AIDS and HIV
Special Report: The arc of Michael Weinstein’s moral outrage from AIDS to homelessness
AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein speaks a press conference announcing a statewide ballot measure to repeal Costa-Hawkins at LA City Hall Plaza on Monday, April 23, 2018, in Los Angeles.(Carlos Delgado/AP Images for AIDS Healthcare Foundation)
California is caught in a conundrum. While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff are steadily guiding America through the divisive impeachment process, President Donald J. Trump seems more and more determined to punish the big blue state for its resistance to his draconian pronouncements.
On Nov. 3, for instance, Trump threatened to withhold federal funds for the devastating wildfires, tweeting that Gov. Gavin Newsom “has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him.”
“No more,” if Newsom asks for funding, Trump tweeted, apparently unaware that the federal government controls forest land and the funding would help the displaced.
But there is an odd, unrecognized disconnect between concern for the burned-out fire victims and the larger issue of homelessness in cities such as San Francisco and San Diego and Los Angeles – 981 human beings died on the streets of LA County in 2018.
And the expectation of more turmoil looms large with Trump’s anticipated intervention into California affairs after the Nov. 15 firing of Matthew Doherty, the gay executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Doherty is likely to be replaced by Robert Marbut, a Texas-based consultant who “has long encouraged elected officials to stop coddling people on the streets.” For instance, The Times reports, in 2012, Marbut “pushed the Florida city of Clearwater to stop ‘renegade food’ donations from churches and other charitable organizations. At the time, he characterized Clearwater as the second-most enabling city in America.”
Marbut’s philosophy, which broadly includes expanding police authority to crack down on the homeless for minor offenses, “is in line” with the Trump administration, The Times reports.
And what is that philosophy? “We have people living in our … best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings … where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige,” Trump said during a September LA site visit by administration officials. “And all of a sudden they have tents.”
Trump’s options are legally limited. But when has that stopped him?
If officials order sweeps of streets and homeless encampments, where would they go? Or might they be rounded up and placed into unspecified federal facilities?
But Newsom may now have a much-needed resource. On Dec. 4, he hired fired federal homeless expert Matthew Doherty to be his senior adviser, perhaps even figuring out how to pry loose millions of dollars in stalled funding for the state with half the nation’s unsheltered homeless population.
Doherty has a daunting job. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority estimates approximately 50,000 to 60,000 people were homeless in LA on any given night in 2019, more than 44,000 on the streets. About 34% are Black, hugely disproportionate to their 8% of the population; 31% are females; and minors through age 24 make up 8,915 of the county’s homeless population, up from 8,072 in 2018.
The jump comes “despite over $619 million in spending on the [homeless] problem in the region over the past year,” AIDS Healthcare Foundation co-founder and President Michael Weinstein said in a June 2 statement.
The LAHSA did not post LGBTQ-specific statistics but last June, when out City Controller Ron Galperin introduced an online map to help link homeless and at-risk LGBTQ youth to services, he noted that up to 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ.
“The homelessness crisis gripping our region spans the spectrum of age, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation and expression, but is particularly difficult for LGBTQ youth,” Galperin said.
Within this context, a majority of voters recognize homelessness as a crisis — exacerbated by a paucity of affordable housing, escalating rents, retaliatory evictions and gentrification. But, The Times notes, “there is some appetite among L.A. County residents to have law enforcement be more involved.”
To Weinstein, the humanitarian calamity on the streets and the criminalization of homelessness is a moral outrage.
“AIDS Healthcare Foundation was born of moral outrage over the mistreatment of people with AIDS. We began as a hospice provider when people were dying in the hallways of the county hospital,” Weinstein says. “Today’s housing crisis is a similar crisis of indifference to suffering. Our patients and employees are feeling the devastating impact of skyrocketing rents. AHF has jumped into the breach with advocacy and by directly creating affordable housing units.”
In 2017, AHF created the Healthy Housing Foundation by AHF, which bought and renovated SROs in Hollywood and Downtown LA. AHF has also sued to prevent destruction of available housing units by developers proposing luxury housing with some affordable units set aside.
Weinstein, whose first apartment at 19 was in West Lake for $100 a month, believes the supposed “trickle down” of luxury complexes actually makes surrounding housing units too expensive for someone living on minimum wage.
Watching this, Weinstein turned to his board of directors and his management team and asked: “What can we do to not just say how bad it is, but create a solution?”
“And so we went out in the marketplace and we bought our first single room occupancy hotel that was two thirds vacant and we rehabilitated it to put people in there,” Weinstein told the Los Angeles Blade. “And now we have seven of them and we have almost 800 rooms. The average cost is $100,000, including the renovation — whereas the city is spending $500,000. And the first units from Proposition HHH, which was the city initiative around building affordable housing, have yet to come online, not one single unit.
“It’s an urgency to meet human need,” he continues. “So not only are we criticizing and advocating, we’re also providing a solution. And I’ve committed to 10,000 rooms over the next five years,” including building from scratch. “We’ve amassed three lots and we will eventually build a project that hopefully will be 800 units there. So we’re very, very serious about creating solutions.”
Weinstein remembers the 1986 fight with his best friend Chris Brownlie against Lyndon LaRouche’s Prop 64 initiative to quarantine people with HIV/AIDS. After the measure failed, they asked what they should do next.
Seeing poor gay men evicted from their apartments, dying homeless and loveless on the streets or in the halls of County General Hospital or the overcrowded 5P21, they founded the AIDS Hospice Foundation and opened the Chris Brownlie Hospice to give them death with a modicum of dignity.
“As human beings, I think one of the things that differentiates us from other animals is that we take care of our own. And in this environment, in the AIDS environment, taking care of our own sometimes means providing people with AIDS with a clean, warm place to live out the last days of their life and a way to die without the distractions of homelessness or freaked out relatives or any of those things,” Brownlie says in the June 2017 documentary “Keeping The Promise,” narrated by Meryl Streep.
In the miracle three-drug cocktail came out in 1996, Weinstein decided to give the medication to AHF clients in their clinics and in their Chris Brownlie and Carl Bean hospices. But the government was not paying reimbursements for the medications in those days, so the cost came out of AIDS organization’s own pocket — bringing AHF to the brink of bankruptcy and provoking a near coup to oust the co-founder.
“I wouldn’t have done anything different because it was really a moral imperative. I mean, you couldn’t let people die who you knew could be saved,” Weinstein said in the documentary. “What happened was virtually all of the patients got better within a month or two. Before that, hardly anybody left the houses. Most people – they came there and that’s where they died. But all of sudden people were leaving and going back to their lives. And that was just miraculous.”
Thousands did not live to see the miracle, including Chris Brownlie. Nov. 29 was the 30th anniversary of his death at the AIDS hospice that bore his name.
“Not only is homelessness and housing affordability akin to the moral outrage of AIDS in the ’80s, but AIDS seemed like an insoluble problem, right? It just seemed like an overwhelming thing that you couldn’t get your arms around. And AHF and others who worked on this issue made it a solvable problem. Same thing can and should happen with housing affordability.”
On Nov. 30, AHF announced it would appeal a dismissed lawsuit filed last August in Superior Court against the City of Los Angeles, the City Council and four Hollywood developers. The lawsuit sought to enforce the federal Fair Housing Act and California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act regarding developments that AHF asserts were “approved without providing adequate measures to ensure that the projects would not displace protected minorities.”
In addition to the gentrification of minority neighborhoods, AHF is tackling the issue of escalating rents. On Dec. 5, AHF announced it has secured nearly one million signatures — far more than the required 623,212 voter signatures needed — to qualify the Rental Affordability Act for placement on statewide ballots for November 2020.
The RAA is sponsored by Housing Is A Human Right, AHF’s housing advocacy division. It is endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, Rep. Maxine Waters, and civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, among others.
