Interview with David Fair

REED: Just to start off with, could you tell me a little bit about your early life?

FAIR: I grew up in Southwest Philadelphia, in the '50s and '60s, in a big Catholic family. I had seven brothers and sisters and attended Catholic schools. And, not much to report about my early life. I got a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and left home even though my childhood home was only 10 blocks away from the campus. I was able to live on campus. You'll be disappointed to know that the annual room and board plus tuition was $3,000. But that's really when I got out of my little Catholic boy shell 00:01:00and started getting involved in other activities, anti-war activities. I did a lot of consumer protection work back in those days. I was a [AmeriCorps] VISTA volunteer working in consumer protection, but my early life was uneventful. I got married when I was 19 to a woman who's still probably my closest friend and we divorced—we officially divorced about 10 years later but we separated about five years after we got married when I realized I was gay. And that's when I came out and I've been stuck there ever since.

REED: So there was a time before AIDS; can you tell me a little more about who you were then and what you were doing?

FAIR: Well, I had always been sort of an activist type when I was in college. I got involved in a lot of different activities, 00:02:00especially anti-war activities. So when I came out, it was sort of a natural thing for me to identify with what was going on and what was then called the Gay Rights Movement. And I got a job at a very gay-friendly church, St. Mary's [Episcopal] Church on the Penn Campus, as the administrator of the church, and my office was in the building on the Penn campus called the Christian Association—was known as the CA—and next door to me was Gay Peer Counseling, which I think was one of the oldest organized, gay programs in Philadelphia. But as a result I got to know a lot of gay people because I was next door and I had just come out around the time I took that job. So, there was also an organization that was then called Gays at Penn that I got involved in. So even though I wasn't a student 00:03:00any longer, I got involved in a lot of campus-related activities. We started to organize in 1977, I think it was, to get the university to adopt a non-discrimination policy for LGBT people and out of that effort, which was eventually successful, we formed the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force. We thought we were very cutting edge because we put the lesbians first in our title. There was a very strong—there actually was another group called Lesbians at Penn that didn't interact with the Gays at Penn group much until the Task Force came along. And it was really through the Task Force that I became interested in issues that were not so provincial as the 00:04:00Penn-related activities. I mean Penn's like its own little city and you can really get lost in there, and I think I did, but the Task Force, we wanted to be a citywide operation, or region-wide operation, so that got me out of my shell a little bit in terms of getting to know people throughout the region. In 1978, we started something called the Philadelphia Gay Cultural Festival which was certainly the first time in Philadelphia, and at the time the Advocate Magazine said we were the first gay cultural—organized gay cultural festival—outside of New York and San Francisco, which had had some. I really enjoyed that activity. That ran for two years and we had plays, and movies, and comedians, and it really was not only for me an eye opening activity because it opened me to 00:05:00people from around the country who were lesbian and gay, but also locally. Because we got a lot of attention for both the Task Force activities and the festival, it sort of expanded my reach in terms of my activism. It was actually as part of the Task Force that I first got involved in AIDS-related activities. In 1980, Dr. Walter Lear—who was openly gay and had been a Deputy Secretary of Health for the state in the [Milton Jerrold] Shapp administration—he invited me and a few other people to his home to form a health committee 00:06:00for the Task Force. And his original motivation for forming the health committee besides the fact that he was a public health activist was that there was a growing epidemic of hepatitis B in the gay, male community and he thought the community should be doing something to prevent people from getting hepatitis B for which there really wasn't much treatment at the time. So we did actually form the health committee and within a year we spun off the health committee and it became what was called Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives. And Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives, probably around 1981–82, attracted LGBT physicians to be involved with it. There were those of us who were sort of community activists and there were the physicians, and they were sort of a separate group within the Task Force health committee. 00:07:00When PCHA was formed, it formed a task force for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency [GRID being an early name for what would later be termed AIDS], which was happening up in New York but we thought was far from our shores. And that really was my first AIDS activism. PCHA is now the Mazzoni Center. So that's what my early years were like. By that time, I had been involved in a lot of different activities in the LGBT community; I was very involved in a group called Black and White Men Together which was an advocacy group for racial equity in the LGBT community, which hasn't improved much, in my opinion, since then. I was involved in the Festival and the Task Force. In 1980, Scott Wilds and I started a group 00:08:00called Philadelphia Equal Rights Coalition with the aim of electing Democratic Committee people throughout Center City, primarily, and Germantown where there were high concentrations—higher concentrations of LGBT people. And one of the things I was proudest of during that period was that we not only elected a number of committee people, but in 1979, the year before the Equal Rights Coalition was formed, we supported Lucien Blackwell who was a city council person who openly supported passing a LGBT rights bill. And we supported him for mayor. He was running as a third party candidate for mayor in the Center City districts, which was the only place where we could say there was a visible LGBT vote. He almost won the wards in Center City and people attributed that to the organizing work that we were doing. So 00:09:00for the first time there were newspaper articles saying, "this is a political force we hadn't really recognized before." That there's these votes and—because people tended to identify the community with the relatively well-off white, gay men in the community, they thought that we had power because of our votes and also because we had disposable income. That was the phrase of the day back in those days. So, I remained involved in electoral politics around LGBT stuff for a long time. I was chair of a committee called Gay and Lesbian Friends of Wilson Goode when he ran against Frank Rizzo in 1983. And after he was elected, was able to get him to create the Mayor's Commission on Sexual Minorities, which was the first time there was an official body in city government specifically related to LGBT 00:10:00people. So, I don’t know, do you want me to just prattle on, or—?

