Interview with Anna Forbes

REED: All right, so we'll go ahead and get started.

FORBES: Sure.

REED: Can you tell me a little bit about your early life?

FORBES: Oh, sure. I was raised in Carlinville, Illinois. Central Illinois, in farming country. My parents were college professors. My family's Quaker, which was sort of an anomaly in that setting. Let's see, I went away to boarding school when I was in high school in Philadelphia. A Quaker boarding school, so I had some indoctrination—additional indoctrination—from that. And also made some very good friends. But I've grown up in a family that's very immersed in progressive politics. And that's certainly where I still remain.

REED: And then when did you move to Philadelphia permanently? Did you stay after boarding school?

FORBES: No, I accidentally went back to the Midwest for college. I still can't figure out how I let that happen. [laughter] But I came back 00:01:00as soon as I graduated. I moved to Philadelphia. That was 1977.

REED: What did you do after you moved here?

FORBES: I—well, it took me a little while—but my goal was to work for Planned Parenthood. I had done an internship for Planned Parenthood when I was in high school. And I was very, very interested in women's health and sexual health and rights. And so, after about six months of knocking on their door and volunteering and whatnot, I got a job there. And I worked for Planned Parenthood until 1981 when the big Reagan layoffs came along. And I was laid off from that job. I next worked for the American Civil Liberties Union. My mother said, "Well, at least you're working for the brand-name organizations." [laughter] And I worked there until '85, when I went to ActionAIDS.

REED: So that's what were you doing professionally 00:02:00around 1985. What was the rest of your life like around that time period?

FORBES: Oh, it had just taken a big change. When I got back from my vacation in 1984, summer of 1984, there were two things waiting for me. One was what there was this guy named Walter Cuirle who wanted to volunteer for the ACLU, and as you can see that stuck. And the other was that my friend Robby had been diagnosed with AIDS. And I was among a small circle of about six people who were his primary caregivers. So when I went to work for ActionAIDS, well—it wasn't ActionAIDS at the time it was Philadelphia AIDS Task Force. But they posted an announcement recruiting for the first full-time case manager to work in HIV/AIDS in Philadelphia. And my first reaction was that I didn't want to do that at all because I was so burned out from watching my friend 00:03:00die. And my second reaction was that I wanted to do it more than anything. And so I applied for the job and I got it. It was interesting, what occurred to me was that what I had been doing at Planned Parenthood and what this work in AIDS would be like was essentially the same thing. Which is that what people were thought to deserve in terms of health care and support and services depended on what the public thought about their sexuality and their behavior around sex. You know, that a young woman who gets pregnant by accident doesn't deserve a safe, legal abortion because, you know, she's just a tramp. And these guys who were dying of AIDS don't deserve care and services because they're just fags. You know, and I realized that this was the same thing in a different coding. And that it was completely consistent with the kind of work that I had been doing, to go work for 00:04:00AIDS organizations.

REED: Was Robby's diagnosis the first time that you really had come face to face with AIDS?

FORBES: It was the first time I really thought about it hard. I mean, I had read about it, you know. I was hanging out almost entirely with LGBT people, you know. I tried to get there myself, but I couldn't. [laughter] I keep telling people it's proof that it's not contagious. Really, I tried. [laughter] So, you know I was reading PGN [Philadelphia Gay News] and so forth, and I'd read about it, I knew that this was this thing that was happening in New York and in San Francisco but I hadn't really thought about it. And he was so sick. And, you know, as soon as I realized what we were looking at here, I started realizing how many other people I knew who were sick. And it, you know, the walls sort of closed in.

REED: Beyond the realities of the illness and dying for him, is there anything that stands out for you from 00:05:00that time of how he interacted with your friends at work or with family or with health care providers?

FORBES: Oh, yeah. It was very clear that there just, there was almost nobody available to him. His family tried to be supportive. And they hadn't had a huge problem with him being gay, but they just really couldn't get themselves into it. You know, Northeast Philadelphia, fairly conservative, Jewish family. And they loved him. But they just couldn't be there. You know, they were only around very sporadically. I mean his sister did a lot more, but his parents really just couldn't deal with it. And there were the few handful of health care providers who were dealing with people with HIV. There were only, like, three or four docs that were really dealing with it at the beginning of the epidemic. And he was, you know, very reliant on them and Philadelphia AIDS Task Force, of course, was 00:06:00providing some volunteer support. And Jim Littrell can tell you more about that because he was involved in that from the very beginning. But everywhere else, all these doors closed, you know? I mean, other friends that wouldn't see him—knew, but didn't come around. You know, I found out that when I talked to people, other people I knew in my other friendship networks, it was like slamming the door on a conversation. People couldn't talk about it. When I first started working for Philadelphia AIDS Task Force the woman I had been ordering computer paper from, 'cause you know we used to have to buy it in those big stacks. When I was at the ACLU I had always been buying my computer paper from her, and she wouldn't sell it to me anymore because she couldn't arrange to have somebody deliver it there because it was too scary. It was really extraordinary how it felt to be in the middle of this crisis and have all the rest of the world around you 00:07:00essentially denying that the crisis was happening. Just refusing to recognize it. It's like being in a war, but nobody else knew we were having a war, you know. It was bizarre.

REED: So you became a case manager in 1985.

FORBES: '85, yeah.

REED: Okay. And how long were you a case manager for?

FORBES: Well, they didn't—I mean they hired me as services coordinator and I was the only full time staff person there. So I was arranging buddy trainings, and delivering buddy trainings, and assigning buddies, and doing case management and doing all of that kind of stuff. And I was at Philadelphia AIDS Task Force from '85 to '86. And then in '86 a group of the support service committee of the Task Force broke away and formed ActionAIDS. Do you know about that? All right, okay. Yeah. We formed ActionAIDS, I was the first staff member for ActionAIDS working on the promise of a salary. [laughter] 00:08:00We didn't have money. Although, they got money together really quickly. I have to give them a lot of credit for that. So, I was the first full-time staff person there, and then in '87—I think, or '88, I can't remember—I had big burnout. We had, by that time we had hired a couple more case managers and I was just running the buddy system, and Jim Littrell was working as the director of ActionAIDS. You know, I was working with a lot of great volunteers, but I just had had one death too many. And I found myself hiding under my desk one night when I was the last person at the office and just crying my eyes out. I couldn't figure out what to do next. 'Cause I didn't want to get out of doing AIDS work, but I just realized that I couldn't—I was up around 200 deaths at that time—and I realized I just couldn't continue this. So Jim and I talked 00:09:00about it, and we agreed that I would become the community relations person. So that I could go out and tell the story of what we were doing at ActionAIDS and try to recruit more volunteers and bring in some money and so forth, but not be working one-on-one, face-to-face with people. And so that was, when I made that change.

REED: There's a video from the candlelight vigil—

FORBES: Yeah.

REED: —in 1987. Is that what you were—you spoke at that vigil? Is that what you were doing at that time?

