only days in the U.S. "I love you, baby," he said, blowing González a kiss. Like Boucicault and all the awardees that night, González got a standing ovation
González gave a speech in Spanish (also translated on a projection screen) in which she commented, "In a community that could be in any part of the developing world, I take food, clothes and words that inspire to sustain those who live in deplorable conditions. Frankly, many pets live better lives than my friends in Fajardo. And because of so much bureaucracy to change, it is almost impossible for them to escape those living conditions. But it is possible when we fight the system," she said.
Paul Davis and Asia Russell, Virginia Shubert Courage Award
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Davis and Russell share an embrace |
Smith introduced Housing Works cofounder Ginny Shubert as a woman who "needs no introduction," leading Shubert to joke, "Next year, I'm going to demand an introduction." Shubert then gave the award named after her to Health GAP's Davis and Russell. Seeing an unmet need for global treatment activism, the pair were part of a small cadre that formed the now powerful Health GAP out of ACT UP Philadelphia, much as Shubert, Cylar, King and Eric Sawyer (who attended the awards) formed Housing Works as an outgrowth of ACT UP New York.
Health GAP's work has had a profound influence on the U.S.'s commitment to the fight the global AIDS epidemic and the group now has offices in both D.C. and Geneva. Davis joked that "we work with boring, soulless disgusting people you'd rather spit on then talk to," and said that Cylar had taught him "the strategic beauty of the crowbar and the crack, and that audacity opens doors rather than closing them." Russell graciously praised Housing Works, adding, "When Housing Works gives you an award, you must be doing something right." Then to rousing cheers she chanted, "Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!"
Diane Williams, Housing Works AIDS Activist Award
Last but not least, Williams received the $5,000 U.S. Activist Award. When Smith first introduced Williams' handsome 19-year-old son Reggie, she cracked, "I'm about to become a cougar!," dramatically fanning herself. Reggie, a graduate of Housing Works' summer youth program and a Columbia University student, handled himself with poise, as he spoke about growing up as part of the "Housing Works family." He introduced his mother as one of Housing Works' most passionate grassroots activists who gets arrested at nearly every civil disobedience action she can. "Mom, you are a true AIDS warrior, and I know that Keith is smiling on you right now. You inspire all of us with your courage," he said.
Williams then bravely shared that courage with the audience, which she moved to tears with her story of her infant daughter Veronica's AIDS diagnosis and death. Williams, who was diagnosed with HIV shortly after Veronica, told of the brutal stigma she and her daughter endured in the hospital for a year and a half: Hospital workers would leave food trays outside Veronica's room out of fear. Williams had to teach herself how to insert Veronica's feeding tube and draw blood because nurses refused. "This is why I go to the rallies and protests," Williams said. "Because I don't want no women or child to be treated like I was treated. I go to remind myself that there is someone that is newly infected out there, and they don't know where to go or what to do like I was."
King concluded the ceremony with remarks in Spanish, English and Creole, leaving the audience with this final thought: "None of the awardees has found fame, much less fortune. Rather, they are ordinary, even humble. When confronted with AIDS each one has chosen to act not once, but again and again, on behalf of others."
'Continuing the fight'
Bill Keyes, the partner of last year's Housing Works Activist Award winner, the late Mark Hayes, and Cylar's mother Anna Patton, attended the ceremony. Both said they were proud that the pioneering work of their loved ones continues.
"When I saw Housing Works in the news in Albany last month fighting the budget cuts, it was like seeing Mark continue the fight," Keyes said.
Patton concurred. "I feel very joyful. To Keith, this really wouldn't have mattered. He'd be proud but he'd go right on doing what he was doing."
To donate to the Cylar Award fund, click
here.