If passed, the initiative would remove restrictions in state law to give cities and counties the ability to devise rent control policies that limit how much rents can increase each year.
“Seventy-five percent of Californians hold a positive to very positive view of rent control,” Weinstein said at a Dec. 5 news conference, according to a press release. “The housing affordability and homelessness crises are the most pressing social justice and public health emergencies in our time, especially in Southern California. We must take action to stop it now. To that end, we intend to bring the issue directly to California voters next November.”
Last year, a similar measure, Prop 10, was defeated. The effort cost $96.66 million – with Coalition for Affordable Housing raising $25.30 million (AHF contributed $22.52 million) and the No on Prop 10 real estate PACs raising $71.37 million.
Big PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association) also chipped in $500,000 to the No on 10 campaign. When the medical news organization STAT asked why, a PhRMA spokesperson claimed they had over 900,000 people living and working in California (thus 2.3% of the state population) and they were concerned that the measure “…could make housing harder to find,” according to a Sept. 20, 2018 report on Business Wire.
Weinstein has a long history of tangling with Big PhRMA, from the late 1980s when AIDS Hospice Foundation and ACT UP protested drug companies profiteering from outrageous drug pricing, to his lawsuits challenging Gilead Sciences drug patents making “untold billions off of tenofovir in its various treatment combinations since its introduction in 2001.” AHF’s lawsuits have paved the way for hundreds of other lawsuits, including a recent patent infringement case by the federal government involving Truvada.
“A rift between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences ruptured further Wednesday when the Trump administration sued Gilead in U.S. District Court, asserting that Gilead made billions of dollars on HIV prevention therapy while repeatedly ignoring government patents,” the Washington Post reported Nov. 7.
Weinstein is also a favorite target of critics who tend to repeat the same debunked claims, even into the pages of the New York Times.
“To his many critics in AIDS activism, Weinstein is the Koch brothers of public health,” Christopher Glazek wrote in a New York Times Magazine feature story, citing a slew of old allegations, including “giving kickbacks to patients, overbilling government insurers.”
“AHF has always been and remains clean as a whistle and at the same time, because our advocacy and our outspoken voice, we are a huge target,” Weinstein said. “Plus, oppression sickness that’s still very alive and kicking in the LGBT community does not allow anyone to rise to a level of leadership without being subjected to this kind of malicious attack.”
Weinstein encourages simple fact checking. For instance, in the so-called “Whistleblower Kickback case” in Florida, the original judge validated the AHF clinic’s business model of giving bonuses to employees to get people tested and using incentives and gift cards for clients who returned for a second appointment, now a more common practice in public health. After the initial lawsuit by former employees failed, they went to both the U.S. Department of Justice and the state government alleging Medicare fraud – but both declined to pursue the case.
In August 2018, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled in AHF’s favor.
“They lost, they appealed, they lost again. And not only did the court rule in our favor, but the [Florida] government intervened to say that what we were doing is not only OK, but what they wanted us to do, which is to put everything under the same roof,” Weinstein said. Not only did AHF win the case, “but they’re having to pay us back the legal costs.”
In another Florida lawsuit, in November 2018, a judge ruled in AHF’s favor in a Medicaid contract case that threatened to disrupt care for nearly 2,000 HIV patients.
Regarding the criticism around LA funding, Weinstein said, “there’s been a lot of prejudice against us because of the advocacy, which we have fought and won in 90+ percent of the cases.”
In one instance, LA County strenuously asserted that AHF over billed for the services for which they were contracted.
“They spent $3 million fighting us on that and then they wound up settling without any claim that we had done anything wrong,” Weinstein said.
Weinstein has been excoriated for calling PrEP a “party drug,” which was translated into his opposition to the drug. In fact, AHF dispenses PrEP after a medical checkup to ensure the client should take it and is advised about side-effects and accompanying condom use.
“It’s a mischaracterization to say that we were opposed to PrEP,” Weinstein told the Los Angeles Blade. “We said that we did not believe it would be a successful public health strategy. And the jury is in on that, right? The people who are taking it are not the people who need it most. They’re older, white, middle-class men. The infection rate has not gone down. The STD rates have gone up, the condom culture has been damaged. We went from a variety of different prevention approaches to basically all PrEP and that has not been successful.”
Weinstein said the reason PrEP has not caught on, “despite the tens of billions of dollars that’s been invested in it, is because it’s very difficult to get people to take a drug for a disease they don’t have. It’s hard enough to get people to take a drug for disease they do have.
“One size does not fit all,” he continued. “That’s what we said from the very beginning — that PrEP would help individuals who were certain not to use condoms but that it would not be effective as an overall public health strategy. It’s been seven and a half years since the approval and we have not seen any significant change in the situation,” especially in reaching people of color.
To make condom use more sexy, for International Condom Day, AHF premiered a funny, lively parody of Cardi B with “Wrap It Like That” that has been viewed almost 859,000 times.
“Part of what has made us unpopular in certain quarters is that from day one we have had an ironclad commitment to serving people of color communities,” Weinstein said. “You still have a tremendous amount of segregation and discrimination in the LGBT community to this day. Whether you talk about Minority AIDS Project or In The Meantime, or Bienestar and if you look at the composition of our board of directors, our senior management, our global leadership — I’ll say this flat out — there is no other organization working in this space that is as diverse as AHF. And we’ve put our money where our mouth is, in terms of where we located our facilities, organizations that we financially support, and alliances that we’ve built.”
AHF’s Michael Weinstein with In The Meantime’s Jeffrey King (Photo by Karen Ocamb)
Impulse Group/ Buenos Aires (Photo courtesy AHF)
“You pay a heavy price for being ahead of your time, being in the vanguard. And I’m not saying that to brag. I mean that’s simply true. Over and over and over again,” Weinstein said.
The most recent flareup with AHF comes from popular, legislatively-prolific out State Sen. Scott Wiener (D – San Francisco) who apparently blames AHF’s strong opposition to SB 50, the transit housing bill he co-authored with State Sen. Ben Hueso (D – San Diego), for killing the bill this year.
“Senator Scott Wiener, SB 50’s author, recently wrote in an email that “AHF and Weinstein are now effectively California’s NIMBY-In-Chief,” the Bay City Beacon wrote in a highly critical story.
However, there was much opposition to SB 50 in its current form. In a statement posted on his website May 16, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Anthony Portantino (D – La Canada Flintridge) explained why he turned SB 50 into a two-year bill.
“SB 50 is a well-intentioned effort to help solve our state’s housing crisis and it highlights two valid ways to affect land use decisions across the state: providing incentives or legislating mandates. My preference has always fallen on the side of incentives for local governments to accomplish goals. There were legitimate concerns expressed from both large and small cities about the scope of SB 50 as it pertained to bus corridors, historic preservation, the definition of ‘jobs rich’ neighborhoods and whether it would increase gentrification and discourage light rail expansion as unintended consequences; all of which justified the pause established today by the committee. My colleague from San Francisco is one of the smartest and most earnest legislators in the capitol. He cares deeply about the housing crisis and I expect him to continue to pursue his goals. Hopefully we provided the opportunity to broaden the conversation, which can result in a more targeted legislative effort.”
In fact, according to a May 8 Business Wire press release, the League of California Cities cited 35 municipalities that opposed SB 50: Burlingame, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Chino Hills, Cupertino, Diamond Bar, Downey, Fremont, Glendale, Glendora, Hermosa Beach, La Mirada, Lafayette, Laguna Niguel, Lakewood, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Manhattan Beach, Mountain View, Novato, Paramount, Pasadena, Pinole, Palo Alto, Rancho Cucamonga, Rancho Palos Verdes, Redondo Beach, Santa Clarita, San Francisco, San Mateo, Solana Beach, Sunnyvale, Vista, West Covina, and West Hollywood.
Nonetheless, efforts were made to disparage AHF, including a news conference taking AHF to task for using a quote by and image of gay icon James Baldwin in an ad.