FORBES: I had just made that transition, yeah. I had just made that transition and we were—actually no, that was. I'm sorry, you're right. It's hard to keep the timing straight. No, that was before I had my burnout. I was still doing case management, and so forth. That was right after we had formed ActionAIDS. It was sort of our official announcement 00:10:00of having formed ActionAIDS. And, I'm sure you noticed that it was simultaneously the formation of BEBASHI. It was where the AIDS world in Philadelphia started to open up a little bit. And the other organizations started to form. And it's interesting—Jane Shull told me once that I closed my speech with that quote from Mother Jones about "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." And she said that's where she got the idea to call [Philadelphia] FIGHT "fight." It was the beginning of a lot of different things.

REED: And from the time that you did case management are there any people in particular now, that you worked with either at ActionAIDS or through the buddy system in some other capacity?

FORBES: Of the clients, or?

REED: Or the clients.

FORBES: Oh, lots. I mean, I made many close friends in those days and a lot of them died. There was a while there where I kept a black dress 00:11:00on the back of my office door 'cause I kept getting these calls saying, "Oh, so-and-so's funeral is this afternoon." And, you know. Sometimes I hadn't even known that the person had died. It was really something. And, yeah the friendships I made are a lot of the friendships I still have. Nothing changes that. Having the trust that you develop in each other and the interdependency that you develop in each other when you're going through a time that's that emotionally and physically draining. 'Cause you absolutely have to rely on each other in order to get through. It was very much like a wartime experience—or at least what people tell me a wartime experience is like.

REED: Sometimes people talk about no longer feeling capable of going to funerals and needing to stop doing it. Is that something you faced?

FORBES: Yeah, yeah. And there were 00:12:00certainly times when I just sort of shut down the shades and tried to block it out. There were all different kinds of ways of handling it. I don't think—I think that part of the reason that I was effective and also part of the reason that I'm not really a good case manager or at least never want to become a case manager again, is that I'm not very good at blocking this stuff out. And it was really hard not to be run over by it. I have a friend, Ellen Kahn, who's now program director at Human Rights Campaign in DC. But she had worked very closely with me and had come in initially as my assistant and then had become a case manager in her own right, and went on and got her Masters in Social Work at Bryn Mawr [College] which is what I did while I was recovering. I was working part-time and going to school part-time while I was recovering from my burnout. 00:13:00And I had a conversation with her once about, you know," How can you do this anymore? How can you get so immersed in people's lives?" You know, when there's this helplessness of not being able to change the trajectory of the disease. And she said, "I don't know." She said, "I just, I can kind of put a limit on it. And not let it get to me as much." And that's what I really haven't been able to do. So, I have tremendous respect for people who can. But, you know it's not my métier.

REED: You mentioned that you were, before you started knowing people who were dying from AIDS, that you were pretty enmeshed in the LGBT community at the time. Did going into the case management work and other work around HIV at the time, did that bring you into contact with any different groups of people that you hadn't necessarily been around before?

FORBES: 00:14:00More so, it brought me in connection with communities of color. Because I had, you know, when I moved out here to Philly in '77 I just sort of accidentally fell in with a group of gay friends. 'Cause I was working in, I was scooping ice cream on South Street. And all of the other people who were working there were LGBT. And so, I just started hanging out and we were having a great time, and life was wonderful. But it was, and you know—for all my progressive politics and my involvement in the women's movement, I was still pretty much a second-generation feminist, you know white with mostly white friends, pretty middle-class folks. And I had done some work with communities of color and so forth through Planned Parenthood and through ACLU and so forth, but not a lot. But, it was—well it wasn't clear to us at the time, it should have been clear to us at the time—it's certainly clear in retrospect 00:15:00that HIV was having a disproportionate affect on communities of color. And so, I started finding myself working more with—well with Rashidah [Hassan, later Abdul-Khabeer], initially at the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force, and then with BEBASHI, and you know Tyrone [Smith] with [The] COLOURS [Organization], and you know, other organizations like that. Some of the churches that we were working with. And, I had never done that much hands-on work in communities of color. So that was a really helpful learning thing for me. And hopefully I was of some use to them. [laughter]

REED: So, transitioning over to talking about We The People. Can you tell me about the first time that you remember hearing about the organization?

FORBES: Yeah. It was before it was founded. [laughter] I worked at ActionAIDS until, let me get 00:16:00the numbers right here, 1990. And then I was in this situation, I had started going to Bryn Mawr, in the social work program and I needed to do a placement. You needed to have a variety of placements. So, when I got to the placements part I went to my advisor there and said, "Look, I'm working at this organization, ActionAIDS, and I really want to continue working there." I had, I mean we had a teenage son at home—I couldn't afford not to have the income. I said, "So I would really like to do something that—have my job be my internship." We talked about that and she said, "Well, that's fine as long as you move into a job position that you haven't been in there already." And I was like, "Well, but I was the first staff person there." [laughter] "I've kind of done all of it," you know. At sometime or other, I mean I couldn't move into 00:17:00accounting because I don't have the skills for that, but you know, all of the administrative stuff and so forth I had kind of done. And so that was a little bit of a dilemma, and I had to do this internship and so what I decided to do was to leave ActionAIDS and go work for the Philadelphia health department, for AACO [AIDS Activities Coordinating Office]. Because I figured if I was going to be a lifelong critic of how public health money is being spent, and public health programming is done, I should know from the inside what that was all about. And my friend Jim Hymes was the one who was running AACO at the time. And so I just went to him and talked to him about this and said, you know, "Can I come work for you guys for a while?" In, you know, public communications and so forth. And he said, "Yeah, sure, fine." And so I moved over to that, and I was working with them. And that was the same time when the Ryan White Planning Councils were coming together, the Ryan White Care Act had been passed. And one of the things that I was doing at AACO was pulling together 00:18:00a community advisory committee, so that people living with HIV were having input to AACO. So this guy, Len [Leonard] West, calls me up one night who's a person living with HIV very openly, a very strong advocate. And he was all kinds of pissed off about the fact that there was no representation of people living with HIV on the HIV planning council. And I'm trying really hard to think of the name of the other person… I knew one other guy who was complaining about this a whole lot. And I said, "You guys should talk to each other! You really need to talk to each other." I can email you the name when I figure it out, because it will come to me eventually. So they got—they didn't know each other—they got in touch with each and talked to each other and the next meeting of the Ryan White Planning Council they had put together a bunch of people living with HIV and they stormed into the meeting and had a little confrontation about the fact that they 00:19:00weren't involved in the planning council. And I think that that was the very beginning of We The People.

REED: Is it David Chickadel that you're thinking of?

FORBES: Yeah, I think it is. Yeah, that would be right.

REED: So were you present for that meeting?

FORBES: No.

REED: Okay. Do you know who else was in that meeting? Was it representatives of the different organizations that existed at the time? Was it an AACO meeting?

FORBES: Yeah, yeah. I would imagine Jane would know, Jim Littrell would probably know. And I believe it was a Ryan White Planning Council meeting. I could be wrong about that, but I think I'm right.

