10 minute read
Crisis Chronicled
World AIDS Museum Evaluates 40 Years of Research and Reflections
Advertisement
BY NILE FORTNER
More than four decades ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first cases of AIDS in the United States. Since then, more than half a million Americans have died of AIDS and over a million currently have the virus in the United States. Since 1981, HIV/AIDS has killed over 32 million people worldwide and 37.9 million people live with the disease today.
“It’s actually very similar to the COVID pandemic today,” said Executive Director for the Worlds AIDS Museum and Educational Center, Dr. Requel Lopes. “There is a lack of understanding. But having HIV and living through COVID can teach people a lot.”
First established in May 2014, located in Wilton Manors, Florida, the World AIDS Museum and Educational Center is a permanent museum dedicated to the victims of HIV/AIDS and documents the HIV/AIDS era, which still affects humanity.
In November of 2013, basketball hall of famer Earvin “Magic” Johnson visited the museum. He dedicated the museum space, 22 years to the day after he announced his HIV status.
After moving locations, including local exhibits and churches, the museum had enough funding to move into its permanent home at 1350 East Sunrise Blvd. Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33304 at ArtServe Fort Lauderdale and the museum’s mission is to eliminate HIV/AIDS stigma through education, artistic expression, cultural programming, and preserve its history.
The museum also offers programs, tours on request, and in the museum’s main gallery, a chronological timeline of AIDS with multiple panels that cover history and current day happenings. The museum and educational center also provides information on treatment and prevention.
Beginning as a support and resources group for Gay HIV positive men known as POZitive Attitudes, the facilitator of POZitive Attitudes, Steve Stagon, had the idea to create the museum. Stagon believes the museum will encourage visitors to think about HIV as not just part of LGBTQ+ history, but human history as a whole.
“Much like we talk about other histories, whether it is slave history or Holocaust history, we have to talk about this history,” said Dr. Lopes. “By discussing, learning, and preserving that history.”
With Broward County, Miami-Dade County, and Palm Beach counties being the “epicenter of the AIDS crisis in America” with some of the highest-rates of the epidemic in these counties, South Florida ts for the museum’s home and since 2015, these counties have consistently had the highest rates of new high HIV diagnoses in the U.S.
Dr. Lopes encourages contributions from everywhere. The museum accepts contributions from locals and from other counties, states, and even other countries.
“We want participation from all corners of the world,” said Dr. Lopes.
She also believes that South Florida is a great spot for the museum because it’s also a vacation destination.
—Dr. Requel Lopes, Executive Director, World AIDS Museum
“Our location here [in Fort Lauderdale] as a vacation destination has allowed us to get a wide range of people,” said Dr. Lopes. “To participate in Fort Lauderdale and from all around the United States - sometimes even from foreign countries as well. In response to the [COVID] pandemic, we did virtual and remote programming and these capabilities allowed us to connect with people outside our region.”
An example is a high school student in Australia doing a semester-long writing assignment about the impact of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s in her small town of Australia.
“People from different regions may have different stories,” said Dr. Lopes. “And these stories are crucial in meeting our mission.”
One of the museum’s historical exhibits displays a South African woman from KwaMancinza, named Gugu Dlamini. After she admitted that she was HIV positive on World AIDS Day, she was stoned and stabbed to death. She was 36 years-old.
Also featured is a hate speech that was nailed to the outside of a gay bar by members of the KKK. The museum and educational center also shows video screenings. Additionally, they have a large AIDS ribbon that’s three-dimensional and made from over 10 years of HIV medication bottles and it focuses on the evolution of HIV medications.
Beyond the art gallery, research library, artifacts, and historical timeline, the museum offers programs and events. Since 2015, the World AIDS Museum partnered with Broward County Public Schools to provide HIV and Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) prevention education in classrooms, school clubs, and school assembly settings.
An example being, the presentation and video, interactive engagement ‘InCtrl: Educated Choices’ which was developed with the assistance of Dr. Clifford Barton, who worked on educational outreach in the Clinton administration. It allows students to ask questions, educate, and empower young people to make educated life choices.
“We’re documenting and remembering through education, art, events, and being a support system,” said Dr. Lopes.
Some events include, ‘Building Healthy Futures,’ a program designed for elementary students featuring five lesson plans that encourage healthy behaviors and decision-making with an associated art activity. Or the museum featuring an exhibit of the work of famed-photographer, Smiley Pool, who is a world-traveled photographer capturing people affected by HIV/AIDS.
Michael Goodman, of Goodman Public Relations, has supported the museum and promotes events such as Smiley Pool’s exhibit. Goodman remembers the consequences of HIV/ AIDS day-in and day-out.
“I remember working at a facility [in the 1990s] where people would die every day,” said Goodman.
The museum and education center hope to inform visitors about a somber topic but without laying an incredibly heavy burden on the heart of visitors.
“It’s very heartbreaking,” said Goodman. “But we need something like this.”
The museum also provides professional development programming for all levels of social- and health-services providers to increase their cultural competence in working with clients or patients around issues related to HIV and AIDS.
The museum’s educators include adults who have been living with or affected by HIV/AIDS, as well as high school and college student peer educators who work in pairs to present the programs. The Peer Educator program includes a multi-session training experience, along with supervised field experience.