“As someone whose community has been so deeply impacted by HIV, I’m deeply offended by how they misuse HIV healthcare dollars,” Wiener, who is gay, recently said of AHF’s anti-SB 50 campaign.
Hueso sent a letter to Attorney General Xavier Becerra requesting an investigation of AHF over alleged misuse of federal 340B funds, Politico reported last August.
“This action is payback from Scott Wiener for our successful opposition to SB 50,” Weinstein tells the Los Angeles Blade. “These charges were made before and nothing came of it. AHF is extensively audited. Politico didn’t bother to say that 96% of our funding goes to patient care. And Senator Hueso’s own letter says that there are no restrictions on 340B funds, which come 100% from drug companies. Lastly, Politico didn’t even bother to speak to me for its article.”
Becerra’s office does not comment on the status of investigations or litigation, but as of Dec. 4 AHF has heard nothing from either from Becerra or the federal Department of Justice. Meanwhile, AHF says Wiener and Hueso are beholding to real estate developers by taking their campaign contributions.
Weinstein pointed out that most of the stories critical of him and AHF “give such short shrift to our humanitarian efforts,” often in “very extremely dangerous and difficult circumstances across the world — not to mention our work on Ebola and our disaster relief where we air-lifted into the Bahamas and into Puerto Rico and Haiti before the U.S. government could get there.”
Since 1987, AHF has developed funding streams through a network of pharmacies, thrift stores, healthcare contracts and strategic partnerships. Today, AHF’s budget is $1.6 billion – with 96% of the funding going to patient care; with 6,500 employees caring for 1,332,868 patients in 43 countries, including 664 free global treatment clinics. AHF also operates in 38 of the 48 US counties the Trump administration wants targeted for HIV prevention, care and treatment.
“You can talk all day long about whatever your political issues are with AHF. But the bottom line is that 1.3 million people are entrusting us with their care,” Weinstein said.
“We started out as a tiny grassroots organization. Our budget in the first year was $50,000, approximately. We were a fraction of the size of APLA. And now we’re a hundred times their size,” Weinstein said. “It’s a tremendous amount of hard work, dedication, and most of all really having our finger on the pulse of what the needs were. And now we’re taking on homelessness and affordability and housing and we’re taking on trying to build a sustainable public health structure in the world. None of the snark, none of the attacks, and none of these so-called legal arguments have slowed us down one iota.”
In fact, AHF’s Healthy Housing Foundation in LA is buoyed by the help they’ve been able to give people such as Herbert Butler, an 88-year-old homeless veteran of the Korean War who has been on the Hollywood streets for 20 years.
“Butler, an avid amateur pianist, long resisted going to shelters (for myriad reasons known best to him), preferring his life on the street,” AHF’s Ged Kenslea told the Los Angeles Blade. “However, one ritual remains sacred to him: several times a week he travels from Hollywood to Union Station to wait his turn for the chance to play — and entertain harried commuters — for 20 minutes or so on the community piano in the station’s waiting room.”
Nicole Farley, from JWCH Wesley Health Care Center, worked to earn Butler’s trust and bonded with him over his deep admiration for her grandfather, the famous alto sax jazz musician Captain John Handy. In October, Farley connected Butler to AHF’s Healthy Housing Foundation and they secured him a spot in the Baltimore Hotel, a 1910 SRO hotel on Skid Row in downtown LA that AHF has repurposed for homeless and extremely low-income housing.
Herbert Butler (Photos courtesy AHF)
“Inspired by Mr. Butler’s story, his service to our country and his passion for music,” Kenslea said, “AHF recently obtained a secondhand mini baby grand piano and placed it in the lobby of AHF’s King Edward Hotel, directly across the street from the Baltimore. Now, Mr. Butler, and other musically inclined residents of AHF’s residences, can play to their hearts’ content.”
“The biggest issue of all the issues that we’re facing is income and inequality,” says Weinstein. “Whether it’s drug companies that price their drugs out of the reach of people, not only here, but around the world. Or whether it’s the fact that, that the system as it exists now, cannot put a roof over everybody’s head. I do a lot of international travel and I go to very poor places. And there’s no place that I have been where there are as many people sleeping on the street as there are in Los Angeles. There are people in huts, there are people in shacks with corrugated roofs, there are some terrible living conditions that I see. But a person who, lying on the sidewalk, the sidewalk is home for tens of thousands of people. I’ve not seen that anywhere that I’ve traveled. If that is not a moral outrage, then I don’t know what it is.”
“Homelessness is the worst wildfire California has ever seen,” says a recent AHF video on the issue of rent control.
AHF President Michael Weinstein and husband Kevin Tran Nguyen (Photo by Karen Ocamb)
“The bottom line is love,” Weinstein tells the Los Angeles Blade. “The bottom line is love of humanity. The bottom line is love of sisters and brothers. And you know, sometimes you really need to fight like hell for the people and the things you love.”
AIDS and HIV
From ACT UP to apps: A candid conversation with MISTR founder Tristan Schukraft
As HIV prevention ushers in a new era, Schukraft reflects on the evolution of sexual healthcare and the power of stigma-free prevention
It was not too long ago that an HIV diagnosis was read as a death sentence. In its earlier decades, the HIV/AIDS crisis was synonymous with fear and loss, steeped in stigma. Over recent years, open conversation and science have come together to combat this stigma while proactively paving the way for life-saving treatments and preventive measures like PrEP. Now, in 2026, with discreet and modern platforms that meet people where they’re at in their lives, HIV prevention has evolved from hushed words of warning into something far more sex-positive and accessible. Game-changing services like MISTR are a testament to this shift, showing our community that healthcare doesn’t have to feel clinical or shaming to work. It can be empowering and, dare I say, celebratory.
Few people embody this evolution quite like Tristan Schukraft, founder of MISTR. With one hand in healthcare and the other high-fiving through queer nightlife, Schukraft gets that, from the bar to the bedroom and beyond, prevention happens in person and in real life. His approach has helped turn PrEP, DoxyPEP, and testing into normalized parts of our daily queer life, reaching hundreds of thousands of people across the US.
In our conversation, Schukraft shares candidly about stigma, policy, and why the future of sexual health depends on keeping it real.
You have one hand in healthcare and the other in nightlife and queer spaces. Can you share with us how these two spheres impact and inform each other? How do they impact and inform you?
Honestly, for me, they’ve never been separate. Nightlife and queer spaces are where people meet, date, hook up, fall in love, and make friends. That’s real life. Being in queer spaces all the time keeps me grounded and reminds me who we’re building MISTR for.
MISTR markets sexual health in a sex-positive, stigma-free fashion. Can you share with us how you measure the impact of this approach?
This year, we held the first-ever National PrEP Day. Dua Lipa performed, and Cardi B was there. After the event, Cardi B went on her Instagram live to encourage people to sign up for PrEP.
When you make sexual health stigma-free and sex positive, people talk about it. We see it in how people use the platform. When 700,000 people are willing to sign up, get tested, start PrEP, and add things like DoxyPEP, that tells us we’ve made it feel safe and normal instead of scary or awkward. And then we see it in the results. Since we expanded DoxyPEP, STI positivity among our patients dropped by half.
How have you seen the conversation of sexual health in our LGBTQ+ community change in mainstream culture in recent years?
Ten years ago, nobody was casually talking about PrEP, and if they did, it likely referenced one being a Truvada whore. Now it’s part of the culture. Popstars like Troye Sivan post pictures of their daily PrEP pill on social media. Cardi B goes on Instagram Live telling people to get on PrEP.
For many sexually active gay men, taking PrEP is simply part of the gay experience. For people in more remote areas, it might not be as talked about. Particularly in rural or more conservative places, MISTR can be a life-changing option. No awkward visits to the family doctor or the local pharmacy where everybody knows your business. It’s all done discreetly online and shipped straight to your door.