REED: And did that—is that eventually what became TPAC?

FORBES: Yeah.

REED: Okay.

FORBES: Yeah, it was when were—it was still the city planning council. 'Cause, you know, the Ryan White has city and state planning councils. And TPAC [The Philadelphia AIDS Consortium] eventually became the state planning council. But at the time it was just the city.

REED: 00:20:00So you heard about that meeting after it happened? About them coming in?

FORBES: Well I heard from Len and, I talked to Leonard more than I talked to David, so I probably heard it from Leonard—that they were planning to do this. And I wanted to be at that meeting, but you know, I couldn't make it happen. 'Cause I was a lowly AACO person at the time. And I don't know, I can't tell you for a fact, what connection there was between that event and the founding of We The People. It may have been that that was already in the works, but it seemed to me as though that need to get together to confront the planning council and, you know, it certainly being a completely legitimate—you know, as soon as I heard that there was no representation of people living with HIV I was like, "Wait a minute, that's not right." 'Cause the act—I guess the act itself doesn't include it—but certainly the guidance around forming planning councils include, now it very clearly includes people living with HIV. But it was still up in the air at the time. 00:21:00You know, at the time of formation. And so I thought it was a very legitimate complaint they had and they should do something about it.

REED: Do you remember the next time that you came into contact with We The People?

FORBES: Well, as soon as We The People announced itself as We The People I was, you know, we were right across the street from them for starters. [laughter] 'Cause we were, I was at 500 South Broad Street in the, what is now—well was then—the city's largest STD clinic. And at that time, I don't know if at this time, but at that time in the '80s if you weren't there—or early '90s rather—if you weren't there by like 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning you were likely not to be treated for an STI, because the place was so crowded. One of the stupidest public health moves in the universe, in my experience. If you want to foster STIs make sure you don't have enough care for the people who have them. Because that's how it's gonna get passed. Anyway, I digress. 00:22:00They were right across the street from us, so yeah. We were—I was kind of in and out of there a lot.

REED: What were you doing when you were going in and out of there?

FORBES: Talking about stuff that was—talking to various people—about stuff that AACO was doing, talking about this consumer advisory committee that I was putting together with AACO. I mean, under AACO's auspices but I wanted to make sure that we did it in very close collaboration with We The People so that there would be, you know, a lot of interchange and a lot of We The People folks involved. And so, I have experience in various other organizations that people don't, oddly enough, the people who talk the talk aren't always walking the walk. You know? And particularly with consumer representation. It seems to me as though there is often in social service organizations, 00:23:00a process of trying to look like you're doing consumer involvement, and so forth. And probably sincerely trying to do it, but not understanding how you need to do it to make it really work. And I'd had some experience with ActionAIDS, because ActionAIDS had a consumer advisory committee and consumers present on the board and so forth. And it was something that, you know, both Jim and I had felt very strongly about when we were at ActionAIDS. And so I had a pretty clear sense of how we needed to do it to do it right, and I wanted to make sure that AACO was gonna do it right. And so I was talking with the folks at We The People about that periodically.

REED: Is there something that you think that AACO ended up doing as a result of those conversations with We The People for the consumer advisory council?

FORBES: I don't think that they would have invested as heavily in the consumer advisory council as they did, if it hadn't been 00:24:00for [We The People] being there. And eventually, it became the advisory council for both TPAC and AACO, jointly. And so we had a pretty strong thing going with that. When I was at AACO, and then when I left AACO in 1994, I handed it off to David Acosta who was there. And so he was running it and obviously, he did a fine job. But also, I was spending a lot of time at We The People because Jim Littrell was working there at the time and he and I were really tight from having worked together at ActionAIDS.

REED: When you look at the early newsletters from the start of We The People, there are a series of newsletter where there's a bit of a back and forth between consumers of ActionAIDS services writing in with complaints about their buddies, or something about the way the system was set up, and then people from ActionAIDS responding and then board members kind of 00:25:00replying back. There was all this communication via the newsletter. Can you add any more detail about what was going on, and what that relationship was like and how it changed over time?

FORBES: I can't really because that was after I left ActionAIDS so I can't really speak to that. There was an interesting and possibly weird experience going on with that fact that Jim's sister, Ennes Littrell, was the one who took over the management of ActionAIDS. And I'm just gonna be honest about it, she and I did not get along at all. And that was in fact, part of the reason I left ActionAIDS, is because we couldn't really deal with each other very well. And I think ActionAIDS did go through a period of time, during that, where it was not being as respectful and responsive to the political authority of consumers, as it should have been. I think that when Kevin Conare came in [as executive director], that changed 00:26:00quite a lot. And that was good. But, yeah there were concerns about that.

REED: And, in what other ways did We The People differ from other organizations at the time?

FORBES: Well, We The People went through its own transition. And this is another thing that I'm just gonna be blunt about, and let the chips fall where they may. This is one of the great advantages of age. [laughter] You're too far down the road to have to worry too much back. I don't think David Fair's taking over there was a good thing at all. I think that he manipulated a lot of the dynamics to suit his own power requirements. I think that he created hostility between We The People and other organizations—particularly AACO—that did not need to be 00:27:00created. I mean, I'm not saying that everybody was getting along great—we weren't. And a lot of the craziness was because we were under this, just, avalanche of grief and rage. You know, it's not—I don't think anybody in the AIDS world would say that by the early to mid-1990s any of us were operating very sanely. Once we got the ARVs [antiretrovirals], you know, and people started to survive, the dynamics became different again. By, you know, '93, '94, '95, we were all just under a mountain of crap. Psychologically. From what we'd been going through. And I think that David's taking over of We The People and then creating this fight with AACO, that I don't think needed to have happened, and then forcing Richard Scott out, I found that very disturbing. And part of what made me 00:28:00really angry was feeling as though people living with HIV were being manipulated. You know? That their dilemma, their catastrophe that they were living with at that time, because before ARVs it was a catastrophe to be living with HIV. You knew your time was limited. And it was a very scary thing for people. To have somebody manipulate that for the sake of tearing down another organization, instead of for the sake of maximizing the wellness and support for people living with HIV, I think was a horrible thing. And, you know, I respect some of the work that David has done, I certainly respect the work he did at 1199C [Philadelphia affiliate of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees] and so forth. But I think that he went to a dark place at that point, and that he did not do We The People or the movement any great service. 00:29:00So, that's one opinion.

REED: Do you think that the tensions that were there and the fighting that was there—do you see it as being that there were philosophical differences about where priorities should be? Or do you think it was more just interpersonal personalities? Or was it trauma?