REED: Well, maybe you could tell me the first time you remember hearing about AIDS—what your reaction was.

FAIR: I don't really remember the first time I heard about AIDS because I think it was at the time the New York Times had an article about it. And I honestly don't remember when that was but I remember when, within PCHA, there was a discussion about whether or not— We had basically failed to do very much about hepatitis B, so the idea came up from the physicians, who I think understood better than the more activist types like me, understood that what was going on in New York and San Francisco was a serious public health problem and it wasn't just like hepatitis B. And there really was sort of a break, 00:11:00not an antagonistic one, but there was a sort of break between those of us who were more generally healthcare activists and those who cared specifically about AIDS, which is why the [Philadelphia] AIDS Task Force of PCHA was formed and basically became the only activity of PCHA. I forgot to mention that in 1980, I was hired as an administrative assistant at the Hospital Workers Union [National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees] 1199C, and in that job, I got to know a lot of healthcare workers. And it was a predominantly African American union; they represented some professional workers but mostly the paraprofessional healthcare employees in hospitals. It was there, actually, that I had the first experience of a person with AIDS. That was probably mid-1982, when I was approached by members of the Union who said that there were these people with this gay disease in the hospital and they didn't want to treat them. They didn't want to clean their rooms, they didn't want to deliver food to them, they didn't want to change the bed pans, because they were afraid they were going to get this disease. So that put me both in 00:12:00a weird position and in a strong position because I understood what was going on because of my work with PCHA and the Task Force, but I also understood— It struck me at the time that otherwise normal people were frightened by this disease and that we needed to both respect that and deal with it in some way. But also that the person who they wouldn't care for—I think this was at Jefferson Hospital—the person that they were refusing to care for, they wanted Hazardous Duty Pay to be able to do it and we were their Union so theoretically we should have advocated for that. We didn't and in the end we advocated 00:13:00for more education for the staff. So thank God I won't have to say that I took the wrong side in those days. But the person who had HIV was a African American woman, and that was something of a shock to me because even though I was aware that a lot of Black, gay men in Philadelphia had HIV as well as white, gay men, it never really sunk in to me in that moment that this was more than just a gay disease, and it was definitely more than just a gay, white disease. And that fact that it was a woman was unusual so that started me on a sort of different path from most of the other gay 00:14:00activists that I knew. I mean, Heshie [Zinman] talked about, in his interview, talked about the rally that he helped organize around AIDS to demand more of a response from City government and at that rally, I was part of a group which is—now we're jumping a few years ahead—I was part of a group that had organized to do HIV education in the African American, gay community. And we organized the people we were working with in that group, which is the group that later became BEBASHI [Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues], to go to that rally but to basically demonstrate against the rally at the rally. Not that we were opposed to what the rally was about, but we were opposed to the perception that we felt it was reinforcing that this is a white, gay man's disease and that nobody ever talked about the fact that there were drug addicts getting HIV, there were teenagers getting HIV, there were lots of people who were at great risk. 00:15:00So I got associated for a few years, to the chagrin of a lot of gay activists and AIDS activists, with being sort of a trouble maker around racial issues and how they were playing out in the AIDS epidemic. And I'm tempted to talk about what's going on today too because it's another thing that really hasn't improved very much. We still don't do a very good job of educating the African American minority, communities of color, let alone the African American and other communities of color around HIV. Most of the organizations that we have in the city are pretty much gay, white men or women 00:16:00who are supporters running those organizations; it's just disappointing how little progress has been made over the past 30 years.

REED: Can you tell me how you responded at the Candlelight Vigil, when you had the counter-demonstration?