You have publicly argued that cuts to government HIV prevention funding are of high risk. Would you please elaborate for us on what those budget decisions mean on an individual level?
It means real people fall through the cracks. Someone doesn’t get tested. Someone waits too long to start PrEP. Someone finds out they’re HIV-positive later than they should have. Community clinics will be the hardest hit, especially those in underserved communities. The good news is that MISTR is ready to help people who might lose their access to care. All you need to do is sign up at mistr.com, and it’s totally free with or without insurance.
From your (and MISTR’s) perspective, how do these funding cuts threaten ongoing efforts to end the HIV epidemic?
For the first time, we have all the tools to end HIV. If everybody who is HIV negative is taking PrEP and everyone HIV+ is virally suppressed, we can end all new HIV transmissions in the United States. We have everything we need today. All we need is to get more people on PrEP. Cutting funding risks losing that momentum. Ending HIV requires scale and consistency. Every time funding gets cut, you lose momentum, trust, and infrastructure, and rebuilding that takes years.
HIV transmissions don’t pause because budgets change.
In our current climate of decreased federal investment, what role do you feel private healthcare and business should play in sexual health?
With reports that the current administration is considering cuts to HIV and prevention funding, we face a moment of reckoning. At the same time, some employers are seeking to exclude PrEP and HIV prevention from their coverage on religious freedom grounds. If these challenges succeed, and if federal funding is slashed, the consequences for public health will be devastating. But this is where the private sector must step up to fill the gap, bridge divides, and deliver results.
Businesses have the power and platform to normalize HIV prevention and drive measurable outcomes. At MISTR, we see firsthand what’s possible: since introducing DoxyPEP, STI positivity rates among our patients have been cut in half. But it’s not just about medication. It’s about messaging.
Our sex-positive, stigma-free marketing speaks directly to our community, making sexual health part of everyday life. No awkward doctor visits, no needles, no paperwork — just free online PrEP and STI testing, prescribed by real physicians and delivered to your door. That kind of impact could grow exponentially if more employers embraced this approach and made HIV prevention part of their employee wellness programs.
Employers, this is your call to action. Start by making sure your health plans cover PrEP and DoxyPEP. Partner with platforms like MISTR to give employees private, stigma-free access to care. Offer on-site testing. Talk openly about sexual health, not just during Pride, but every day of the year. This is not political — this is about protecting lives, strengthening communities, and building a healthier, more productive workforce. Because healthy employees aren’t just good for public health — they’re good for business.
When the private sector steps up, outcomes improve. And when businesses align with platforms like MISTR, scaling impact isn’t just possible — it’s happening.
Has MISTR experienced any direct effects from these recent shifts in public health funding?
MISTR’s unique model is totally free for patients with or without insurance, and we don’t cost the government or taxpayers a penny. We are scaling up our efforts to reach people who might be losing their access or care.
What would be your message to policymakers who are considering further cuts to HIV/AIDS programs?
During his first term, President Donald Trump committed unprecedented resources to the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative here at home. Bipartisan support has shown what’s possible when bold leadership meets smart strategy. To policymakers: I urge you to reconsider any cuts to HIV prevention funding. This is not the time to pull back. It’s the time to push forward. Ending HIV is within reach — but only if government, private industry, and community organizations stand together.
What is one perhaps overlooked win from last year that impacted you on a personal level?
Seeing our STI positivity rate drop by half after expanding DoxyPEP.
Looking at the year ahead, what are MISTR’s most significant priorities for sexual health in 2026?
Expanding access, especially in the South and in communities that still get left out. Rolling out injectable PrEP. And just continuing to make sexual healthcare easier and more normal.
Is MISTR planning to integrate injectable PrEP into the mix?
Yes, absolutely. Long-acting PrEP is a game-changer, especially for people who struggle with daily pills. We’re rolling it out through a hybrid model: telehealth plus in-person injections in key LGBTQ+ neighborhoods.
As you just mentioned, MISTR reported cutting STI positivity rates in half through expanded DoxyPEP access last year (mad props). What do you think allowed you to accomplish this?
We made it easy, normalized it, and bundled it into care. No stigma, no hoops, no lectures. When you remove friction, people take care of themselves.
If you could eliminate from our collective consciousness one particular myth or stigma about sexual health, what would it be?
Sexual health should be talked about in the open, and we can have fun with it! I threw a party in October for National PrEP Day. How many parties have you been to celebrating sexual health? You should go to more.
What were the most significant obstacles or setbacks you saw some of your patients face in accessing PrEP and STI prevention services in the recent past?
Stigma, paperwork, insurance, provider judgment, and just navigating a system that was never designed for them.
Looking at the next chapter, what would you like to see MISTR accomplish next? And I have to ask, what’s next for you?
For MISTR: scale, injectables, and getting more HIV+ utilizing MISTR long-term HIV care. I started MISTR with the goal of ending HIV, so this year, next year, and as long as it takes, I want to make history and end HIV.
For me: staying close to the community, building things that matter, and making sure we never lose sight of the humans behind the metrics.
For more information, head to HeyMistr.com.
This article is part of LA Blade’s January health series.
AIDS and HIV
Community is the cure: AIDS Walk LA returns to fight HIV and funding cuts
AIDS Walk Los Angeles returns to West Hollywood on October 12 with the theme ‘Community Is the Cure,’ highlighting the vital role of unity, radical community action, and advocacy in the fight against HIV/AIDS, stigma, and government funding cuts
APLA Health, a nonprofit providing HIV care, prevention, and sexual health services, announced the return of AIDS Walk Los Angeles on Sunday, October 12, 2025, starting from West Hollywood Park. This year’s theme, “Community Is the Cure,” emphasizes the role of unity in advancing progress against HIV/AIDS and supporting those affected.
Walk day will feature a live performance from RuPaul’s Drag Race star Heidi N Closet, DJ sets, and community booths. Following the celebration, walkers will make their way through the streets of West Hollywood.
“This event was born out of urgency, and it’s just as relevant today,” said Craig E. Thompson, CEO of APLA Health. “We’ve made incredible progress in the fight against HIV, but that progress is under direct threat from funding cuts and political attacks. Now is the time to show that we won’t be silenced or set back.”
Since its inception forty years ago, AIDS Walk Los Angeles has grown into one of the largest HIV/AIDS fundraising events in the world, raising nearly $100 million. Proceeds fund APLA Health’s services, including HIV specialty care, sexual health services, food and nutrition support, and housing assistance.
“The HIV/AIDS epidemic has always shown us that progress happens when people come together, when patients, neighbors, families, activists, and health providers stand shoulder to shoulder. Today, with funding under attack and stigma resurfacing, unity is not optional. ‘Community Is the Cure’ is a reminder that science alone isn’t enough. We need collective willpower, advocacy, and solidarity to ensure everyone has access to the care and dignity they deserve,” Thompson said.
Cuts to Medicaid, the Ryan White Program, and prevention funding threaten access to medications, housing assistance, and food security. “Here in Los Angeles, where tens of thousands rely on these programs, even modest reductions can push people back into crisis. AIDS Walk Los Angeles helps fill some of those gaps, but philanthropy cannot fully replace the government’s responsibility,” Thompson explained.
Communities of color, the medically underserved, people living in poverty, and those experiencing homelessness are disproportionately affected. “The barriers aren’t medical. They’re structural: stigma, lack of insurance, unstable housing, and underfunded safety-net services. The administration is underinvesting in the very programs designed to break down these barriers. Until that changes, inequities in HIV prevention and care will persist,” he said.
Funds raised by the walk provide housing, groceries, case management, and access to medical care. Thompson shared the story of one patient who had lost housing and had to choose between medication and meals. “Through AIDS Walk–funded programs, we were able to connect him to stable housing, consistent medical care, and our food pantry. Today, he is virally suppressed, working again, and mentoring others who are newly diagnosed with HIV. Stories like his are common, and they remind us that cuts aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet, they’re setbacks in real people’s lives.”