FORBES: It's very hard to say where the lines get crossed, you know? And it's very hard for a hardcore activist organization like We The People to work successfully with a city health department. I mean they're just, you know, apples and oranges, right? And I think that the advocacy—I have no problem with pushing AACO and with pushing the Ryan White Planning Council and so forth. I mean, I'm a lifelong advocate. I think the job of advocates is to push. Right? And that's not a problem, but 00:30:00to do that effectively you have to realize what's possible to achieve, you have to be willing to work with the entrenched institution to say, "Look, we really need to make this change. How can we get this done? What can we cause to happen to, you know, free up money for X, or to help you resist complying with requirement Y that is hurting us." And we had done a lot of that. I mean, we got Betak [AIDS Care Facility] open, you know the combination of advocacy from ActionAIDS—well starting with We The People and ACT UP—also working with ActionAIDS and working with BEBASHI and working, you know. We collectively put enough pressure on the City that they were able to get Betak open sooner than it would have otherwise. I mean, the City had been dragging and dragging and dragging its feet on that. 00:31:00But that's inside/outside activism. When you have people on the [outside] sitting down and going, "Okay, look. We'll throw this demonstration here and make a big noise, and then you can take that to health commissioner [on the inside] and say, 'Look, these people are making a big noise, we have to do something!'" You know what, you use those kinds of dynamics, where you're not really opposing each other and trying to destroy each other, you're trying to say, "Okay, how can we manipulate this political situation in order to get what we all agree we need to do?" And I don't think we'd been doing a sterling job of that, but I thought we'd been doing a reasonable job. I mean, we got condoms in the prisons, right? In the jails. We got condoms in the high schools. Which nobody thought we would be able to do. That was under Marla [Gold]'s reign at AACO and she was brilliant at it. You know, we got Betak open, we were getting money into the planning council, which was then being distributed with a fair amount of input from 00:32:00the community. So we were moving, we had stuff going. And for some godforsaken reason, David [Fair] and his buddies just decided that they needed to tear this whole thing up and they tore Jim Littrell up. I will never forgive David for that. That was pure ad hominem attacks for no goddamn reason. So that he could be head of We The People, and then he got that. And then they decided to go after AACO and Richard Scott. And this did not help things, you know?

REED: What happened with Richard Scott hasn't come up in other interviews so far. Can you talk a little bit about that?

FORBES: Well, I was—what was I doing? I became self-employed in '94, 'cause I—well, because AACO decided that it really was not gonna be okay for me to be an active member of ACT UP and getting 00:33:00arrested in civil obedience by night and being an AACO person by day. And since Walter and I were living outside of the city limits I was technically hired as a consultant, because they couldn't hire me as a staff person because I wasn't within the city limits. So after one too many big demonstrations, I was advised of the fact that as soon as my contract was up in July, I was not going to be working at AACO anymore. And I was interested in getting into microbicide stuff at that point so I just decided to become an independent consultant so that I could work on what I really wanted to work on and just do enough contracts on the side to pay my bills. So I was a little bit out of the mix on the Richard Scott thing, but I respected Richard. I had worked with him at AACO; he came in after Marla left as the head of AACO. And I knew that he was not moving as rapidly on some things 00:34:00as We The People wanted him to, but I also knew a lot of the tensions that he was under in terms of the health commissioner and the state health department and so forth. And, you know, he just was getting criticized, criticized, criticized, criticized, criticized by We The People and then somebody at AACO made a mistake and released a list of names of people on a committee that shouldn't have been released to the public. And they used that to nail him. And they got him fired. And it just—they didn't have to do it that way, you know? It didn't have to go that way. And it was largely ACT UP, on the outside, but I think there was a lot of We The People behind it pushing that too. And I had been a member of ACT UP since 1987—I was diehard for ACT UP, and I 00:35:00stopped going to meetings 'cause I just felt like this is not the way we're gonna win the revolution. [laughter] I mean, direct action certainly—but tearing other people up ad hominem just for the sake of doing it is not what's gonna happen.

REED: The committee names that were released, why was that controversial?

FORBES: It was, I would have to go back and look through my files to send you the literature but I'm sure it's in—in fact I looked it up online and found a Philadelphia Inquirer article about it so I know there's some record about this. There was indication of some of them as being people living with HIV. I can't remember if they were listed as part of a consumer's committee or what, but anyway he outed some people living with it. I mean, first of all, he didn't do it, it was somebody on his staff who screwed up. And secondly, it was not a great screw up, but it was not the end of the world either. You know?

REED: I had wanted to ask what it was like being an active member of ACT UP and then 00:36:00also working at AACO, and you were talking about it a minute ago. Can you tell some times when you struggled with having both of those roles?

FORBES: I loved it! [laughter] I mean it really seemed very fortuitous to me for us to be able to do that. Because, first of all, initially my bosses at AACO were very supportive of what ACT UP was doing. Even though they weren't, you know, coming out and standing in the street with us. Jim Hymes was very supportive of it; Marla was certainly supportive of it. And it put me in a position of being able to come back from ACT UP meetings and say, "Look, here's what ACT UP wants to do." I mean, with ACT UP knowing that I was doing this. I was never, I never hid who I was working for or anything like that, everybody knew. 00:37:00But I could say, you know, if we can get this and this in place then when they have this action, we'll be able to take this to the health commissioner and he may be able to do something about it. And, I can't remember the name of the commissioner at the time, [Maurice] Clifford. Somebody Clifford. You know, he was great. First of all, he was African American; he understood that AIDS was hitting the African American community very hard. He wanted to support AACO. And, you know, AACO was still relatively new at that time. 'Cause it was still the early '90s. And he was, you know, I could write a press release that responded to the action, have it ready to go the minute the action was over, we'd send it over to Clifford, he would okay it, and we could release it the next morning. It was like, great. Because it was able to do exactly what direct action should do, which is to 00:38:00put an issue in front of the public, get them thinking about it and then immediately after that: here's what the city health department is saying about this. And that double whammy makes it harder for like city council or whoever the goal is, to turn away from it. Because the activists want this, city health department says we should do this, I guess we should do it. You know, it was a real opportunity to get things to move.

REED: Can you describe a time when you guys did that?

FORBES: Yeah, the condoms in the high schools, was a very clear one. Oh, and probably even better was syringe exchange. You know, we were just—Philadelphia was just starting to think a lot about syringe exchange in like, '91, I guess it was. And ACT UP had formed the beginnings of Prevention Point, was doing free, illegal syringe exchange. 00:39:00And we wanted it not to be illegal, because obviously, Prevention Point could do a lot more of it a lot more openly if it weren't illegal. And so, we found out that the best way to that was by executive order of the mayor. That the mayor had the power to make an executive order to legitimize syringe exchange in the City of Philadelphia. And [Mayor Ed] Rendell had just come in, and we knew he wasn't totally opposed to the idea, so we decided to just push that. And we had to get the board of health to sanction it. And Maurice Clifford—Maurice was his name—who was the health commissioner at the time got behind the idea and said, "Well, it's gonna be hard to push it through the board, but we can try." And so Prevention Point was doing its thing outside and illegally and daring anybody to arrest them, and I was—you know, Jim Hymes and I were doing our thing inside in 00:40:00AACO and put together a fact sheet or talking points, whatever, for this meeting that was coming up with the board of health. And Clifford took it to the board of health, and they okayed it, and on the strength of that, Ed Rendell signed the executive order and bingo bango, there we were. It was beautiful.