The spectacular fourth-annual Keith D. Cylar Awards and Gala took place last night (look for a full report next Friday). This year's awardees were honored earlier in the week in Washington, D.C. After two productive days of lobbying, Gloria González, Esther Boucicault, Diane Williams, and Health GAP's Paul Davis and Asia Russell gathered in a Rayburn Building conference room on Tuesday for cocktails and a brief ceremony attended by some 60 well-wishers, including the event's co-sponsor Rep. Yvette Clark (D-NY), Housing Works clients, and staffers to Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) and Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE). Advocates from the National AIDS Housing Coalition, AIDS Action, the AIDS Institute and the Whitman-Walker Clinic were also on hand. Clark noted the important work the activists are doing. "This is a health imperative and we need to make sure that people with AIDS are not marginalized," Clark said. In their own words The schmoozing over appetizers and drinks didn't stop the five awardees, who true to form as unstoppable AIDS activists, kept right on advancing their agendas. During her remarks, González spoke about issues that are hindering improvements for people living with HIV/AIDS in her native Puerto Rico and directed her remarks to any legislators in the room to get involved with Puerto Rico's mismanagement of Ryan White funds. "If you don't take action today the problem will follow you," González said. She also spoke up about the importance for drug users to be given help, including syringe exchange. "If you think the person who is on the streets is there because they want to be, you are mistaken," she said. Bouicault was the first person in Haiti to publicly discuss living with HIV—she gave a now-famous series of radio and television interviews in 1998. In her remarks to the ceremony attendees she said, "I was the first one to take the courage because I wanted to give the disease a face. I always wonder if someone had come before me, would I have gotten HIV?" The awardees who knew Keith Cylar, the fiery Housing Works cofounder after whom the activist awards are named, shared stories of how he inspired them. "Keith refused to separate global issues from domestic issues," Davis said. "And he knew that the closer the insider is to the outsider the bigger the impact is." Russell also credited Cylar for guiding her towards activism successes. "As a young, white HIV-negative activist, Keith taught me that people with AIDS have the power to lead us," she said. Williams, who got a rousing applause when she took the mic, also shared how Cylar influenced her life and activism. "I remember Keith coming back from a protest and I asked, 'Why did you get arrested?' He said, 'I'm not going to stop until we have housing and healthcare for ourselves!' So that's what I do. I don't want a mother or child to go through what I went through." Although injection drug users accounted for a majority of new infections in Puerto Rico, the commonwealth has no needle exchange or other harm reduction programs, and no coherent or coordinated HIV prevention policies aimed at injection drug users. Gloria González, who will be honored on April 17 at the Times Center with a Keith D. Cylar Award (for more information and tickets go to cylarawards.com), says that in her hometown of Fajardo, the mayor has an agreement with an agency in Philadelphia: "The mayor believes that all is needed is detox," González said. "He thinks he has a done a great job by establishing an agreement with an agency in Philadelphia to which he ships injection drug users who are homeless. Let's think about it: Fajardo has an equestrian park, beautiful beaches, ferries which depart for Culebra and Vieques. So, he cleans the streets, he sends them to Philadelphia." Instead of viewing drug addiction as an isolated problem that needs to be shipped off to another place, González, an HIV-positive former drug user who works with injection drug users in Fajardo, sees drug use as "one branch on an immense tree" that leads to HIV infection and other problems. These other branches include the lack of economic opportunities, illiteracy, employment, stigma, family and mental health. As winner of the Cylar's U.S. AIDS Activist Award, González receives $10,000. She hopes to use the money to develop a comprehensive center where all of these different issues can be addressed in order to help injection drug users. "We need to be able to hold the hands of drug users throughout the process," González said. "It may start with not injecting once or going to detox for twenty days. But then what? You go back into a community where there is stigma, where you are stigmatized because you have used, because you can't read or write, and where you have Hep C or HIV. You have been denied care in the local hospital because you were homeless and positive. Now you are able to take a shower, but you are HIV-positive. You still can't read. You are still poor and live in a town where you are looked down upon. The stigma remains." 'HIV came to kill me, but it has also given me life' When González received a call from Housing Works President and CEO Charles King telling her she that she had won a Cylar Award and that it came with a $10,000 prize, she thought it was a crank call. "I honestly thought it was a joke," she told the Update, through a Spanish translator. Even after Housing Works Vice President of Development Robert Cordero called back to explain, González was skeptical and asked that the award letter be faxed to her. When she got to Bill's Kitchen—a non-profit agency on the island that provides nutritional supplements and meals to persons living with HIV/AIDS where she volunteers—her colleagues denied that a fax arrived. "I thought to myself, 'See, I knew it was a joke—too good to be true.' But then everyone started applauding and congratulating me." In addition to the lack of prevention among injection drug users, Puerto Rico has a broadly mismanaged ongoing AIDS