SINFULLY GOOD

LEFT Pelosi delivers the minority report to the Democratic National Nominating Convention in 1992.

RIGHT Pelosi in February 1987

“I am here to fi ght HIV and AIDS,” Pelosi said. “We must take leadership of course in the crisis of AIDS.”

Pelosi’s fellow congressmembers were scandalized by her statement, especially since President Ronald Reagan hadn’t uttered the word “AIDS” at that time — even though tens of thousands of Americans had died from it.

“Imagine, in ’87, we had a president in the White House that wasn’t mentioning the words,” Pelosi said in that 2014 interview with SiriusXM. “Coming from San Francisco, all of us shared the experience of holding people in our arms until they died who were healthy just a few years earlier. [Fighting HIV] really was my mission.” It wasn’t lip service: “I got myself on the committees of jurisdiction that would increase the funding for care, for prevention, and for hopefully finding a cure and maybe a vaccine.” Her work for HIV causes never ceased; she increased funding for research, expanded access to Medicaid for people living with HIV, boosted the Ryan White CARE program, the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, and the Minority HIV/AIDS initiative, and participated in some of the earliest meetings for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, sewing her own panel for the fl ower girl in her wedding who died from HIV-related complications.

Though she will not longer be Speaker or House minority leader, Pelosi will continue to fi ght HIV because, as she said almost a decade ago, “I never thought 25, 26 years ago that we would project to now and still not have a cure.”

SWEET EMBRACE

A BELOVED TV SHOW INSPIRES BRITAIN’S LARGEST PERMANENT HIV MEMORIAL.

FOR ALMOST ALL who saw it, Russell T Davies’s 2021 miniseries It’s a Sin was revelatory — beautifully and truthfully depicting the toll of HIV on a group of young British friends in the 1980s. The pain, humor, and honesty of the show certainly made an impression on Garry Jones, a businessman in Birmingham, the United Kingdom’s second largest city. He was motivated by It’s a Sin to design a monument to all those lost to, and currently living with, HIV or AIDS. After fundraising with local fi gures like Birmingham Pride cofounder Phil Oldershaw, the monument began moving to reality. On December 1, World AIDS Day, “Red Ribbons” was unveiled in the city’s Hippodrome Square, becoming the U.K.’s largest permanent AIDS and HIV memorial.

Nearly 20 feet high, the memorial features “entwined red-ribbon hearts positioned to represent an embrace,” according to its creators. One of the ribbons will be allowed to corrode and rust as a reminder of the millions lost to the virus — the West Midlands area of England, which includes Birmingham, has seen over 1,000 people die from AIDS complications since the disease’s onset in the 1980s. The other ribbon will be painted red to symbolize those living with with the virus and call attention to the disease’s persistence, as over 3,500 people in the West Midlands have been diagnosed with HIV in the past decade.

“We hope that the memorial will not only stand as a tribute to those who have sadly lost their lives,” Oldershaw says, “but will also help to educate people about the virus, so we can end both the stigma and prejudice associated with the HIV community.” —NB