FAIR: Well, it really wasn't a counter-demonstration. We were with the crowd and we marched with everybody else but Rashida Hassan [now Abdul-Khabeer] who had started BEBASHI, she was invited to speak because she was on the board of the Task Force, the AIDS Task Force. So I remember running up 00:17:00to Wanamaker [Department Store] and getting a big, black candle. And when it was her turn to speak she came up with this big black candle and gave a very moving speech about the people that were not being—that most of the people in that crowd were ignoring about AIDS and lit the candle and did all that dramatic stuff. There used to be a video of it. I don't remember there being people being antagonistic at the rally, but there were lots of letters to the [Philadelphia] Gay News about, how dare these people, you know, that were were—since most of us were gay who were involved in this thing, that we were like Jim Jones, you know feeding people the Kool-Aid; while the community died around us, we were distracting people with these other issues. And there were many—if you look through the records of the Gay News, you'll see a lot of tensions that blew up in various ways. Demonstrations; we had a sit-in at the Task Force one day. There were a lot of issues that today I would think of as probably petty issues, 00:18:00but they were ways for us to get attention to the issue. I had become pretty well known as a gay activist, and as a union activist, and as politically connected because I had chaired Wilson Goode's campaign and he became mayor and the Union was very politically active, so I had a lot of friends especially in the African American political world. So people tended to come to me when they wanted to get attention for issues that had to do with race or class within the community. And I had written several pieces about how I thought that—because I was criticized a lot for Black people—not by Black people, but by white people: "Black people can speak for themselves. Why are you doing this?" And my attitude was, 00:19:00racism is a white people's problem and white people have to address it. I'm not saying I was—I'm sure there was something of a savior kind of mentality going on in my head, but at the time, I didn't feel that. And, anyway, there were lots of controversies in those days. In 1987, finally—and we were very critical of the Goode Administration. So even though I was associated with the Goode Administration, had started the Sexual Minorities Commission [Mayor's Commission for Sexual Minorities], he had created something called the Mayor's Commission on Health Emergencies to try and do some planning about what was going on with HIV. There was still enormous amount of antagonism to the Goode Administration because the City wasn't spending any money, literally, it was spending no money on anything HIV-related. And the only thing it was doing was some HIV testing which was then HTLV [Human T-cell Lymphotropic Virus] 00:20:00testing with federal money—they had some federal money—and counting AIDS cases. They spent more money on counting people with AIDS than they did doing anything for people with AIDS. So in 1986, Angel Ortiz who was one of the city council people who was chair of what's called the Public Health and Human Services Committee, held a special hearing just on the AIDS epidemic and what the City was or wasn't doing about the AIDS epidemic. And the two things I remember about that was that they let me testify for 45 minutes. I had 45 minutes of diatribe about what was going on in the City's—or not going on—in the City's AIDS program. And David Chickadel attended the hearing, where he announced the formation of We the People. 00:21:00It was called We the People because We the People was the, was a commonly used phrase in 1986 because it was the, I guess the 300th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution. So all of these Constitution-related events were happening while he's using the term "we the people". So "we are the people too. And we are the ones who are living with HIV and AIDS." And it was four months after I gave that testimony that Wilson Goode came to me and said, "Well if you think you can do it better, then why don't you take the job of making it happen." And literally, that's what he said. And I said, "If you give me some money I can make it happen," and so that's when he appointed me 00:22:00head of the AIDS Activities—to form the AIDS Activities Coordinating Office. There I was finally able, because he did give some money; he gave us $6 million which was quite a change from no money. We still only had a little bit of Federal money, but with that $6 million we created a system of case management which I'm happy to say still exists today. And we did some home care, nursing care for people with HIV. We supported a lot of different education and prevention programs. We vastly expanded HIV testing. In those days we had AIDS-specific housing because the public, the homeless services programs, didn't know how to deal with people who had AIDS, and so many of the people with AIDS who were homeless were mentally ill as well. And so the decision was we just have to have special needs housing for them as opposed to trying to integrate them into the mainstream system because their needs were so much more great. 