crisis. There have been protests in the U.S. demanding oversight by the Human Resources and Services Administration, and an investigation into the mismanagement and fraud that has led to a crippling of Puerto Rico's AIDS health care infrastructure. González got HIV through drug use. She was diagnosed with HIV and Hepatitis C after her skin turned a tell-tale yellow. Still, González continued to use drugs for a year after being diagnosed, but eventually got into a 12 step program. She has been sober for 15 years. "HIV is what got me out of the world of drug use," she said. "HIV and I, we live together in harmony, because HIV came to kill me, but it also has given me life." After five years of sobriety, González felt comfortable going back to the shooting galleries and street corners where she had once gone as an addict, in order to reach out to her peers. Worried about a relapse, she started simply, delivering food and clothes to the people she used to live with. But González, who has a 12-year-old son, soon felt she needed to do more. "I was sitting in my car. The air conditioner was on, full blast, it was nice and cool in the car. My nails were flawless because I had just gotten a manicure, and I felt clean with my freshly washed hair—the whole works. And then I saw her. I was stopped at a red light and I saw her. Skinny, bones sticking through her skin. Skeletal. I knew she was smelly even if she was outside, standing a little bit away, and I was inside. And I could see the lesions, veins popping and track marks that ran up and own her arms, if not also her legs. I saw myself." González threw herself full-force into her fight for AIDS treatment, prevention and housing for injection drug users in Puerto Rico. While many Puerto Ricans look at active drug users with shame, González works with them as a community, providing hope and goods such as food, water and clothing, which for them are luxuries. For González, the Cylar Award represents a decade-long commitment to fighting AIDS in Puerto Rico. "This is my passion, it is my pain. I was there. I know what it is," González said. "I do not want glory. What I want is to work for my people and that is on the streets." The biggest challenge to fighting AIDS in Haiti isn't poverty or the difficulty of delivering AIDS meds to people in rural areas or any other formidable practical problem. The biggest challenge, according to Housing Works Keith D. Cylar International AIDS Activist Award winner Esther Boucicault, is ignorance. "Many people in Haiti still believe that AIDS is a punishment from God and that opportunistic infections are the result of witchcraft " Boucicault said. "These beliefs keep them from adopting safe behaviors." Boucicault, along with four other remarkable AIDS activists, will be honored at Housing Works' Keith D. Cylar Awards benefit gala at the Times Center on April 17. The other awardees are Gloria Gonzalez, Diane Williams, Asia Russell and Paul Davis. For tickets to the Cylar Awards, visit cylarawards.com. The Cylar Awards are largely meant to support the efforts of HIV-positive AIDS activists dedicated to fighting stigma and discrimination, a description that Boucicault embodies. In 1998, she became the first person to publicly discuss living with HIV in Haiti, a country where four percent of the population has the virus and AIDS stigma is profound. In one in a series of TV interviews, a news anchor offered Boucicault, who sat off-camera, a last chance to back out. Boucicault said, "I'm not afraid," and the camera pulled back to reveal a confident, poised, attractive woman. "Esther is fearless," said her friend Elsy Mecklembourg-Guibert. "No one forced her to divulge her HIV status. She took it upon herself." Mecklembourg-Guibert has helped Boucicault make numerous visits to New York City to help educate Haitian immigrants about HIV prevention and dispel AIDS myths and stigma. 'A beacon of hope' One reason Boucicault had the courage to tell her countrymen that she has HIV is that she was already a battle-tested AIDS warrior. In the early 90s, Boucicault lost her husband and son to AIDS. Shortly after her own diagnosis in 1995 (she believes an earlier test incorrectly diagnosed her as HIV-negative) and despite her own fragile health, she founded the groundbreaking Fondation Esther Boucicault-Stanislas (FEBS). At FEBS, Boucicault was able to do what policy makers and politicians all over the world said, at the time, couldn't be done: Treat poor people with AIDS in rural areas. When world-renowned global treatment group Partners in Health wanted to help get care to Haitians in the St. Marc region where FEBS is located, they called Boucicault. "Adapting the PIH model of (treatment) delivery was very easy to lay over" what Boucicault already had in place, PIH medical director Joia Mukherjee told POZ magazine in 2005. PIH founder Paul Farmer called Boucicault "a beacon of hope and dignity." Boucicault's announcement of her serostatus initially prompted negative reactions. She told POZ, "People thought I was lying, or the government had paid me." But Boucicault has persisted in voicing her message that AIDS is not God's punishment, that people with HIV deserve respect and treatment, and that all Haitians need to take measures to protect themselves and others. "Things have changed a great deal," she said of the decade since she disclosed her status. "For example, there was a survey in Haiti that showed that most people wouldn't need to keep it a secret if a member of their family had HIV/AIDS. It's no longer this super illness where the victim must be isolated from the rest of the world." Boucicault is excited about receiving a Cylar Award not just because the $10,000 cash grant will allow her to make micro-loans to FEBS clients and provide education for children with HIV, but because it brings greater attention to her mission. "The Cylar Award will give me more opportunities to make my voice heard, which I hope is the voice of people living with HIV in Haiti," Boucicault said.