Beyond fundraising, AIDS Walk LA is a platform for advocacy. “When thousands of people flood the streets of West Hollywood, it’s a visible reminder to our community that HIV/AIDS has not gone away and to policymakers that their decisions have life-or-death consequences. The walk puts pressure on elected officials to fund programs, fight stigma, and stand up for people affected by HIV,” Thompson said.
He urged the public to take action beyond walking and donating. “Call your elected officials. Demand that HIV services remain fully funded. Show up for community hearings. Support housing initiatives. Share facts on social media to counter stigma. And, importantly, talk. Without continued conversation about HIV/AIDS and sexual health, we jeopardize the incredible advancements we’ve made in HIV care and prevention.”
Thompson also framed the walk as part of a broader activist approach. “Radical action today means showing up for one another in tangible ways, housing someone, feeding someone, advocating for someone, and refusing to accept policies that erase people’s humanity. As our theme emphasizes, when politicians fail us, COMMUNITY IS THE CURE. For participants in AIDS Walk LA, it means recognizing that the walk is just the beginning. Each person can be a messenger, an advocate, and an ally in daily life. When we work together to get people connected to support services, the collective action is radical because it insists on care and dignity in a time when those values are under attack.”
“Activism ensures policymakers cannot quietly dismantle programs. Community solidarity means that no one gets left behind. Public pressure creates accountability. When thousands unite at AIDS Walk LA, it demonstrates the broad mandate to keep fighting until HIV is no longer a public health crisis. That unity is as important as any medical breakthrough,” Thompson concluded.
For more information on AIDS Walk Los Angeles and how to register, visit https://AIDSWALK.LA.
AIDS and HIV
“If not now, when?” Journalist and activist Karl Schmid is reshaping how we talk about HIV/AIDS
The Blade sits down with the award-winning host to talk about stigma and his latest initiative – taking HIV education onto the runway
Karl Schmid has long been a staple in queer news and media. Hailing from Australia, Schmid grew accustomed to the limelight from a young age, and eventually made a successful transition into American network television through his work on red carpets for ABC.
In 2018, he would be thrust into the spotlight for a different reason. Despite repeated warnings from professional acquaintances, Schmid came out as HIV positive to share his story, wear down stigmas, and to educate people about important and misunderstood science like the concept of undetectable equals untransmittable.
And so, Schmid would grow accustomed to renewal. In 2019, he launched Plus Life Media, a platform that shares HIV resources, education, and stories of resilience from people living with HIV/AIDS. He was part of the team behind the Emmy-nominated short documentary, Marty’s Place: Where Hope Lives: an intimate look into a housing cooperative created in the 1990s to support people with HIV/AIDS. Late last week, he flew to New York for the U.S. debut of his latest initiative: HIV Unwrapped. The project pairs researchers and scientists in HIV studies with fashion design students, culminating in a runway show that features bold reimaginings and interpretations of crucial science.
The Blade spoke with Karl about the cross-pollination in his own life and career, and how his latest effort is shaping the way he blends activism and media to reinvigorate conversations around HIV/AIDS.
HIV Unwrapped feels like a really interesting pivot into a different kind of modality and platform for you. Can you tell me more about the initiative and how it fits into your legacy of activism and work?
Well, HIV Unwrapped came out of Australia and this wonderful activist named Brent Allan, who I’m good friends with. And Brent had been at, I think, the WorldPride, or something that was happening in Australia, and there was an exhibition where they paired some engineers and science people of varying professions with a fashion designer to try and illustrate their work.
And he thought, “Wow, what a great way to maybe try and interpret HIV science and reignite the conversation around HIV.” So it started in Melbourne, Australia, and it was successful there. And then they did a version in the UK earlier this year. And then in July for the International AIDS Conference that took place in Kigali, in Rwanda, they did a version.
And that’s kind of where I stepped in. I think with HIV Unwrapped, you’re drawn into the fashion first — and then the science comes. It’s just a really unique and different way of reframing the conversation about HIV. But beyond that, it’s also working with fashion students, young people, and to see them become so invested in HIV science. That’s what gets me the most excited. Because you’re opening a whole new world to a person who doesn’t maybe really think about HIV all that much, and now they’ve learned all this amazing stuff. Suddenly you’ve got a whole new bunch of people talking about HIV in exciting and fresh ways, and they’re telling their friends and they’re having conversations about it.
You’re trying to create different entry points for people to not only talk about the science behind HIV and AIDS, but also how we can reinterpret it in original and visually interesting ways.
I mean, look, you’ve got the House Appropriations Committee willing to advance this “Big Beautiful Bill” that slashes $2 billion in HIV funding in this country, and as someone living with HIV, you keep going, “Why would they do that? Why? We are so close to ending HIV.” All of a sudden, we’ve stopped funding research, and we’re stopping this, and I’m just like, “Why?”
Now more than ever, we’ve got people and politicians and government and a large part of the United States who think, “Oh yeah, HIV isn’t a thing anymore. It’s not important.” Well, it is still a thing. It is still important, and HIV Unwrapped is a way to be creative and open new avenues of dialogue.
A friend of mine sent me a handwritten note the other day. This is in Texas. One of his roommates wrote a handwritten note to another roommate, saying, “Oh, just so you know, ‘such and such’ has AIDS. So I’d be scrubbing the shower if I were you after he uses it. I personally have decided to go and shower at the gym.” And this is a person in their 30s, so we’re still having these dumb conversations from 1984.
That’s why I do what I do with Plus Life, and that’s why I’m like, “Wow, HIV Unwrapped is another tool in our toolbox we can use.” And I guess our hope is really that scientists will see this across the country and around the world and go, “Well, that is a really cool way to explain my science and make it accessible,” and want to engage in future projects like this.
How queer communities are represented in the media can leave deep imprints. I was watching an older interview you did where you recall this HIV ad you saw in a movie theater as a kid. The Grim Reaper’s there, and it’s creepy and sinister. It seems like we’ve moved away from that kind of imagery — but it doesn’t feel like we’ve necessarily come to a much better understanding of HIV/AIDS. Where do you think we’re at now in terms of representation?
The fact that, to this day, I can tell you where I was, what the movie was, that it was a Saturday, which cinema it was in, and I was a seven year old kid. It gives you an idea of how burned into my memory that is. And, I agree. I think we’ve moved away largely from the fear tactics, but we’ve stopped talking about it. I’d like to think that we’ve gotten better in representing people living with HIV, on television and film, as just people living with HIV. Where HIV doesn’t become the central storyline, and it’s not a doom and gloom, “woe is me” story. It’s just part of who they are.
But we sort of dance around anything that’s to do with our bodies or sex or sexuality, because it makes us uncomfortable. And so when I pitch stories to ABC and other networks, and even, quite frankly, trying to get press to cover HIV Unwrapped: we get passed on. People don’t want to talk to us because HIV isn’t sexy. As long as we keep doing that and having that reaction — if we don’t talk about it — we don’t get to a place where we can be comfortable with it.
Since I came out about my status all those years ago, my focus has been trying to normalize the conversation. That’s how we grow, and that’s how we learn — whether it’s HIV, whether it’s politics, whether it’s anything. But if we don’t talk about it, and we sort of pretend it doesn’t exist, and then we cut funding for it, and we sort of sweep it under the rug: it ain’t going to go anywhere.
Women of color, Black and brown women, have the highest infection rates in the United States. In the south those rates keep going up and up and up, and now we’re cutting funding to testing and to counseling and to services. I’m really worried that we will end up back with AIDS wards in hospitals again, and there’s no need for it.
To bring it back to HIV Unwrapped, that’s why, if I can come up and work with an amazing group of people to tell stories and to have conversations in fresh ways, then I’m going to keep doing it — whether it’s HIV Unwrapped, whether it’s what I do on Plus Life, whether it’s a television show or whatever crazy thing I come up with next.