00:23:00And I ran the AIDS Office for about two and a half years and I'm happy to say that most of the existing AIDS organizations today got their start in that period of time because I was able to unilaterally decide who to give money to. We didn't have to do RFPs [Request for Proposal] and all that kind of stuff because it was an emergency so, we were trying to get things up quickly, set up quickly. So we were able to give money to Congreso [de Latinos Unidos], and money to BEBASHI, and money to the Task Force, and money to ActionAIDS, which started just about that same time; the AIDS Library [of Philadelphia] started around that time with Heshie; the AIDS Law Project; Philadelphia FIGHT, you know. That was the sort of golden age of response to the AIDS epidemic and I was very proud of the fact that despite the fact that we had spent almost ten years, I thought, wasted almost ten years thinking and acting as if it was only gay, white men that got AIDS, 00:24:00that we very rapidly became one of the few cities that had a multiracial approach to AIDS both in terms of prevention education and in terms of social service care and treatment. I'm skipping over a lot of stuff because some of it, I don't remember and—so it's probably because I don't remember. In 1990, the Ryan White CARE Act was passed. I think it was 1990; it was around that time. But what the Ryan White CARE Act required was that 00:25:00local areas had to have a planning council and when I was running the AIDS Office, since we were operating under the thought that this was an emergency, we need to set things up quickly, we can't use the regular procedures of government to make that happen because that will take too long, what had developed over time was that gave me an enormous amount of power. I could decide who, what organizations lived or died and how healthy they were because we had the only money that was available to them. And that pissed off a lot of people and I can't really say I blame them. I like to believe that I never misused that power but, on the other hand, there were still a lot of people out to get me for my years of advocating 00:26:00that they were racist. So there was an organized effort when it became clear that there were going to have to be these local planning councils to give the power of deciding where the money should go, for various AIDS programs, to these planning councils, Which wasn't required by the law but that was the advocacy coming from the AIDS organization, that they wanted to decide who got money as opposed to me unilaterally deciding or having a planning council that was just giving advice to the Mayor and the Commissioner. And that period of time there was just a lot of negative energy being expressed towards me and so I just decided that I couldn't put up with it, I couldn't survive with that anymore and I exhausted myself in two and a half years so I decided to 00:27:00leave the AIDS office and I was on—at the time I was on a couple of boards including the Congreso board and Congreso was one of the agencies that was put on the planning council when it was formed. So Congreso appointed me as their representative to the planning council. So I got to continue my advocacy for money to go into communities of color as well as into the white, gay community as a member of the planning council. Shortly after that started, the planning council started, I was asked by Charles Harp who was the executive director of We the People, who was leaving We the People, 00:28:00to consider coming to work for We the People. They had asked me—I had forgotten to mention—they had asked me to be on their board of directors so I was the treasurer of We the People at the time, and I was eventually hired as the director of We the People and continued my various forms of advocacy as the director of We the People. Which was another situation that was, where I found myself in the position of advocating on behalf of a group of people that I didn't belong to, which is people with HIV. And on top of that, most of the people at We the People by that time were African American because of the drop-in center at Broad and Lombard attracted a lot of homeless people and there were no real, non-alcoholic atmospheres for Black, gay men to meet each other. So since a lot of Black, gay men had HIV, We the People became a place for people to get to know each other as well. So it was a social group as much as a political and a service group. And I ran We the People for 00:29:00five years. During that time we had lots of battles trying to keep the planning council, which was operated then by the Philadelphia AIDS Consortium, trying to keep them honest. We thought, keep them honest, by trying to make sure they were fair in how they distributed the money. We argued that since the beginning of the epidemic, the majority of people that surveillance had identified as having HIV were African American and Latino, so we needed to make sure that we were actually not just serving African Americans and Latinos in gay, white organizations, but were building capacity within the African American and Latino communities and later the Southeast Asian community, to build their own responses to the epidemic in their own cultural frameworks. So there was a lot of—advocacy is the best word, 00:30:00back and forth on those issues. We used to publish a weekly update on AIDS treatment news called "Fast Facts" which periodically we used, from time to time, to advocate against something that TPAC was doing, or for something we wanted TPAC to be doing, or for more money for AIDS services like housing services. I mean, probably the biggest two issues that We the People dealt with was drug and alcohol addiction and homelessness among people with HIV, and there was very little response to that. 00:31:00So there were a lot of battles, a lot of demonstrations, and sit-ins, and things of that nature. "Fast Facts" eventually became Alive and Kicking which was a publication that we put out every month for a while. And that was that. In 1996, I was totally burned out. I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and also realized that—this was after protease inhibitors had come into play—there was a noticeable change in the health of people with HIV. And people were living longer, and people were staying healthy longer, and some people were never getting sick, and it became a real quandary for me since I was also active in other causes. I was a homeless activist; I was still a union activist. I was a children's advocate. 00:32:00It became hard for me to advocate for special treatment for people with AIDS when there were people with AIDS who were healthy and other people who weren't healthy and who weren't getting services because we were getting special treatment. "AIDS exceptionalism," it was called. And that just became more and more difficult for me to handle. At the same time, I was getting emotionally wrecked so I left We the People in 1996 and changed my—reinvented myself as an advocate for children's services and that's what I've been doing ever since. So that's 20 years of work in a nutshell.