REED: Do you remember how the public reacted at that time?

FORBES: There was some yelling and howling around people. Especially, you know, not wanting to have the syringe exchange in their neighborhood. And I realize that that is always a very, very tough point. Because, you know, there's all this shame involved in it, unfortunately. People in neighborhoods where drug use is high are not proud of that, and they don't like having it pointed out. And they don't like having it discussed in the news, and they don't feel a lot of times happy about 00:41:00drug users. Because they're getting ripped off and, you know, stuff like that. I get that. On the other hand, when you're doing harm reduction you have to go where you need to go to do harm reduction. So there was some flap in the papers about it, but not a lot. Not a lot. We were at the point, I think then in the early '90s where the public, especially in Philadelphia—because Philly had a surprisingly strong and active and vocal advocacy scene around HIV going on. I think we were a lot more—certainly a lot more of that happening in Philly than in say, Baltimore or DC. I mean New York was very active, obviously. I think by the early '90s most of the general public knew we have to do something about AIDS. "I don't want to think about it, I don't want to talk about it, I don't want to hear about it, but I know we have to do something." And so, when they saw something like that in the papers, they were like, "Eh, I don't love it, but if the health department says we have to do it, 00:42:00then I guess we have to do it." So there wasn't—I don't remember there being a huge backlash, there certainly was some backlash. And the State had a heart attack—I mean the State really hated it. 'Cause, you know, they say about Pennsylvania that we're Pittsburgh on one side, Philadelphia on the other and Alabama in the middle. [laughter] And the state health department at one point [laughter] said that they were gonna come in and arrest the people who were doing syringe exchange in Philadelphia. I guess this was right before the executive order was signed, you know. And Rendell was getting ready to sign the executive order, so he was just kind of turning a blind eye to what was happening every Saturday morning. And Walter and I were at a café having breakfast together and I got this beep—'cause you know, we had beepers at that point. And I called the office and they said, "Oh my god, the state police are about to go out and arrest the folks at the Prevention Point! 00:43:00We've gotta do something!" And, fortunately, I happened to know somebody who was there and how to get in touch with them on the site, and I had to call up Prevention Point on the site and say, "Quick, you've gotta pack up and get out of there, the state police are headed towards you!" [laughter] But that was, being in that liaison position was great. It was just great.

REED: And then at some point, the kind of internal support for you playing that dual role, or for you to be more of an intermediary, that support went away at some point.

FORBES: Right. And it was probably, partly my fault. If I had been lower key, if I had not been as visible in getting arrested and so forth, I probably could have played that role longer. So that's one of those things in retrospect that I might do differently. But, you know, I was in my 30s. I was doing my thing. [laughter]

REED: I came across a poem that you wrote in the Alive and Kicking newspaper. That was from 00:44:00 1989.

FORBES: Is that "Thousands of Angels"?

REED: It was at an AIDS protest on the steps of the White House, December 1st on World AIDS Day.

FORBES: Oh, yeah. "Thousands of Angels."

REED: Can you talk about what was happening then, and what inspired you to write the poem? Would you actually mind reading the poem?

FORBES: No, not at all. "Thousands of Angels." // I said to my father once, "I'll try." / And he said, "That's all the angels can do." / Thinking of him I sat down in the street, / In front of the White House, in front of my world. / Facing the cameras we started to name them, / The friends and companions who peopled our lives, / As the names of the dead rang out and embraced us, / All the cold nervousness started to fade. / 00:45:00I'm here for you, Bill. I'm bringing your anger. / I'm here, baby Anne, with you clear in my mind. / Tell Mama Consuela I'm here with the fury I felt / On the day that I heard you'd both died. / And Robby, I smile, as I wait for the handcuffs, / I'm hearing your cracks about great looking cops. / Your fabulous wit is still here to delight me, / I'm borrowing courage to live with your style. / Thousands of angels surrounding the White House, / The sixty-five thousand that recently died, / We call in your voices for research and treatment, / And ending neglect that allows genocide. / Jamal, keep me safe, when my body's dragged from here. / Brenda come hold me and help me to shine. / Keisha, come chant with us as, for the living, / We press the demands that will keep us alive. // Well, I just—I have always 00:46:00felt as though I've got these folks on my shoulders. You know, they're behind my ear. And, I write a lot now. It's all nonfiction, it's all about HIV, for several publications. And when I'm reading something I frequently think, is this bullshit, or is this not bullshit? And Robby's voice is there: "Eh, it's kind of on the verge of bullshit. You better clean it up." [laughter] You know, I feel responsible. And I also feel supported, and I feel as though I don't want to forget these folks. Ever. And I don't want anybody else to, either.

REED: Is there anybody that you mention in the poem who you could describe?

FORBES: Well, Robby was my first friend who got it, and he was—let's see, he was in his mid-20s. 00:47:00Hippie child from way back. He'd grown up in Northeast Philadelphia in a fairly, as I said, fairly conservative family. And, I actually met him through one of the guys that I worked with in the ice cream shop. They had been best friends and grown up together. And they were really bonded because of having grown up gay in an environment where that was not very well accepted, and they'd been through a lot of stuff. And Robby had been sent to an alternative high school, fortunately by his parents, so he had had a little bit easier time than my friend Gary had had in the mainstream high school. But he was into transcendental meditation, and he was into, you know, all kinds of very earth and granola type stuff. And yet he was very much an out loud and proud gay man. I mean he was, 00:48:00you know, radical fairies type of person. And I've talked with my friends about what would it have been like if he had grown up. You know, if he had really had a chance to pass 30. And my friend Gary says that he probably would have ended up being a shrink or a counselor or something, 'cause he was very good at talking to people about their feelings. Gary and Robby and I were roommates for three years in West Philadelphia. And it was great, it was wonderful living with them, you know. I'd get back from my dates when they were going out for theirs. [laughter] 'Cause they would come home after, you know, their day jobs and take disco naps and then get up at like 8 or 9 and get dressed and go out at 10. [laughter] Stay until the bars closed. But he, you know, in his mid-20s he was just starting to sort of grow out of that, and he was in a 00:49:00long-term relationship with an African American man and he, you know, was raising my consciousness all over the place about racism and, you know, the separatism around race that still existed within a lot of our progressive organizations. For me, on my end, I was very much on women's rights and reproductive rights. So, you know, I would go to their marches with them, and they would go to my marches with me. [laughter] It was really—it was good. I mean, at the time in my life between '77 when I moved to Philly and '84 when Robby got sick was like one of the best parts of my life. So, yeah, they—it was—I think that was part of the reason it was easy for to go into AIDS work, because the gay community, and particularly gay men was not an unfamiliar world to me at all. It was a very comfortable world for me. When they interviewed me for the job 00:50:00at ActionAIDS—well, it was Philadelphia AIDS Task Force—you know, it was almost entirely men at that point. And one of the questions they asked me was, you know, "How can we get more women involved in the task force?" And I said, "Hire me." I said, "You can't get women to volunteer unless you have women in leadership positions, you have to show publicly that this is something that women do, and that it's something that is very open and welcoming to women." You know, and all of that attitude came out of living with these guys.