It feels like there’s so much watering-down in terms of conversations around sexual health, HIV and AIDS. What is the resistance that you’ve faced, and how has that resistance changed over the years?
I’ve heard, “I think what you’re doing is great. It’s just not the right time to tell the story.” Well, when is the right time to tell the story? I think so many people in America think HIV doesn’t affect them. And the reality is very different. HIV affects everybody. If not now, when? People are still dying in this country. People are afraid to get tested, and they’re living in shame. And they’re hiding what’s wrong with them because of the stigma — and that just shouldn’t be happening.
I’ve said this a million times too. You know, HIV and AIDS doesn’t kill you. That’s not what’s going to put me in the grave. But it’s the stigma. It’s the bigoted, out-of-date opinions of Congress and politicians and public figures and uneducated people who just think this is somehow some deviant, dirty “sex disease” or drug disease, and those of us who get it deserve it. And you know, television networks, especially, are in the business of making money. And to do that, they sell advertising, and so they’re worried that advertisers will turn off if you talk about this kind of stuff.
And I think it’s maybe a little bit the opposite. I think if you can find, again, engaging and interesting ways to have real conversations, I’ve certainly found that you get a very vast and wide audience of people who will chime in and may have an opinion. And again, our opinions may differ, and that’s okay, but, but as long as we’re having the conversation, the more you say it, the less scary it is.
Almost 20 years after you were first diagnosed with HIV, do you see yourself pivoting now to work more on activism? Is that something you’re trying to focus more on now at this point of your career?
I will say that I’m incredibly fortunate to have worked for as many years as I have in broadcast, and I’ve done some really amazing things, and had some phenomenal opportunities going to the Oscars and doing all those red carpets and celebrity interviews all over the world. They’re all valuable experiences that I’ve been able to build upon. But I will say that in the last sort of two years, especially, my focus has become more about Plus Life and doing these kinds of stories and these kinds of initiatives.
I am fascinated by people. I think to be a decent journalist or broadcaster, you have to have that innate curiosity. And I am deeply curious about people and people’s behavior and where they come from, and what kind of homes they grew up in, what their friends are like. It’s incredibly satisfying to me. Do I miss being on regular, scheduled programming and television? Sure. It was a fantastic platform, and there’s nothing quite like the thrill of live television for me, and that’s why I loved being in news and entertainment news.
I think as I sort of get older, and I’m no longer the young kid on the block, and I’m not so nimble with my thumbs and my forefingers when it comes to putting stuff up on social media and Tik Tok and all of that…If I’ve got an opportunity to really hone in on the stuff that I do with Plus Life, there’s nothing more rewarding than that, right?
A behind-the-scenes documentary of the U.S. debut of HIV Unwrapped will be available to stream on November 30th, just before World AIDS Day.
AIDS and HIV
Assemblymembers urge Governor Newsom to sign “lifeline” bill for HIV medication
AB 554 amends existing law that restricts access to PrEP medication
On September 10, Assembly Bill (AB) 554, or the PrEPARE Act (Protecting Rights, Expanding Prevention, and Advancing Reimbursement for Equity Act), was passed with a majority vote by the California State Assembly and Senate. Today, the bill’s leaders are urging Governor Newsom to sign it into law.
“With a powerful coalition behind AB 554, we were able to get this bill through the process swiftly, and are hopeful that the Governor will see the need for the LGBTQ+ community,” Los Angeles Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez, one of the bill’s co-authors, told the Blade.
AB 554 was first introduced in February, and was penned by Assemblymember Gonzalez and San Francisco Assemblymember Matt Haney. It was formed to amend existing laws around health insurance coverage that currently restrict access to certain antiretroviral drugs, or HIV preventative medicine like PrEP and PEP, and to ease difficulties community clinics face in administering these medications and receiving reimbursement. The bill will also require health care plans to cover FDA-approved HIV medication without enforcing prior authorization or step therapy.
For Gonzales and the bill’s supporters, AB 554 is about boosting access to various forms of effective HIV preventative medicine and providing a safeguard for people as the state of HIV research and treatment enters unsteady ground. This all comes in the midst of the debate around the House Committee on Appropriations’s 2026 Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies funding bill, which proposes $1.7 billion in cuts to domestic HIV prevention and research efforts, as well as programs that provide care for people living with HIV/AIDS — particularly, low-income people of color.
Assemblymember Gonzalez stated to the Blade that this is a “stark reminder that this epidemic still hits our communities of color the hardest,” and wants to address this by evolving and updating laws to reflect local needs. He is hopeful about the Governor’s impending response, and stated that the bill is “not just a policy; it is a lifeline.”
“It’s about giving people real choices, equipping small clinics with the tools they need to protect lives,” Gonzalez continued, “and ensuring that California continues to put public health over politics.”
AIDS and HIV
Local organization aims to support and assist Black LGBTQ+ community
REACH LA is stepping up their mission amid hostile administration
REACH LA, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization aimed at working with youth of color, is stepping up their prevention resources during Black History Month to support the LGBTQ+ community of color.
Though today is National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, REACH LA works year-round to provide resources to their community members.
This month, the organization is amplifying its mission to support Black LGBTQ+ youth by offering free HIV testing and care throughout February, offering a $25 gift card as incentive to get tested. This and all of REACH LA’s efforts are geared toward assisting the marginalized Black and Latin American communities by reducing stigma, increasing education and assisting community members with resources.
The QTBIPOC community is especially vulnerable to political and personal attacks. As we head into the next four years under a hostile administration whose goal is to erase queer and trans people, there will be continued attacks on federal funding and on any other front possible.
“This year, it is especially vital, more than ever, to amplify and commemorate National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. At REACH LA, we are currently engaging with individuals and partnerships while navigating through dire and uncertain times where HIV/AIDS awareness prevention efforts, access, and visibility have been under attack and restricted,” said Jeremiah Givens, chief marketing and communications officer at REACH LA.
It is important to spotlight the intersection between health equity, Black LGBTQ+ empowerment and community-based solutions during Black History Month and every other month throughout the year and especially during this particularly vulnerable time.
As one of eight CDC PACT Program Partners, REACH LA celebrates National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day with a Positive Living Campaign in collaboration with the CDC’s Let’s Stop HIV Together initiative. The campaign highlights the resilience of individuals living with HIV and works to raise awareness and foster community support.
To learn more about resources, visit their website or stop in for testing, support and other resources. The organization’s doors are open Monday through Friday, from 11 AM to 7 PM for free, on-site HIV testing and assistance with accessing PREP and PEP, linkage to care and free mental health therapy.
Over 300 people gathered last Monday to commemorate World AIDS Day in an event hosted by Bienestar Human Services. The non-profit focuses on identifying and addressing emerging health issues faced by Latinx and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans Queer and more (LGBTQ+) populations.
The main objective of the annual event was to light a candle to honor those who passed away due to Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and celebrate those who, despite the condition, keep going.
HIV is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Once you have HIV, the virus stays in the body for life, and while there is no cure. There is, however, medicine that can help people stay healthy, states Planned Parenthood. HIV destroys the cells that protect the human body from infections. If a person doesn’t have enough of these CD4 or T cells, the body can’t fight off infections as normal. This damage can lead to AIDS, which is the most serious stage of HIV, and it leads to death over time.
In the U.S., there are about 1.3 million people newly infected with HIV in 2023 and 39.9 million living with HIV, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.
Living with HIV for decades
Among the participants at the event at the Ukrainian Culture Center on Melrose in East Hollywood was Marcela, a transgender woman who was diagnosed HIV positive 33 years ago. She said when she learned about her diagnosis, she was so depressed she tried to commit suicide. She ended up at the hospital, and after getting better, she heard about an organization that was helping people with health issues such as hers.