"Society in general needs to understand that people with HIV can live productive lives." Before he became the liberal Messiah, Al Gore was the vice president who energetically supported a Clinton administration policy imposing trade sanctions against countries producing generic versions of AIDS medications. When a handful of activists began repeatedly interrupting his presidential campaign in 1999 to draw attention to this morally indefensible position, Gore agreed to meet with the group
—and then convinced Clinton to relax the patent sanctions. The price of medication in Sub-Saharan Africa dropped from $10,000 a year per patient in 1998 to $45 a year per patient today. Two core members of that activist gang were Health GAP founders Paul Davis and Asia Russell, who say the Clinton-Gore turnaround is one of the achievements of which they are proudest. As, respectively, Health GAP's director of international advocacy and director of U.S. governmental affairs, Davis and Russell continue to work towards Health GAP's goal of eliminating barriers to affordable life-sustaining medicines for people living with HIV/AIDS around the world. Housing Works will honor these two trailblazers in the global AIDS movement with a Virginia Shubert Courage Award at the Fourth Annual Keith D. Cylar Activist Awards on April 17. For tickets to the awards gala click here. "AIDS activism is tough, but it's incredibly rewarding and more vital now to me than ever before, so it's an intense gratification to receive an award for work that is really essential to me," Russell said. "What only compounds that gratification is that the award is in the name of true AIDS warriors." Davis agreed. “Before he left us, it was my privilege to work with Keith from time to time on his project to build a new society in the vacant lots of the old. To receive this award in his name, and to be recognized by his beloved community is a profound honor." When they helped found Health GAP, Davis, 39, and Russell, 31, were both passionate ACT UP/Philadelphia members. "ACT UP was just the smartest, best activist organization in the world," Davis said. Both already had activist experience: Davis had been a tenant organizer in Seattle and got involved with ACT UP through AIDS housing. Russell, who was arrested for the first time at age 15 protesting the first Gulf War, had been involved with AIDS activism since volunteering in Washington D.C. providing housing and services for men living with AIDS. "All of them died too soon," Russell said. "This human impact of the refusal by people with power to mount an aggressive response to AIDS radicalized me." Russell and Davis were among those in ACT UP who realized that the same tactics used to increase access to AIDS meds in the U.S. could be applied to combating the global AIDS pandemic. Initially, there was some resistance. Many wondered how Philadelphians living with HIV/AIDS and their communities would respond to taking on global AIDS, given the real needs of people in the U.S. "But during teach-ins, and planning meetings and endless preparation, it became clear: People felt genuine solidarity with HIV-positive people in developing countries, even though they were an ocean away. The struggle for access to affordable, life-extending treatment was an issue that electrified people. It wasn't a sense of charity, but a sense of a shared struggle for social justice," Russell said. "I felt extraordinarily proud to be a part of that movement—one that rejected the urge to divide domestic AIDS issues from global AIDS issues, or to pit the two against each other, artificially." The magic of bird-dogging "Bird-dogging is the magic bullet of grassroots tactics," said Paul Davis. "As activists, we spend a lot of time talking to people who don't have the power to do anything. On the stump is one of the only places where we have face-to-face interaction with the people in power." Health GAP is known for exploiting bird-dogging-confronting politicians seeking election at all manner of public appearances-to its fullest. The relative success of the reauthorization of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), owes much to Health GAP bird-dogging
in 2008. Presidential candidate after candidate was asked to pledge $50 billion for global AIDS, and by World AIDS Day, all of the Democratic candidates at least, agreed, putting pressure on Democrats in Congress to do the same during PEPFAR reauthorization. "Once the candidates, said yes to this, Congress didn't feel they could say no," Davis said. On Wednesday, the House approved the PEPFAR reauthorization with a $50 billion budget by a vote of 308 to 116, and is awaiting a vote in the Senate. What's next for Russell and Davis? Russell, who serves on the Board of Directors for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, plans to work on identifying the best strategies to combat those diseases in small communities worldwide. Davis plans to sail with his partner Jennifer Cohn (who he met at an ACT UP meeting) and settle in a place where they can "attempt to be useful." Davis and Russell will be honored at the Cylar Awards along with Esther Boucicault (International AIDS Activist Award), who was the first person in Haiti to publicly