REED: So I'm going to go back a little bit. 00:33:00You were talking about the formation of AACO and this movement from kind of grassroots advocacy work and organizing and direct action to becoming more sanctioned by the government in different roles. What was it like to make that transition?

FAIR: I think that it was one of the reasons I only lasted two and a half years. I mean, before AACO or during the time we were at AACO, ACT UP had—there was this nursing home, Betak, which was specifically for people with HIV. And it was, everybody involved in creating this nursing was dragging their feet 00:34:00and ACT UP went up to Betak and took it over, basically had a sit-in to draw attention to the fact that people desperately needed this service and it was—they were not creating it. And I was sort of tangentially involved with that; I was never really that active in ACT UP though I printed in my union office the very first ACT UP rally leaflet. David Chickadel made me come in on a Sunday afternoon to print it up. For me it wasn't that difficult because, first of all, I had a pretty well-established reputation as a sort of gadfly as a activist, so I wasn't worried about people thinking I had sold out. Plus, unlike the typical City bureaucrat, all doors were forced open to me. So when we had to hire 60 people through the Civil Service System and we had to do it immediately and it usually takes a year and a half to hire 10, the Mayor basically told them, "Do whatever David asks you to do." So I could roam around the various City departments and get immediate response because he very personally was convinced that we were right: this was an emergency and needed an emergency response. 00:35:00So I got to fight within the bureaucracy. In fact, the [Philadelphia] Inquirer did a cover story on the early days of AACO and they called it the "Guerilla Bureaucrat" because we were constantly in battle with the bureaucracy so that wasn't too far away from what I was doing before I became a City employee. I was supposed to be there for six months and I wound up being there for two and a half years. It was the source of a lot of controversy. Fortunately for my mental health, it appeared to me that most of the people who were doing the most antagonistic stuff around my performance were people who wanted more money from the AIDS Office 00:36:00so I could discredit that to some extent. But people were writing editorials in the Inquirer about, "this guy's really an asshole but it's what we need to make this happen," kind of thing. So I was reinforced constantly in my sort of, activist-within-the-bureaucracy kind of identity. By 1990, with the advent of Ryan White and the planning council and funding—having to fight over funding cuts. I mean, there had been two of three major funding cuts to the AIDS program during that two and a half years because Wilson had given me 6 million. Wilson, the Goode Administration, almost bankrupted the City with its fiscal management and this was an example! He was just walking down the hall and said, "Okay, you can have $6 million." 00:37:00So whenever the chickens started to come home to roost, they kept cutting the AIDS budget. We had to have demonstrations and sit-ins. I won't name the organization, but I once funneled some of the City's money into an organization to organize demonstrations in favor of funding for the AIDS Office. But by the beginning of 1990, the main thing that happened—there were two things that happened: one was, they created a civil service title called Director of the AIDS Activities Coordinating Office. I had not been Civil Service; I had been what they call an "exempt" employee which meant that I didn't have to be as much a part of the bureaucracy. It was a good thing they formed this director's job, but had to make the decision, do I really want to work here for the rest of my life, which is what it felt like. Do I want to be doing 00:38:00AIDS for the rest of my life? And I was of two minds about whether I ought to do that. But the other thing that happened was that there was a lawsuit against the City for poor health services for people with HIV in the prisons, in the City prisons. I was basically being asked to defend the City's position on this, which was: we're doing the best we can with the money we have. And I didn't believe in that position, but it was clear that I had exhausted the commissioner and the various other people in the health department with all the various special favors I was asking for and getting, that I wasn't the most popular guy in that bureaucracy, and that 00:39:00they had, more or less, had enough. And the mayor was sending conflicting signals to me because he was saying, "The law says I have to have this planning council so we're going to have this planning council," and I think on some level I wasn't eager to give up the almost total power that I had to spend this money, but I also didn't trust the people he was putting on the planning council so that put me in a strange position. So I like to believe that I ultimately left that job because I was fundamentally not a bureaucrat and that it was right for me to be a community activist before AACO, it was right for me to be an activist within the system in setting up AACO, and it was right for me to continue my activism outside of AACO once things started to get more mainstream and bureaucratized. And at We the People—we could have a whole other discussion just about We the People. We the People was, for me, a spontaneous development. 00:40:00Nobody really organized We the People. David Chickadel and the people around him were the leaders of that process but they weren't community organizers; they were just people with HIV who wanted to get people paying attention to what their challenges were. And you don't usually see that kind of stuff happening spontaneously, but it was happening around the country in AIDS—that people with AIDS were rising to speak for themselves. And within the public health world, there was this approach for community health planning around healthcare issues. In Philadelphia, that meant creating within the city, in different sections of the city, what were called Health Systems Agencies who were legally required, just like with the Ryan White Planning Council, they were legally required to have people in the community advising them on 00:41:00major decisions that were being made about health care in their particular neighborhoods. So, for example, if a hospital wanted to spend $6 million on a dialysis unit, rather than just be able to do that, they had to have a meeting through the Health Systems Agency and get input from both professionals in the field and what they called consumers—the people who were using health services. And so We the People started right about the time that the idea of people who consumed healthcare services, as a constituency in and of itself, was coming into—it was a fad sort of taking over the healthcare system. And so they were in 00:42:00exactly the right place at the right time. So everybody suddenly realized, all of us were making decisions about people with AIDS and their lives, and most of us weren't people with AIDS. So We the People created an atmosphere from the get-go, that this group of people had spontaneously got together who were people with AIDS and they had an opinion about what was going on in the AIDS service system. So when I got there, I had been a community organizer for a long time so I used sort of—I did manipulate the process to some degree as a sort of Saul Alinsky–style community organizer in trying to train people on how to be advocates for themselves and try to encourage people with HIV to—when there were board openings at Action AIDS, or at the Task Force, or 00:43:00someplace else, put themselves forward and argue that they shouldn't be considered like anybody else as a candidate because they were a consumer of services and that these organizations needed to have some more sensitivity to consumers. And so the impact that We the People had throughout the AIDS service system was enormous in terms of that; and I think even today, something like 50 percent of the planning councils are people with HIV. I don't know how they're selected anymore, but the only other organization that really made an effort, it seemed, to respect people with HIV as consumers was Philadelphia FIGHT because they were, at the time, one of the only actual medical care providers. Everybody else was social service providers and until the late '90s, nobody paid much attention to medical care; because first of all, ACT UP was doing the advocacy on that end and they were doing a good job. And until there was treatment, 00:44:00if you're a drug addict, 28-year-old drug addict who's gay, goes to We the People and there's no treatment available to you but getting drug treatment; no AIDS treatment available to you but drug treatment might be available, that was more attractive. What was good about We the People, I think, and something we haven't seen in most systems, not just the AIDS system, is that the board of directors was comprised almost solely—not only, but almost solely—people with HIV. Everybody who worked there were people who had HIV, almost everybody. And that in addition to 00:45:00their clear social role, especially in the LGBT community, they also provided services that other AIDS service organizations weren't providing because they were professionals. So it's like, you could be a case manager at Action AIDS, I'm just picking them as an example, and have a case load, but there was a qualitatively different interaction with the people who were at We the People—many of them were volunteers. We had, I think when I left, there were a total of five paid staff—but it was a qualitatively different experience because it wasn't like, "I'm a social worker and I have my MSW and I have my 16 forms to fill." It was, "You need a sheltered bed tonight, let me go make some phone calls and, if necessary, yell at somebody to get you a bed that night. 00:46:00So it became empowered, almost, because it got money to do social services. It was using social services to organize people. We had done the same thing in the homeless system through a group in the early '80s called the Committee for Dignity and Fairness [for] the Homeless, which was fighting for fairness and dignity for the homeless, but also open shelter. So it was a homeless shelter run by homeless people and that gave us a base to organize from. Eventually we formed something called the Delaware Valley Union of the Homeless where people paid $1 to be a member of the Union of the Homeless and we actually negotiated on behalf of homeless people with SEPTA, and with the health department, and with other places, with the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. Penn had taken over big chunks of West Philadelphia and one of the deals it made with the City, was that it would provide free care to 50 people. 50 beds, rather, would be permanently dedicated to clients referred by the City of Philadelphia and they would get free care; and the City had never used hat provision. So as the Union of the Homeless we actually went to the guy who was the previous health commissioner when I was at the department, and sat in his office until he signed an agreement that said he would 00:47:00negotiate for those beds, which he did eventually. I'm sorry I got off on a tangent. I guess I was just trying to make the point that We the People was not an AIDS service organization, it was an organizing effort that was very successful and used the resources that other people were using to create career jobs in the AIDS bureaucracy. They used those resources to not only help other people with AIDS, but to organize them and give them a political voice as well.