REED: What did Robby look like?

FORBES: Um, he was cute. [laughter] He was a little bit shorter than me. He was very thin and sort of wiry. He had floppy, brown hair. He usually had more than a little bit of a beard, but it wasn't particularly well maintained. [laughter] He had these long, artistic fingers. I can send you a 00:51:00picture if you like. But, yeah his—I did a few poems during the time that he was sick, and it was all about trying to figure out how to let go of somebody so young, you know?

REED: Did you publish other writings in Alive and Kicking?

FORBES: I think I must have written a few columns for them at various times, I can't remember off the top. I mean, a lot of what I've done all throughout my career is writing columns and getting them posted in various places. And I know that I had a few previous poems about Robby published. One of them came out in PGN, 'cause I was friends with a woman who was working there, and I wrote something right after he died that she wanted to publish.

REED: Did you go to any of the We The People social events? Like the community dinners or—

FORBES: 00:52:00Not really. I did—occasionally I would go over there for a movie night, or if they were having a speaker or something like that. I was certainly more comfortable when Jim was there than when David took over. I didn't really go much, after that. But one thing I used to go over there for was, I used to arrange for people living with HIV who were interested in doing so and wanted to do so, to testify in public policy forums. 'Cause I thought one thing we really needed was for the voices of people living with HIV to be heard much more by policy makers. It was, you know, they were still seeing people living with HIV as this sort of anonymous blur, and the way you fix that is by putting this person in front of them. And this person saying, "Hello, I have HIV." You know? And then it becomes real. So, on several occasions I would 00:53:00go over there and say, "Look we have"—when we were testifying about getting better services for people living with HIV in prisons, I went over there and was talking about the fact that we had a chance to go to Harrisburg, and for somebody to testify on this. And you know, would they be willing to do that? And my deal with people was that, if they would sit down and tell me their story verbally I would write the testimony, in their voice to the best of my ability and then they would get it back, and they would get to—you know, I said "Take it apart, cross out as much as you want, do whatever you want, so that it says what you want it to say." And we would work back and forth on the statement until the person felt comfortable delivering it, and then they would have the chance to testify. And it seemed like a really good thing to do, because there were a lot of people who wanted to do that, but just didn't feel comfortable talking in front of a large group of people. And "Am I going to sound stupid?" And "What am I going to say?" And so forth. And for somebody to really invest 00:54:00the time in them, to say your story is important and people need to hear it. Now let's think about how we can make this comfortable for you, but still compelling and getting the message across. And so there was a guy who went and talked about his experience living with HIV in jail. And it was really compelling. And I was able to do that with a few women, when we had a big conference on women and HIV at one point in the early '90s. So I would hook up with people at We The People about that. Looking for folks who were willing to do that and then coming over and working with them on pieces.

REED: And the man who talked about his experiences in the jail, was that in Harrisburg that he ended up?

FORBES: Yeah, I was trying to remember that. He actually, that may have been a local one in Philly. I know we did, I can remember a guy—whose name I can't remember now of 00:55:00course—who was from We The People who we did end up taking to Harrisburg. So, we did it both in Philly and in Harrisburg.

REED: Do you remember what the person who went to Harrisburg spoke about?

FORBES: I don't. It will probably come back to me. It was probably about money, 'cause it was mostly about the fact that, you know, there were these new nascent services coming up, but there just wasn't anywhere near enough. And there was also, this may have been on that, a push for greater investment in home-based care. Because there were people who were ending up in hospitals for long periods of time, who didn't want to be there, and didn't need to be there, if they could have had better home-based services. They would have preferred it, it would have been cheaper for the State, and we eventually did get some policy shifted on that so there was greater investment in home-based services.

REED: And as far 00:56:00as We The People goes, are there any other experiences you had with We The People that you could talk about?

FORBES: Well, because I was sort of, you know, my consciousness of them waned sharply in '94, after I started working at home and I wasn't in town every day. It's really hard for me to say, and I also—I mean, I remember '90 to '94 much more clearly. And then everything changed so radically in '96, you know. I mean, it really, it—they call it the Lazarus Effect. When people go on ARVs after, you know, being really—a long period of deterioration with the illness. And, it was just incredible. I remember seeing Frank Broderick, who used to be the editor of Au Courant, the other gay paper at the time. And the last time I had seen him, he was 00:57:00skin and bones, and then I was walking down Broad Street one day and I saw this guy walking toward me, and I thought, "God, that looks like Frank Broderick, but it can't be." 'Cause he gained like 20 pounds and he looked great, you know? And it was just incredible the whiplash of suddenly seeing people doing well. It was wonderful, but it was incredible. Anyway, that I don't really—I think when things got really vicious with We The People, and Jim Littrell particularly, I just stopped dealing with We The People. 'Cause I was too angry about it.

REED: That seems like it was around—between '95 and '96?

FORBES: Yeah. So the combination of being out of town, not being in downtown Philadelphia, and being so furious. I mean, my friend Jim is a dear, dear friend of mine and he was run into the ground. It was unbelievably cruel what they did to him. In terms of completely tearing down his reputation 00:58:00as a professional. And, you know, I just couldn't deal with it.

REED: Did Jim transition out of the world of HIV-related services?

FORBES: Pretty much. Yeah. I mean he still had his fingers in some things, and was involved in some things but, yeah. I mean he couldn't, he just, you know? Not only had David slammed him so hard against the wall, but not enough people had come forward to defend him. And it was just completely disillusioning. And as I say, the whole AIDS field was a little psychotic at that point. It was just very much, I mean the—you know a fistfight broke out at one point in the Philadelphia—in a TPAC meeting. It just—it was just incredible. And it was because everybody was just overloaded and we couldn't, we couldn't see how we were gonna get out of this thing.

REED: 00:59:00I saw a quote from you about Temple Minner, where you just said about him that he was "scathingly honest." Can you talk anymore about Temple? There's so many mentions of him, but you don't get a sense very much of his personality.

FORBES: Oh, he was [laughter]—he was a trip! Yeah… Temple and David were both such crazy personalities. [laughter] But Temple, you know, at least had the fact that he was living with HIV, and that was in his own way, struggling as best he could to survive. And he was plowing over some people that he really shouldn't have been plowing over, you know? But, somehow it seemed a little less—not less awful—but a little more understandable, given the fact that he was basically, you know, 01:00:00a dog in a corner trying to save his own life. And, that seemed clear to me. And he did—there were many occasions where he spoke truth to power. He said what needed to be said, and he said it pretty roughly and, you know, not the way I would have done it, but [laughter]—you know, there was some real power to what he was doing. And it didn't, I don't really know how to explain it. It didn't feel to me as though it was the same kind of self-aggrandizement, as it was with David, you know? [content removed] 01:01:00It felt more—the same way Trump feels like self-aggrandizement, David felt like self-aggrandizement. When he was tearing people up. And Temple, it didn't feel that way. It felt like, you know, this is a not very well-educated but very street smart, very intelligent person who is fighting to save his own life. And he is making some mistakes sometimes, but he is not—it didn't feel like he was tearing somebody down for the fun of it.