discuss living with HIV/AIDS and who built a pioneering AIDS organization in the rural Bas-Artibonite region; Gloria Gonzalez (U.S. AIDS Activist Award), an HIV-positive former drug user fighting for treatment, prevention and housing for HIV-positive injection drug users in Puerto Rico; and Diane Williams (Housing Works AIDS Activist Award), one of Housing Works' fiercest of grassroots activists. From the 27 day walk from New York to Washington, D.C., to kick off the Campaign to End AIDS to—count 'em—nine arrests, there has hardly been an advocacy event at Housing Works during the last 14 years that Diane Williams didn't play a part in. From the moment Williams became a Housing Works client in 1994, she was passionate about advocating for herself and fellow people with HIV/AIDS. "I want to be an advocate for my brothers and sisters in Mexico and Africa and here in the United States and show AIDS is not a death sentence," Williams said. "We need equal medication everywhere, comprehensive sex education in schools. There's just so much to be done." For her committment to activism, Williams, who currently serves as an administrative assistant to Housing Works Senior Vice President Andrew Coamey, will be awarded the 2008 Keith D. Cylar Housing Works AIDS Activist Award at the Times Center on April 17. For more information about the gala, or to purchase tickets, go to
cylarawards.com. "Diane is dealing with significant struggles as a mother, grandmother and a person living with HIV and working full-time, yet she is always one of the first people to volunteer for a direct action," said Housing Works President and CEO Charles King. Activism has come naturally to the soft-spoken Williams, who most recently participated in a direct action demonstration to demand federal intervention in the Puerto Rico AIDS crisis as part of the "Broadway 12," and credits Housing Works co-founder Keith Cylar as a mentor. "When I first joined Housing Works I remember seeing Keith Cylar on the podium talking about equal rights," Williams said. "He talked to me and suggested the right things I should do. He told me, 'Speak up and go for it.'" One activism experience Williams most takes pride in was taking over the Family Research Council, a conservative group that preaches abstinence-only education. "Abstinence is important, but it doesn't work for everyone," Williams said. Even though Williams said getting arrested is "always scary" she does it because "people might change their minds because they hear about what we're doing."
Williams has passed on this spirit to her daughter Nikita, 21, and son Reggie, 20. Reggie in particular has thrown himself full-force into activism, participating in the Youth Action Institute. Reggie is now a student at Columbia University, where he participated in the campus's World AIDS Day events. "I didn't think I'd live to see my kids graduate high school, and now I'm living to see my children grow up into these wonderful people. They are so proud of me, and I'm so proud of them." Williams also has a young granddaughter. 'Housing Works offered a refuge' In 1994 Williams was devastated by the death of her two-year old daughter who died of AIDS four years earlier. While Williams' family provided support, she felt alone and didn't know many other women who were HIV-positive. "I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and I needed emotional support," Williams said. "Housing Works offered a refuge." Williams through herself into parenting classes, case management, and activism trips in Albany and D.C. And while being an activist was an easy decision for Williams, deciding to go back to work was harder. "I thought I wasn't worthy to go back to work, and I was scared of leaving my benefits," she said. "But my caseworker helped me realize I had the potential, and I wanted my children to see that just because I'm HIV-positive, the virus isn't running me, I'm running the virus." So in 2003 Williams entered the Housing Works Job Training Program and has worked for Housing Works ever since. She receive high praise from Coamey, who said that Williams' has learned how to balance her life, so that her work in advocacy enhances her commitment to her job and her family. "She understands her role in the Housing Works community as a role model and takes that job very seriously, mentoring both clients and former clients who come on staff," Coamey said. "Diane also has this uncanny ability to see the light at the end of a tunnel. When things are bad, she spends a good time convincing us that it's going to get better, which has a profound impact on me, her boss." With the $5,000 Keith Cylar Award, Williams plans to go back to school and take classes in business administration. "I keep striving for more," Williams said. "Never say never because your dreams will come true. When I came to Housing Works I felt stuck, and didn't believe that at all. Now I keep striving for more." For more information about Williams and the other Cylar awardees, go to
cylarawards.com. Keep reading the Update for more profiles on the 2008 Cylar awardees.April 18, 2008
WAXING ELOQUENT IN WASHINGTON
April 11, 2008
GLORIA! GLORIA!
HOPE IN HAITI
April 4, 2008
GLOBAL GO-GETTERS
March 14, 2008
DIRECT ACTION HERO