REED: Can you tell me about your first memories of We the People?

FAIR: I guess my first interaction with We the People 00:48:00was with Kiyoshi [Kuromiya]. He was publishing the Critical Path [Project] newsletter which nobody could understand but it was a critically important publication for the people who were advocating on medical issues, but he had to do a lot of interpreting for regular, ordinary people like myself. In fact, I remember, Kiyoshi was in the hospital and I went to visit him when I was still director of AACO. Went to visit him in the hospital and he started talking to me about this internet thing and that he had a bulletin board on the internet. And this was probably 1988, 1987 and he wanted to publish this newsletter and would I give him money to publish this newsletter? And because I was the czar, and I got to give money to whoever I want, I agreed to give him the money while he was in the hospital. I remember Kiyoshi 00:49:00invited me to one of the community dinners that We the People used to have. They used to do two or three a week. This one was at a church in South Philadelphia [St. Mary's Episcopal Church] and I remember coming in there. That was, it had to be—We the People formed just a few months before I became the director of AACO, so it had to be late 1987, early 1988. And I was totally blown away by how many people I knew who were involved with We the People. Even though I had been an AIDS activist for seven years at that point, I had no idea that so many people in my life had HIV until I met them again 00:50:00at this dinner. So I remember, when I was director of We the People at least, that we created sort of a safe space for people to hang out. Today they would call it a low demand outreach program. We did say you couldn't use drugs in the building, but we didn't say you couldn't use drugs. We allowed people to hold hands and cruise each other when they were in the building. That got a little bit more hairy towards the end of my time there when we had a lot more straight people coming to We the People. 00:51:00It was a membership organization and people felt like they belonged to We the People and no matter how hard they try, most AIDS service organizations can't convince their clients that those clients belong to that agency, but We the People was different. People felt like they had power over what was going on there. We had a lot of social activities that went on at We the People. A lot of educational activities. We formed a group called Positive Voices because people with AIDS were very popular to speak to youth groups and Rotary clubs and stuff like that because AIDS was still relatively new. So we decided that people with AIDS should get paid for doing that work, so we went to the City and asked for money to start Positive Voices where we paid a stipend to people and organized making the visits to these agencies. That's another thing that I think led to We the People being successful for a few years was that, pretty much, things that were normally done by volunteers, people were paid a stipend for. They couldn't get paid very much money because they were mostly getting Social Security so it was a $5 stipend for cleaning up after a meeting or something like that. But that was meaningful money if you were living on SSI. 00:52:00We had a lot of programs where people could make a few bucks by helping out in some way. We had a lot of demonstrations, especially around housing. There were some members of We the People who were active in ACT UP so we would generally be perceived of as the people of color at the ACT UP demonstrations. In fact, some of the people who are still involved in ACT UP locally got their activist starts at We the People. We had a hunger strike one time. The same nursing home, Betak had finally opened. 00:53:00They were about 40 patients there and then the Lutheran Homes [of Germantown] decided that it could no longer make it work financially so they announced they were going to close it. So we had a lot of advocacy to the Casey [Bob Casey Sr] administration to get more money to keep the nursing home opened. They were very resistant to paying a higher daily rate for people with AIDS who needed nursing care as compared to an elderly person who needed elderly care because they said basically, "the nursing care is the same so why should we pay more for a person with AIDS?" Which was a legitimate position. The problem was that any elderly person 00:54:00could theoretically get into any nursing home but people with AIDS couldn't get into any nursing home at all, except this one, so it needed some extra support. Finally, I think this had to be in 1994 we went up, about 20 of us went up, and said we were going to be on a hunger strike until the state solved this problem. We were there for 17 days; we got lots of press coverage. Finally, Estelle Richman, who was the Health Commissioner at the time, she found some money suddenly that allowed it to stay open for a little bit longer. And I lost 17 pounds. I lost a pound a day when I was doing that. I was one of the few people who wasn't sneaking food. A few of them were sneaking food. I remember that actually because I remember the woman named Varee Suthireung, who was a Thai woman who was president of the board of We the People who was very committed to this particular action, 00:55:00but we had to basically force her to not participate because she was ill and it could've killed her—and somehow that popped in my brain when you asked things I remembered about We the People, so. But she stayed up there with us even though she went out and had pizza. We had to sit on the Betak porch drinking our fruit juices.