“For us, it really is about empowerment,” said Dr. Lopes. “You document, you remember, and you empower.”
Museum visitor Adolfo Gonzalez-Garcia said he enjoyed his time at the museum. He mentioned how the medication used to be several pills, three times a day. Now, it is one pill a day or one shot every month. He mostly enjoyed the ‘Medications Then and Now’ portion of the museum.
“History can never be forgotten,” he said. “You think you remember your story, you think you remember your history. But seeing the stories and seeing it here and reading it makes it more clear for all communities.”
According to Dr. Lopes and ‘Southern Equality,’ one story that Dr. Lopes has been moved by was a story about a man from Atlanta. After meeting him at a museum event, Dr. Lopes asked him if he could tell his story for a project series for the museum. “It was a moving conversation,” said Dr. Lopes. “Very insightful.”
His story was on the perspective of being a gay African-American man who grew up in the church.
Even though these stories and the others are available to see on the museum’s YouTube channel, the museum is also funding to transcribe the videos. That way people can identify subjects and themes covered in the videos and include those in a searchable database that can be used for information, support systems, and/or researching a certain topic.
They also have a ‘Spotlight Series,’ signings, acclaimed visitors, films and guest speakers, such as those who have been affected by HIV/AIDS to participate in a collection of short videos pro ling people who have been infected or affected by the disease.
One being Professor of History at Florida International University and author of ‘To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle with HIV/AIDS,’ Dan Royles, and featuring photography and interviews by medical student at Nova Southeastern University, Parvia Aujla, ‘Intersections: Living with HIV in the time of COVID.’ This is a series on some who are HIV positive with COVID, reflecting from both the HIV crisis and the Coronavirus pandemic.
“HIV in the time of COVID will actually be its own section,” said Dr. Lopes.
As the world scrambles for a COVID vaccine and contends with the deadly surges of the disease, some see the parallels of the HIV/AIDs crisis to the Coronavirus pandemic. Two infectious diseases, two global health crises, with striking similarities that echo the early past.
The current COVID pandemic comes with a sense of Deja Vu for some who faced the emerging AIDS mystery of the 1980s. As the Coronavirus sweeps through the U.S., the deadly new illnesses have similarities.
Both HIV and the COVID can be transmitted by someone who is infected without showing signs of symptoms. Both attack otherwise healthy people. While some are more vulnerable to infection than others, both viruses can kill anyone who gets sick. “In the run-up to finding a vaccine and testing they pulled from research and tested from HIV,” said Dr. Lopes. Both contagions have similar connections and even though HIV/AIDs may seem like “yesterday’s news,” it’s anything but. While the world turned its attention to COVID, according to ‘UnAids.org,’ last year, HIV infected over 1.5 million and killed over 690,000 people.
—Dr. Requel Lopes, Executive Director, World AIDS Museum
“For instance, Doctor [David] Ho, who in 1976, helped to bring Cocktail Therapy ahead, which is being used for the COVID virus itself in order to combat it.”
Much like Dr. Lopes, Goodman also believes the HIV/AIDS pandemic is something similar during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“HIV/AIDS mirrors COVID,” said Goodman. “It’s on a much different scale but the same kind of reaction, cases, and same kind of media frenzy in the ‘80s.”
Dr. Lopes also discussed how depending on someone’s age they may remember the museum’s HIV/AIDS history. Even though the hope is to inform visitors about a somber topic but without laying an incredibly heavy burden on the heart, the younger generation may see HIV/AIDS simply as a manageable disease. However, Lopes believes that the mindset in some younger people may need to change.
“Even those who are non-positive need to be more empowered,” said Lopes. “And think about what they are doing because HIV doesn’t discriminate.”
Today, HIV/AIDS still continues to have an impact on a variety of vulnerable groups, including communities of color, users and those who engage with injectable drug usage, and members of both the straight and LGBTQ+ communities.
Calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” may have some museum goers and other people remembering the years that people called HIV/AIDS, “the gay disease.” But the museum brings awareness that names like that push false discrimination about who is vulnerable to the virus and put a bias against already-vulnerable people.
Visiting the museum to pay respect to the struggle against HIV/AIDS, museum-goer, Tanay Antoinette-Johnson. “It’s a hard topic to talk about,” said Antoinette-Johnson. “I think that’s why an exhibit like this took so long and a topic like this is hard.”
Tanay Antoinette-Johnson’s brother died of HIV/AIDS.
“For me, it’s hurtful to remember what this horrible disease did to kill my brother,” Antoinette-Johnson said. “In the time I’ve been here I’ve learned about the misconception of history and how it started.”
The World AIDS Museum and Education Center seeks to continue and expand its original mission, by having continued events and allowing guests and visitors to witness people who have been affected by HIV/ AIDS and they’ll continue to allow all people a chance to participate in telling their own story.
“But one key fact to take away is how far we’ve come,” said Antoinette-Johnson. “And to realize there is always hope for the future.”
For more information about the World AIDS Museum and Educational Center, you may visit worldaidsmuseum.org, email info@worldaidsmuseum.org, and call (954) 390-0550. You may also stay updated with the World AIDS Museum and Educational Center on Facebook, following on Twitter, Instagram, and subscribing on YouTube.