REED: When you look at the list of board members and staff members at We The People over the years, you know, at the beginning there are virtually no women and there are more women as time goes on. Do you have any insight on the role of women within the organization?

FORBES: I don't really, because I wasn't that heavily involved in it. But it looked, externally, as though it was very difficult for women to get any traction in terms of leadership. And this is one of the great disillusionments of my life. I had this whack-a-doo idea when I went into doing AIDS work that somehow gay men were going to be less sexist than straight men. Not so much. [laughter] Doesn't really apply. And I think that, you know, I think particularly in terms of gay men, 01:02:00particularly in terms of HIV, that they know intellectually that women get it, but there's this sort of preoccupation with gay men getting it. And I think it's understandable, in that, you know, they're a class of people who have been put down and are having to fight their own oppression all of the time. And, you know, that's—it does make you very focused on your identity and how you have to defend your identity. But I think it's really unfortunate that there couldn't be more common cause made with women living with HIV. And I think part of the problem was the sexism of the gay men, I think part of the problem was that most of the women who were getting HIV were women of color. And that most of them were poor women, and had had very little opportunity to build leadership skills and leadership style to the extent that they needed to have it in order to be able to be—to 01:03:00push their way, to elbow their way into organizations like We The People. And this certainly is not unique to We The People, I mean I saw it happen in organizations all over the place. I mean, there were a few people, like Linda Smith, are you talking to—have you talked to her?

REED: No, I'm trying to connect with her.

FORBES: Oh, good. Definitely talk to Linda Smith. Tell her I say hey. [laughter] She was one of the few people who managed to, you know, get herself in there. But it's really hard and, you know, and that compounded with the fact that the media gives more status and recognition to men's voices anyway, really made it very difficult.

REED: So, I'm going to transition to talking about today, and parallels between then and now. But, can you talk a little bit about how HIV affects your life today?

FORBES: Well, it took over my life over 01:04:00thirty years ago and it hasn't given it back yet! [laughter] No, it's been wonderful. I mean, it's weird to say that, but it, you know… I was raised to believe I needed to do something meaningful with my life, and I have never questioned that for a second. And, I never thought it was going to be HIV. I mean, when I applied for the job with the AIDS Task Force I thought, "Okay, well let's go through the alphabet. I've been doing abortion rights, now I'll do AIDS, maybe I'll do breast cancer after that…" [laughter] I mean, I knew it was gonna be sexual health, you know. But, I certainly had no idea that it was going to last for this long. But, I feel… let's see, how do you say this. I feel horrible that we are going through this massive [opioid] epidemic; on the other hand, I feel as through the experience that I had and continue to 01:05:00have, but especially based in that experience of crisis, is one of the most influential and rewarding and valuable things I've ever gone though. Just in terms of learning about what's important, and learning about how to work with people. And, I just—every time somebody in my life dies, I think about this. It comes down to, we either love each other or we don't. And that's it. That's all. Everything else is bullshit, you know? And if you decide to put yourself in the position of letting your life express the fact that we have to love each other, then you have to do that. That's a big thing to do. And so, I don't know what my life would have been like if it hadn't happened, but I feel as though it completely shaped all of the work that I have done since then and all of the work I intend to do before I finish.

REED: One thing that's 01:06:00come up a lot are people who were involved with We The People and other organizations at the time talking about how, as they age, and as they start to lose people they're close to once again, but to more "natural causes," how surprised they've been at how traumatizing that feels and how it brings up emotions from that time again. Have you experienced that?

FORBES: Oh, yeah. Sure. It is weird, 'cause you think you have these callouses, right? Another friend of mine, Allan, who was very much involved in all of this, with ActionAIDS and so forth, he and I used to work together and we just developed this really morbid sense of comedy between us, because of what we were going through. And we were talking one day about some folks who were working on organizing a funeral for somebody and having all of this difficulty 01:07:00with it. And, Allan just leans over to me and says, "Amateurs." [laughter] I mean, that's the level that we were at with this, we were doing it so much it felt like, you know, we were completely immersed with it. But yes, it's true, now that now people around me are starting to die because of age, or age-related reasons. It hurts a lot. And I look back and I can't believe that we went through as much as we went through. Except that there wasn't any choice, you know. I mean, it was what was happening. The idea of walking away from it never occurred to me. And, in fact, it's—there's a little tiny bit of uncharitable stuff in my head for people who did walk away from it. 'Cause I certainly have friends who were heavily involved in the AIDS movement at one point and then just had enough and went away and did something else. And every rational bone in my body completely defends that, but there's still a little tiny voice in my head 01:08:00that's going, "Yeah…" [laughter] But yeah, it's hard. It's hard coming back to the trauma of it.

REED: And, can you talk a little bit about the work that you're currently involved in related to HIV?

FORBES: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. A woman name Nancy Stoller, toward the beginning of the epidemic wrote a really interesting book called Queers, Whores and Junkies: Lessons from the Damned. And when I—long story—but when I realized in 2010 that I had to leave the organization that I'd been working with—the Global Campaign for Microbicides—I'd been there for a decade. I realized that what I really wanted to do, was to work on sex workers' rights. And bringing sex workers' rights organizations together with AIDS service organizations, in an attempt to give them more clout, and more political leverage. And also in order to educate 01:09:00AIDS service organizations about how they could be and should be reaching out and providing sex worker-friendly services. And I thought of Nancy's book, because, you know—I've done queers, done junkies, time to do whores. [laughter] I've only got, like, seven years left, I've gotta finish up this career, right? So, yeah. I'm consulting again. Consulting is what I do when I want to work on something that nobody's willing to pay me to work on. So I can just do contracts to make enough money to live and then do my work on the side. And I have this proposal that I have put together and I've persuaded the AIDS Foundation of Chicago to be my fiscal sponsor for it. And just about a month ago, we got our first funding from AIDS United, which was very nice. It's only a little bit of money, but it's enough money to start with. And it also allows us to go to other funders and say, "Well, AIDS United is supporting this. So, you know, you should consider it too." 01:10:00And I'm very much hoping to have that fully funded sometime this year, so that I'll be able to spend a year doing this project and see if I can make it work. The idea is to pick three to five cities in the country where sex worker rights organizations are still very nascent, and very new and don't have a lot of clout, and to try to pair them with an AIDS services organization that's interested in collaborating with them. And then doing cross-education so that we educate the AIDS services organization about how they can better provide for sex workers living with HIV and sex workers at risk of HIV. And then with the sex worker rights organizations I'll be working with SWOP USA, which is the Sex Workers Outreach Project, to do education with them about advocacy skills and designing advocacy campaigns and so on and so forth. 01:11:00Bring them up to speed on that, and then at the end of the year bring the two organizations together and say, "So, can you guys think of any issues you'd like to work on together around sex workers rights that you can collaborate on?" And I'm really hoping that some of them will work on, you know, condoms as evidence, you know the police practice of arresting people for having condoms, the—what do you call it? The diversion programs that some cities are starting. Stuff like that. Training police so that they're not beating up sex workers quite so much. I think that—I think the HIV/AIDS organizations will be able to see that this is something that they have an obligation to be involved in. Because here are people, who are living with HIV or at high risk of HIV, so it is their constituency, and they'll be willing to put their political muscle behind it. 01:12:00And I also think of it because of the history. Because 30 years ago, HIV organizations were the people that nobody would talk to. And that you couldn't get an appointment with, you know? If you were on city council, you could deny them an appointment, you know? They were the rejects. They were the people that no one would talk about. And, so I'm saying—look back in your history. Okay, now it's time for you to reach forward. And for you to take on a key population that is drastically underserved because that's what was done for you. So, that's my idea. I like it.