REED: Did you physically stay on the Betak porch for 17 days?

FAIR: Yes. Well, we had tents in the back and periodically groups of people would come and sit with us. We had a big rally at Canaan Baptist Church in Germantown. Betak was in Mt. Airy. A group of Black churches got together to hold a rally for the people at Betak which was amazing. 00:56:00It was amazing. That was probably, that and the demonstration—we had a demonstration when the state moved to a managed care approach for Medicaid. Kiyoshi had been for years publishing a list on the internet of doctors who would care for people with AIDS because that was a finite number of doctors. Historically, the health plans, the private health plans, wouldn't publish in their directories that a doctor was an AIDS specialist because that might attract people with AIDS 00:57:00and people with AIDS were expensive. And so when the state decided that it was going to get rid of regular Medicaid and have their health plans on Medicaid, we were demanding that they have a list of AIDS doctors and they refused for the same reason they had always refused. So probably the Betak hunger strike was my favorite activism thing that I had done, but the second most favorite was when we had a demonstration outside of the [Department of Public] Welfare Office on Bainbridge street, that's no longer there, demanding to see the list of AIDS doctors. And they weren't paying attention to us; we were just people gathered outside making noise and welfare offices were used to that. So a group of us decided we were going to go in and look for the list. So we went in and jumped over the counter and started going on people's desks and pulling open the drawers and file cabinets. "Where are the lists? Where is the list? Where is the list?" And probably about 40 members of We the People followed us in and they stayed in the sort of lobby area. But it got so tense that the state sent somebody by helicopter 00:58:00from Harrisburg to meet with us and make a commitment that they would publish the list if we could get it for them, because they had no idea who the AIDS doctors were in their system. And we had Kiyoshi's lists so we were able to do that. And we didn't get arrested, which surprised me. The state police showed up but they never arrested us. I was arrested many times in demonstrations but my two favorites, I wasn't arrested.

REED: Before you were director of We the People, what sort of interaction did you have with the organization in that time period?

FAIR: Well, we were a funder. AACO was a funder. We gave them what today we would call unrestricted money because they really didn't have anything. They were in the basement of the AIDS Task Force building. They were a desk in the basement. And David wanted to open up this drop-in center. So I remember we gave them $200,000 00:59:00and David got sick very rapidly after We the People was formed so he really wasn't very active when it started to formalize. But one of my staff people at AACO left to take the job as director. I think he was the first director of We the People [Bob Pearson was the second executive director of We the People, after David Chickadel]. I'm not totally sure there wasn't somebody else. His name was Bob Pearson and he was a very smart guy and he had been involved in international development projects and things like that, so the idea of setting up a little storefront was not overwhelming to him like it was to everybody else. I remember we bought them an Apple computer; Apple 2 or Mac 2. I forget what it was called. Very early Apple computer. 01:00:00They had two sites on Broad Street; there was one below South Street, the one that people generally associate with We the People was at Broad and Lombard. And Bob hired a couple of activity types, people who would do activities with people with AIDS. So they would do reggae and they would do movie nights and things like that. There wasn't as much of a political bent at that time because, first of all, it was mostly white people at the beginning and the ones who were activists were active in ACT UP and didn't particularly see a need for We the People to be identified specifically around that. It was really only when We the People turned into a predominantly organization of people of color 01:01:00that they felt that there needed to be something other than ACT UP. Because ACT UP was focused on medical stuff, it wasn't focused on social services and social services is what they were looking for. I was a funder, basically. They came to me, like Kiyoshi came to me with his newsletter idea, so we had to give them additional money for that, I remember that. My roommate at the time was a guy named Arnold Jackson who was a Black, gay activist, very active. He got a job working at We the People as 01:02:00Member Service Coordinator or something. That's how I got on the board of We the People because he recommended me for the board. But they were falling apart after Bob left and a guy named Charles Harp was running it and he was doing the best job he could but it was really turning into like a YMCA for people with HIV, not without the gym. It was just activities, activities, activities, and people didn't want to just have activities. They had more serious needs and concerns and Charles couldn't handle that so when he left, the fear was that We the People would go under. But I had been consulting after I left We the People [AACO] and hated it, hated it to the core of my soul. And so when 01:03:00a guy named Zachariah [Williams] asked me if I would consider running We the People. I thought, "Well at least it'd be a regular paycheck." Salary was $40,000 a year, which was even more money than I was making at AACO; was more money than it is today. So I took the job basically because I was still living and breathing AIDS pretty much all the time. All of my social world seemed to die from AIDS starting early when we didn't really know what was happening, but pretty much continuing up until '96, '97 when it finally started to peter off. I was on the board at the time of an organization called the Tenant's Rental Assistance Corporation which had an activist arm called the Tenant Action Group and they got the contract to, from the Office of Housing, to pay the rent of people with AIDS who qualify for rental assistance. 01:04:00And I left that board eventually and I recently rejoined the board of that organization. It's now called the Tenant Union Representative Network and they still do AIDS housing vouchers. And one day I was at the office when they distributed the materials to the board members, they accidentally distributed a report on the HOPWA [Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS] grant which is what pays for the rental assistance and there was a list of people who were getting rental assistance and they were like seven people on the list who were getting rental assistance when I was at We the People 20 years ago who are still getting rental assistance. It reminded me that that's what I was talking about back in 1996 when I left We the People. 01:05:00I mean I love these guys, but it's like why should they be getting rental assistance just because they happen to have HIV? They're obviously healthy or they wouldn't be alive for 20 years, you know? And there's plenty of homeless people out there who are dying, going to die on the streets this month only because we didn't have a housing voucher for them.