“Since then, I learned to live with this condition because it is not an illness; it’s a condition,” she said.
Bienestar celebrated the World AIDS Day on December 2, 2024. (Courtesy of Bienestar)
Marcela, who didn’t provide her last name, said she not only found a new way of living with HIV but also found an extended family at Bienestar. They have guided her on how to receive the proper treatment and medicines, to be part of a support group and even to pay her rent when she needed it the most.
The 64-year-old woman doesn’t have any family members in the United States. She said five years ago, her husband passed away of pneumonia. She was living alone in Long Beach and got behind her payments during the pandemic. She said Bienestar helped her apply for a grant of over $20,000 that secured the payment for her rent, and now she is debt-free.
“I’m extremely grateful to them and all the help they provide,” she said.
Working for the community
This year, Bienestar is celebrating 35 years of serving the LGBTQ+ community. Among the many programs they offer is the Support Group for Transgender Women, which Marcela belongs to.
Mia Perez, the support group manager, said 15 to 20 members attend the group every Friday from 3 to 5 p.m. They talk about their feelings, share experiences, and plan and participate in social events.
Perez said one of the participants’ biggest concerns is accepting reality once they have been diagnosed. “However, with all these new treatments people that are HIV positive can have a normal relationship with someone who doesn’t have HIV. It’s all about getting informed,” said Perez.
Other concerns include what will happen to them once the new presidential administration takes office since they have plans to deport immigrants and many of the transgender women are immigrants.
“That’s why we are trying to get in contact with an immigration attorney or an organization so they can keep them informed of their rights,” said Perez.
Bienestar events, like World AIDS Day, help those affected create a stronger community, and they realize the recognition is not just for those who are HIV positive but also for their families and friends.
Marcela said when she is feeling down or bored at home, all she has to do is go to Bienestar and the people there always give her a warm welcome.
“They give me coffee, they offer me lunch. Being there is like being at home,” she said.
AIDS and HIV
New monument in West Hollywood will honor lives lost to AIDS
In 1985, WeHo sponsored one of the first awareness campaigns in the country, nationally and globally becoming a model city for the response to the epidemic
December is AIDS/HIV awareness month and this year West Hollywood is honoring the lives lost, by breaking ground on a project in West Hollywood Park that has been in the works since 2012.
Members of Hollywood’s City Council joined representatives from the Foundation of AIDS Monument to announce the commencement of the construction of STORIES: The AIDS Monument, which will memorialize 32 million lives lost. This monument, created by artist Daniel Tobin, will represent the rich history of Los Angeles where many of those afflicted with HIV/AIDS lived out their final days in support of their community.
Tobin is a co-founder and creative director of Urban Art Projects, which creates public art programs that humanize cities by embedding creativity into local communities.
The motto for the monument is posted on the website announcing the project.
“The AIDS Monument:
REMEMBERS those we lost, those who survived, the protests and vigils, the caregivers.
CELEBRATES those who step up when others step away.
EDUCATES future generations through lessons learned.”
The monument will feature a plaza with a donor wall, vertical bronze ‘traces’ with narrative text, integrated lighting resembling a candlelight vigil, and a podium facing North San Vicente Blvd.
World AIDS Day, which just passed, is on December 1st since the World Health Organization declared it an international day for global health in 1988 to honor the lives lost to HIV/AIDS.
The Foundation for the AIDS monument aims to chronicle the epidemic to be preserved for younger generations to learn the history and memorialize the voices that arose during this time.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic particularly affected people in Hollywood during the onset of the epidemic in the 1980s. The epidemic caused a devastatingly high number of deaths in the city. The city then became one of the first government entities to provide social service grants to local AIDS and HIV organizations.
In 1985, the city sponsored one of the first awareness campaigns in the country, nationally and globally becoming a model city for the response to the epidemic.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the theme for World AIDS Day, ‘Collective Action: Sustain and Accelerate HIV Progress.’
The city of West Hollywood continues to strive to become a HIV Zero city with its current implementation of HIV Zero Initiative. The initiative embraces a vision to “Get to Zero” on many fronts: zero new infections, zero progression of HIV to AIDS, zero discrimination and zero stigma.
Along with the initiative and the new AIDS monument, the city also provides ongoing support and programming through events for World AIDS Day and the annual AIDS Memorial Walk in partnership with the Alliance for Housing and Healing.
For more information, please visit www.weho.org/services/human-services/hiv-aids-resources.
AIDS and HIV
National Latino AIDS Awareness Day: Breaking down stigma, silence and silos
FLAS provides HIV and STD education
When Elia Chino, Founder and Executive Director of the Fundacion Latinoamericana De Acción Social (FLAS) Inc., initially approached major HIV/AIDS agencies in Houston, Texas for support in starting an organization tailored specifically to reaching Latino populations, she was met with confusion.
“Why do you want to start a separate organization?” they asked. “We’re here!”
Chino remembers her frustration. “They didn’t understand,” she said. “Our brothers and sisters were dying, and the community needed services that they couldn’t provide.”
Indeed, in the 1990s, barriers to HIV care and treatment for Latino populations were markedly different from those faced by other populations. Information about the HIV epidemic was largely in English, and inaccessible to many individuals who had immigrated from indigenous Latin American communities and never learned to read and write in their native language, let alone English. When they were able to access treatment, Latino individuals often faced mistreatment at primary care facilities due to a lack of culturally competent care.
Perhaps most challenging was the culture of silence. Many Latino immigrants living with HIV in the United States fled homophobia, transphobia and stigma in their home countries, and were still grappling with lasting shame and guilt. Despite many people dying, there was little open discussion or education about the cause. In fact, Chino didn’t even know that the HIV epidemic took the lives of some of her best friends until speaking with their families years later.
“No one was talking about their diagnosis,” says Chino. “People had come to the United States for freedom, but still weren’t ready to talk about who they were. There was a real atmosphere of stigma, taboo, misinformation and fear.”
At the time, Chino was volunteering at a hospital serving communities without insurance. The fourth, fifth and sixth floors were all dedicated to treating people with HIV. Chino began educating herself on this crisis while she volunteered at the hospital, and founded FLAS in 1994 after discovering that the majority of HIV prevention efforts were not reaching Latino individuals.
In the beginning, without support from other organizations in the area or resources to expand, Chino was a one-woman show, conducting outreach in clubs, cantinas and bars by herself. She hadn’t anticipated the barriers she’d face as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and an immigrant. Horrible discrimination, a language barrier and intense HIV stigma in the communities she was working in made the work challenging, but also emphasized the necessity of what she was doing.
Over time, with support and funding from organizations like Gilead Sciences, FLAS has been able to expand its services from solely HIV prevention to include HIV testing, behavioral health services, housing and social services assistance, support groups and a food pantry. The organization has started hosting educational events everywhere from churches to street corners, raising awareness about HIV in the Houston community. Chino also started collaborating with the consulate of Mexico to help newcomers navigate U.S. health systems and services when they arrive in the United States. Next year, the organization will start offering mobile HIV testing clinics for communities in need.
Since its launch, FLAS has been able to expand its initial focus to address the holistic drivers of this crisis, moving beyond medical determinants of health to tackle the social and structural barriers that perpetuate the HIV epidemic and prevent Latino populations from accessing comprehensive treatment.
“Everyone keeps telling Latino individuals to get tested, but this does nothing unless you actually incentivize people to do so,” says Chino. “People have to go to work. They have to pay their rent. They have to buy food. Many can’t afford to lose their salary and spend a full day coming in to do a test or get treatment. We have to make it easier to access HIV prevention and treatment, and we have to provide incentives.”
This year marked FLAS’s 30th anniversary, which the organization celebrated with a gala in August. They have made a huge impact in Houston since their launch – providing HIV and STD education to over 500,000 Latino people, distributing over 20,000 HIV tests, referring over 40,000 people for social services and hosting over 6,000 educational events and health fairs in English and Spanish. However, many of the challenges for HIV prevention and treatment for Latino populations remain.
