On 1 December WHO joins partners and communities to commemorate World AIDS Day 2024. Under the theme “Take the rights path: My health, my right!”, WHO is calling on global leaders and citizens to champion the right to health by addressing the inequalities that hinder progress in ending AIDS.
The first World AIDS Day was December 1, 1988. It was the first international acknowledgement of AIDS a day to raise awareness of prevention and treatment and to honor those lost to to what was then still a raging lethal public health crisis.
I was the Director of Programs at the Minnesota AIDS Project (MAP) just finishing my first year in 1988. This year I enjoyed a wide ranging and deeply connected phone call with Eric, who was the first Executive Director of MAP. How we each cherish friendships that formed in those earlier days of AIDS and are still alive and vibrant today. I talked with another friend who has been living with AIDS since those early days, so amazing and grateful that we still get to have time together even if just on the phone. I read the December 1st meditation from Perry Tilleraas's The Colour of LIght, Daily Meditations for All of Us Living With AIDS.
"I live in the moment, happy with myself and trusting the universe to take care of me. My life is simple. My heart is open."
Then as I have done many many times I thought about Jonathan Mann, who along with his wife died in the crash of the Swissair flight as they were on the way to a WHO & UN session. Here are a few lines from the NY Times Obituary:
Dr. Mann and Dr. Clements-Mann were on their way to Geneva to attend a series of global strategy sessions on AIDS, sponsored by the World Health Organization and United Nations. On Thursday, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Prime Minister of Norway who is now the W.H.O. director general, led a memorial service attended by about 80 colleagues.
Fighting tears, Ms. Brundtland, said Dr. Mann ''was the kind of person who changed the course of events by his dedication, conviction and commitment.''
''He had a burning engagement for human rights,'' she said.
Dr. Mann, who spent much of his career at the Harvard School of Public Health, came to international prominence in 1986 when he founded and became the first director of the World Health Organization's Global Program on AIDS.
Colleagues said he was both fierce and sensitive at the same time, and took on large challenges with an apparent disregard for their difficulty.
Dr. Mann's death came almost ten years after that first World AIDS Day. There were so many people that shaped and supported and challenged my thinking, my work, my heart. Dr. Mann's work, his words, his passion, his thoughts did all of those things for me. He so eloquently and simply spent his life work helping, demanding that we all see the social, collective, political, real connections regarding all public health threats.
In lines often remembered by colleagues, at the World AIDS Summit
meeting that Dr. Mann organized in London in 1988, he said, ''We live in
a world threatened by unlimited destructive force, yet we share a
vision of creative potential. . . . AIDS shows us once again that
silence, exclusion, and isolation -- of individuals, groups, or nations
-- creates a danger for us all.'' NY Times
Such a collision of voices from Michael Callen, to Larry Kramer, to Dr. C Everett Koop, Perry Tilleraas, Cleve Jones. Then all the lesbians, including myself who stepped up, stepped in becoming their own AIDS activists in their own way. Most of all there were the every day, no headlines, no fame women, men queer, straight, all colors and ages that timely and without acclaim did what they could do to help prevent HIV and help to care for those with HIV. There were those who never thought of the larger context, they just did what they did tirelessly. There were those who used their voices to impact people, communities, agencies, funders and more. We lived in the world of the dying and fiercely clung to the all the dreams about life.
So many women, so many lesbians stepping up - the "we are here we are queer" sent cognitive dissidence across the focus of HIV being a gay male "disease" we were all in it together.
Once again I am thinking of Dr. Mann's words, "AIDS shows us once again that silence, exclusion, isolation of individuals, groups or nations creates a danger for us all."
We have lived through another epidemic and still feeling the effects of Covid in this country and around the world, so many people needlessly died - the marginalized, the excluded, the silenced. The vision of HIV as a long-term chronic condition has become a reality for most, the science that has wrestled the challenge of HIV transmission has been tamed. More people live with rather than die of AIDS.
Yet, here I am living in a country where the faction of people who will soon once again take over the presidency and the executive branch of our government live and thrive on silencing those who don't agree, exclude people who are not just like them, and want our entire country to exist in isolation. All ingredients that "create a danger" to us all.
And yet, today in 2024 I feel a strong tug of hope. There are going to be very bad things that will happen as a result of these architects of authoritarianism, greed and revenge and there will be a whole new list of voices, creatives, activists, everyday people that will resist. We will continue to work and speak and come together around a vision of a vibrant democracy, a place at the table for us all, where we are all included and cared for and heard. We are still all in it together, we are still remembering and we still have our dedication, conviction and commitment.
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