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Black & Pink News
May/June 2020
White Washing: How The HIV/AIDS Movement Was Coopted By Tommy Young-Dennis (Nebraska AIDS Project, Omaha, NE) and Pastor Darryl Brown Junior (Charles Drew Health Center, Omaha, NE) “Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!” was the 1987 chant of people living with HIV/AIDS along with their family members and friends. These chants in Washington streets that were intended to demand more government support by way of expedited approval from the FDA for medications to treat HIV, were an echo of the 1969 LGBTQ+ centered chants made in New York streets. The chants of 1969 were the result of the resistance of a group of queer patrons at the Stonewall Bar after being invaded by NY police in an effort to shut the gay bar down. Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender Black woman is credited with throwing the first brick at police during the raid which incited a riot. From this resistance, was
Brown queer leaders for their places in these movements.
birthed the first gay pride parade along with festivals of celebration within the queer community, traditions upheld to this day. The history of Gay Pride along with the history of the HIV/AIDS movement is one that finds its rich roots on the backs of Black/Brown queer individuals; however, that has not always been the popular narrative. Stories of these intersecting histories are often told without celebrating Black/
In his 2015 movie “Stonewall,” Roland Emmerlich’s depiction of the resistance displayed a white man throwing the first brick. These issues of representation and fact-based story-telling are not isolated to this film. The name Robert Rayford comes to mind. While media images in the late 80s and 90s represented cisgender white men sick in hospital beds during the height of the epidemic, research had already demonstrated that a Black (suspected) gay man from St. Louis, MO was the first case of HIV in the United States. Robert Rayford died in 1969 at the age of 15 and due to several abnormalities, tissue specimens were kept after his