“We have over 30,000 individuals living with HIV in Houston, yet when we ask for people to talk about their status, no one comes forward to tell their stories. HIV is a chronic disease, but stigmatization is still so strong in the Latino community,” says Chino. “You can say you have cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, whatever – but nobody says I have HIV. There is still so much work to do.”
As a testament to their important programming, FLAS is a recipient of funding through Gilead Sciences’ TRANScend® Community Impact Fund, a program aimed at empowering Trans-led organizations working to improve the safety, health and wellness of the Transgender community. Since its inception in 2019, TRANScend has awarded more than $9.2 million in grants to 26 community organizations across 15 U.S. states and territories.
TRANScend support has been critical to helping FLAS maintain its services. In 2020, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, Gilead’s funding helped FLAS continue to offer virtual behavioral and mental health services to the community when their physical offices had to close.
According to Chino, this type of partnership is critical to ending the HIV epidemic in Latino communities, especially for meeting communities where they are.
“Communities trust their grassroots organizations, and grassroots organizations provide for their communities,” she says. “At the end of the day, we need to continue to support the groups doing the difficult work on the ground with the people they’re serving, especially those breaking down stigma and lasting barriers to care for Latino communities.”
AIDS and HIV
40th anniversary AIDS Walk happening this weekend in West Hollywood
AIDS Project Los Angeles Health will gather in West Hollywood Park to kick off 40th anniversary celebration
APLA Health will celebrate its 40th anniversary this Sunday at West Hollywood Park, by kicking off the world’s first and oldest AIDS walk with a special appearance by Salina Estitties, live entertainment, and speeches.
APLA Health, which was formerly known as AIDS Project Los Angeles, serves the underserved LGBTQ+ communities of Los Angeles by providing them with resources.
“We are steadfast in our efforts to end the HIV epidemic in our lifetime. Through the use of tools like PrEP and PEP, the science of ‘undetectable equals intransmissible,’ and our working to ensure broad access to LGTBQ+ empowering healthcare, we can make a real step forward in the fight to end this disease,” said APLA Health’s chief executive officer, Craig E. Thompson.
For 40 years, APLA Health has spearheaded programs, facilitated healthcare check-ups and provided other essential services to nearly 20,000 members of the LGBTQ+ community annually in Los Angeles, regardless of their ability to pay.
APLA Health provides LGBTQ+ primary care, dental care, behavioral healthcare, HIV specialty care, and other support services for housing and nutritional needs.
The AIDS Walk will begin at 10AM and registrations are open for teams and solo walkers. More information can be found on the APLA Health’s website.
AIDS and HIV
Cautious Optimism in San Francisco as New Cases of HIV in Latinos Decrease
The decrease could mark the first time in five years that Latinos haven’t accounted for the largest number of new cases
SAN FRANCISCO — For years, Latinos represented the biggest share of new HIV cases in this city, but testing data suggests the tide may be turning.
The number of Latinos newly testing positive for HIV dropped 46% from 2022 to 2023, according to a preliminary report released in July by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
The decrease could mark the first time in five years that Latinos haven’t accounted for the largest number of new cases, leading to cautious optimism that the millions of dollars the city has spent to remedy the troubling disparity is working. But outreach workers and health care providers say that work still needs to be done to prevent, and to test, for HIV, especially among new immigrants.
“I am very hopeful, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to let up in any way on our efforts,” said Stephanie Cohen, who is the medical director of the city’s HIV and STI prevention division.
Public health experts said the city’s latest report could be encouraging, but that more data is needed to know whether San Francisco has addressed inequities in its HIV services. For instance, it’s still unclear how many Latinos were tested or if the number of Latinos exposed to the virus had also fallen — key health metrics the public health department declined to provide to KFF Health News. Testing rates are also below pre-pandemic levels, according to the city.
“If there are fewer Latinos being reached by testing efforts despite a need, that points to a serious challenge to addressing HIV,” said Lindsey Dawson, the associate director of HIV Policy and director of LGBTQ Health Policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
San Francisco, like the rest of the country, suffers major disparities in diagnosis rates for Latinos and people of color. Outreach workers say that recent immigrants are more vulnerable to infectious diseases because they don’t know where to get tested or have a hard time navigating the health care system.
In 2022, Latinos represented 44% of new HIV cases in San Francisco, even though they accounted for only 15% of the population. Latinos’ share of new cases fell to 30% last year, while whites accounted for the largest share of new cases at 36%, according to the new report.
Cohen acknowledged a one-year decline is not enough to draw a trend, but she said targeted funding to community-based organizations may have helped lower HIV cases among Latinos. A final report is expected in the fall.
Most cities primarily depend on federal dollars to pay for HIV services, but San Francisco has an ambitious target to be the first U.S. city to eliminate HIV, and roughly half of its $44 million HIV/AIDS budget last year came from city coffers. By comparison, New Orleans, which has similar HIV rates, kicked in only $22,000 of its $13 million overall HIV/AIDS budget, according to that city’s health department.
As part of an effort to address HIV disparities among LGBTQ+ communities and people of color, San Francisco last year gave $2.1 million to three nonprofits — Instituto Familiar de la Raza, Mission Neighborhood Health Center, and San Francisco AIDS Foundation — to bolster outreach, testing, and treatment among Latinos, according to the city’s 2023 budget.
At Instituto Familiar de la Raza, which administers the contract, the funding has helped pay for HIV testing, prevention, treatment, outreach events, counseling, and immigration legal services, said Claudia Cabrera-Lara, director of the HIV program at Sí a la Vida. But ongoing funding isn’t guaranteed.
“We live with the anxiety of not knowing what is going to happen,” she said.
The public health department has commissioned a $150,000 project with Instituto Familiar de la Raza to determine how Latinos are contracting HIV, who is most at risk, and what health gaps remain. The results are expected in September.
“It could help us shape, pivot, and grow our programs in a way that makes them as effective as possible,” Cohen said.
The center of the HIV epidemic in the mid-1980s, San Francisco set a national model for response to the disease after building a network of HIV services for residents to get free or low-cost HIV testing, as well as treatment, regardless of health insurance or immigration status.
Although city testing data showed that new cases among Latinos declined last year, outreach workers are seeing the opposite. They say they are encountering more Latinos diagnosed with HIV while they struggle to get out information about testing and prevention — such as taking preventive medications like PrEP — especially among the young and gay immigrant communities.
San Francisco’s 2022 epidemiological data shows that 95 of the 213 people diagnosed at an advanced stage of the virus were foreign-born. And the diagnosis rate among Latino men was four times as high as the rate for white men, and 1.2 times that of Black men.
“It’s a tragedy,” said Carina Marquez, associate professor of medicine in the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, the city’s largest provider of HIV care. “We have such great tools to prevent HIV and to treat HIV, but we are seeing this big disparity.”
Because Latinos are the ethnicity least likely to receive care in San Francisco, outreach workers want the city to increase funding to continue to reduce HIV disparities.
The San Francisco AIDS Foundation, for instance, would like more bilingual sexual health outreach workers; it currently has four, to cover areas where Latinos have recently settled, said Jorge Zepeda, its director of Latine Health Services.
At Mission Neighborhood Health Center, which runs Clinica Esperanza, one of the largest providers of HIV care to Latinos and immigrants, the number of patients seeking treatment has jumped from about two a month to around 16 a month.
Among the challenges is getting patients connected to mental health and substance abuse bilingual services crucial to retaining them in HIV care, said Luis Carlos Ruiz Perez, the clinic’s HIV medical case manager. The clinic wants to advertise its testing and treatment services more but lacks the money.
“A lot of people don’t know what resources are available. Period,” said Liz Oates, a health systems navigator from Glide Foundation, who works on HIV prevention and testing. “So where do you start when nobody’s engaging you?”
This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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