April 11, 2007

Keeping Up With Keith: Housing Works Honors AIDS Activists

The four winners of this year’s Keith D. Cylar AIDS Activist Awards—to be handed out tomorrow night at a benefit ceremony in Manhattan—at first would seem to have very little in common: a Bolivian crusader who fought to bring women into the AIDS movement; a prisoner advocate combating the impact of strict drug laws on people of color; a Florida organizer determined to educate the activists of the future; and a policy reformer who spent his life lobbying for the rights of marginalized New Yorkers before passing away just last week.

Where these powerhouse activists overlap is in the legacy of Keith Cylar, the cofounder of the New York-based group Housing Works, who died of AIDS in 2004. The Cylar Awards recognize work like his that helps chip away at the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS and advocates fair treatment for positive people, which is a fair description of all four.

The awards ceremony will follow a whirlwind Capitol Hill week of political activity for the three living recipients. In meetings since Monday, they’ve advocated for such issues as universal treatment and greater housing opportunities for people with HIV.

“They’re making use of their activist skills at the federal level,” explains Christine Campbell, director of national advocacy and organizing for Housing Works. “They’re looking at the global issues and making sure that [efforts on] those issues are appropriately funded.”

As four individual activists, they have had a far-reaching impact on HIV and AIDS. As a team—and with extra recognition from Housing Works—the sky’s the limit.


Gracia Violeta Ross Quiroga
International AIDS Activist Award

When Gracia Violeta Ross Quiroga first began working as an AIDS activist, after being diagnosed with HIV in 2000, she noticed that she was one of only a handful of women showing up at activist events.

After she helped found RedBoL, the Bolivian Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, in 2001, she proposed holding a national meeting of women living with HIV—and was immediately shot down. “My colleagues accused me of trying to divide the Network and rejected the proposal,” she says.

In 2004, Ross Quiroga finally got the support she needed to organize just such a conference, a massive convergence that drew women from all over the mountain nation. “The men leaders couldn’t believe so many women were already infected,” says Ross Quiroga, who had made her point. “Men could no longer deny the presence and the strength of these women.”

Today, women make up about half of the Network’s activists. Ross Quiroga is now setting her sights on recruiting leaders from the country’s smaller, poorer cities. “We have strong leaders in the main cities, but not in the small cities where discrimination is still strong,” she says. Ross Quiroga, now national chair of RedBoL, is also focusing her efforts on children living with HIV as South America’s facilitator for the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS.


Deborah Peterson Small
Virginia Shubert Courage Award
 
One out of every four black men will go to prison in his lifetime. Two-thirds of women in prison are women of color. Deborah Peterson Small thinks neither of those statistics is a coincidence, and she wants you to know why.

Small believes educating people about the ways that anti-drug laws unfairly affect people of color—and negatively influence society overall—is the best defense against them. “It wouldn’t be possible for so many people to be arrested, convicted, prosecuted and sent away for relatively minor drug offenses if the community didn't tolerate it," she says.

So in 2004, Small, once the director of public policy for the Drug Policy Alliance and legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, founded Break the Chains: Communities of Color and the War on Drugs. The organization works to educate people—both policymakers and members of vulnerable communities—about drug policy reform, and gets them involved in pressing for change. 

Small says that one of the most "immoral" things about our current drug laws is that they're used as a justification for not setting up needle exchange programs and not distributing condoms in prisons. “Pure ideology keeps us from doing the very things we know we should be doing to help save lives,” she says.


Michael Emanuel Rajner
U.S. AIDS Activist Award

Michael Emanuel Rajner wants to help educate tomorrow's activists on the issues of today, whether it’s a college student posting fliers on campus about HIV drug prices or a middle-aged positive person looking around for a way to get involved. The AIDS movement needs to invest more in its leaders, he says. "There [isn’t] a good understanding of how to integrate yourself into the process.”

Rajner, national secretary at the Campaign to End AIDS (C2EA), is the first to admit to his own need for education; he is studying social work at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. "It has taught me to be more thoughtful and more patient towards populations I haven't encountered,” he says of the experience.

The learning helps him directly in his work on projects such as C2EA's Tropical Storm caravan, a three-week activist road trip from Florida to Washington, D.C., that Rajner coordinated in 2005.


Mark Hayes
Housing Works AIDS Activist Award

On Tuesday, April 3, Mark Hayes passed away at age 48 in his Albany, New York, home after a lifetime of AIDS activism and civil rights work. 

Alternately described as fearless and persistent, the HIV-positive Hayes had been Housing Works’ state and federal issues organizer since 1999. He was known for his grassroots leadership style and for standing up to state officials in debates on health care budgets, disability issues and antipoverty campaigns.

That was the just the latest of his gigs, though, and AIDS was just one of the causes to benefit from his passion. He was also a founding member of the New York Transgender Coalition, a statewide rights group, and cochair of Medicaid Matters NY.

Hayes was diagnosed with stage 3 esophageal cancer last June but continued to work even as the disease weakened his body. He was appointed to the Albany Human Rights Commission later last year.


Photographs courtesy of Housing Works

 

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