REED: What issues related to AIDS are the most important to the communities that you're interested in working with right now?

FORBES: Well, it's an interesting question, because 01:13:00most of the sex worker rights organizations I've been talking to and working with—and I've spent the last five years trying to develop credibility with them—which is a long hard slog, you know? 'Cause I am an ally, I am not—I mean. It's the story of my life, "Hello, I'm this straight, white girl, come to help you with your controversial cause. No I am not one of you, I'll never be one of you, I know that, but I want to be your ally." I've been doing that all along. And, you know they'll tell you right up front that HIV is not the number one thing they're concerned about. They are much more concerned about getting beat up all the time. And about not being able to get the health care they need because they can't. Seventy per cent of sex workers in one survey had never told a health care provider that they were doing sex work. And you can't get decent health care if you can't tell somebody what's happening in your life. You know, it's just outrageous. So that's the stuff that they really want to deal with, 01:14:00and I'm coming into it saying, "Look, I want to do what I can to advance sex workers' rights. And the one chip I have, the one thing I can put on the table is 30 years of experience with the HIV world. That's the only credibility I have that I can put at your disposal. So, what I think is that if we can work something out that would allow you to get an advantage politically, and advantage in your advocacy work, through my connections with the HIV/AIDS world, then that's a way that I can help you, using the credentials that I have to make that happen." So if I didn't have the AIDS background, and I wanted to work with the sex worker rights world, I'd probably be working on something else. I wouldn't be working on trying to build this liaison. But since this liaison is what I have, it's the tool I have to work with, and I think it is a legitimate argument—that they can be and should be involved in this, 01:15:00then that's what I'm doing. And so it's a little bit of a round-the-corner type thing, you know? But I've been talking to a lot of sex worker rights organizations and I presented at the Desiree Conference in New Orleans last year, and people get the idea. They can see the potential value of it. And, you know, the cities that I'm looking at, hopefully in terms of being able to bring in the project, I've talked to them about it and they're like, "Yeah, this isn't something we would really have gone for necessarily, but you're explaining it in a way that we can see, yeah, that could be helpful to us." And that's all I need. I mean, if it's something that will help them, then that's all to the good. So, that's the way I'm kind of working it now. It's gonna be interesting to see how it works out with the AIDS organization, 'cause I think some of them—I think a lot of them, unfortunately, particularly due to the last election—are gonna be saying, "Look, we're up to here now, we can't take on anything else. 01:16:00We've just gotta try to survive." But, of course, in the same environment, the sex workers' rights folks need help all the more. And so, gonna see if I can patch it together anyway.

REED: And what do you think is needed today to address HIV and AIDS beyond what we've talked about?

FORBES: I am at the point, after decades of going to conferences and everything else, where I am feeling as though the solution is political, and it's structural. You know? I'm getting so sick of conferences that are solely biomedically focused. You know, we have great medications now, obviously we need more, and we do need a vaccine, and we do need good microbicides, and there's a lot of technical tools that we need. But we have enough technical tools now, with PrEP, 01:17:00and with the vaginal ring coming along and so forth, that we can make huge strides in preventing the spread of HIV if we could deal with some of the structural problems that we have. It is about poverty now, it's about sexism, it's about bias against injection drug users and bias against sex workers, it's about all of this political stuff. And it's harder, much harder, to get the public and opinion makers to face that. Because those are the big, hard, struggles. You know? Making a vaccine is easy in comparison. You know? And that's where we are. We can't keep saying, "Oh, we just have to have a better this or a better that," or whatever. That's not what's keeping people from getting help. That's not what's spreading the virus. What's spreading the virus is poverty, and desperation, and lack of education, and all that other 01:18:00 stuff.

REED: And is there anything else you want to talk about, that we haven't spoken about already today?

FORBES: Not really, except to say that I think that the premise of We The People was exactly the right premise. And that's true for any consumer group. The first thing, the basic thing, the rock bottom thing, is helping people to advocate for themselves, because they're the only ones who know what they need. Nobody else does. You know? I don't know what sex workers need, sex workers have to tell me what they need, 'cause I don't know. The premise was exactly right, the problem is that it is always, in any movement, extremely difficult 01:19:00to get people all ginned up and excited and on fire about their demands and what they need. And then keep going in a continuous, slow, uphill slog, to try to get there. It's really hard to maintain momentum. And, you know, that just makes it very hard to keep an organization together, because people like to rally behind something, and it's all too easy to rally behind demonizing this one, or demonizing that one, or you know—that's easier than saying, "Okay, we got city council, or the state health department or whatever to move about two inches this year, and if we work really hard we may be able to get 'em to move another two inches next year." You know, it's slow! Political change is generally slow. [Break] 01:20:00It's not surprising that lots of organizations don't make it in the long run, because they pull apart for whatever reason because advocacy is such a long, slow slog. But that's the nature of the beast. And, you know, I don't think we'll see another We The People, per se, come together because ever since we've had antiretrovirals, the people who have the money and the privilege to access good health care are taken care of. You know, the bottom line for me has always been how do you bring the attention of the middle class, how do you focus the attention of the middle class on the concerns of the poor? 01:21:00And it's really hard to do, unless the concerns of the middle class are also the concerns of the poor, which is what was the case with HIV, when it first occurred. My first political struggle that I grew up in was the Vietnam War. And, you know, we did a great job of bringing the concerns of the middle class to focus on the issues of the poor when middle-class kids were getting drafted. But as soon as the draft stopped, you know, we haven't seen any anti-war movement, even remotely like that since then because middle-class kids aren't getting drafted anymore, so it's not the concern of the middle class. And that's always the problem with social change organizations.

REED: Okay, anything else?

FORBES: Nope I think that's it.