REED: You mentioned that at some point the membership base of We the People became primarily people of color, that's not how it started?

FAIR: No, no. No. It was a guy named Terry Robinson; I'm surprised I remember his name, and Bill Randall and David Chickadel, they were the three people who started it. Terry was African American 01:06:00but his social world was the white, gay community so it was David's network that comprised the original We the People. You wouldn't have that kind of network today. Maybe you would; I just assume that because we don't have all the gay clubs we used to have and the discos and all that kind of stuff. But David was like a personality in the clubs and knew a lot of people so when he created We the People, he attracted those people to come hang out with him and pretty much that's all We the People was doing, people hanging out. When they were in the basement of PCHA [Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives], a lot of people didn't even know they existed. When they moved below South Street, that was a very short period of time that they were there, and then they got this building at Broad—425 South Broad Street. And that was right on the corner where 01:07:00a lot of homeless people went into the subway to sleep. We had a whole homeless city under the subway in those days, in the Broad Street Concourse; and so once they opened the site at 425, it started to change because there were a lot of sex workers who came in. A lot of addicts, a lot of hustlers, and over time, I would say from the period maybe, 1989 through, maybe '92, it sort of shifted pretty dramatically. I mean a lot of the white people kept coming and there were still a number of white people on the board when I was hired, 01:08:00but it pretty rapidly became identified as an African American organization even though there were white people involved. I sort of stuck out like a sore thumb as the director but pretty much the—I remember we had a guy named Dominic Bash on the board. He was well-known in the community, and he was white, and we had a US attorney who was on the board for a while who had HIV who was on there for—the Board was different from the typical—I've been on a lot of boards. This was not what you would call a well-organized or professional board. It was an organizing committee, really. And they left me worrying about whether or not there was any money in the bank account. You know, make sure the electric bill got paid and things like that as the director because they wanted to talk about politics of AIDS or they wanted to talk about services that people needed. Since there was a dearth of places for especially, low income African American, gay men to get together, We the People became that place. And when the dinners continued, 01:09:00the Tuesday and Thursday night dinners, we started attracting regular homeless people who didn't have HIV and took on a cast of being HIV focused but not HIV only. At one point the Alive and Kicking newsletter had a mailing list of almost 5,000 people, most of whom did not have AIDS but it was pretty influential at the time; We the People was pretty influential at the time.

REED: There was a reference in one of the We the People newsletters about verifying that 01:10:00people accessing services and programs at We the People were HIV positive.

FAIR: The reason I referenced it, there was this debate around, should this be an HIV-only kind of place? And at least at the time that I was there, they probably had those debates earlier on, the decision was that we were just getting too much demand for help, especially around homelessness that to say just HIV would mean that we have to test people as they came in the door. I'm sure there were plenty of people who pretended that they had HIV. My husband runs a drop-in center for drug addicts up in Kensington. He runs the drop-in 01:11:00center to get people to come in for HIV testing and people are always claiming to have HIV because they need a meal or they need socks, something like that, even though he doesn't require them to do that; they do that all the time. But there was some tension around that, but that I associated with the earlier days of We the People, not with most of the time that I was there, at the end of the '80s. And there were some services that were specifically for HIV, people with HIV like—I mean the meals program was originally supposed to be just for people with HIV but it never was that and so eventually because we made sure there was some AIDS education done at those events and things like that, the City was ok with allowing us to have people who weren't HIV positive there because it gave us an opportunity to offer testing and education 01:12:00and things like that. The case management stuff pretty much stayed HIV focused though. We didn't really—when it came to more intense kind of work with somebody, we always prioritized—and we had a fund called the Life Savers Fund that was like an emergency needs fund to pay people's security deposits or electric bills and things like that. That was only open to people with HIV because it was Ryan White money and Ryan White has more serious restrictions than the City money had. That's one of the advantages we had in developing the AIDS Office, is that almost any other city human service office is heavily dependent on federal and state money. The City doesn't actually put up very much money for mental health services, for example. I think it's out of a budget of $1 billion for mental health and drug 01:13:00abuse services. If the city puts up $11 million out of $1 billion and the Department of Human Services, the Child Welfare Office, they have a $675 million dollar budget and the City puts up $49 [million]. For AIDS, we didn't have any of those kind of numbers but when I left the AIDS office, it had a budget of $11 million before Ryan White funding started. And of that $11 million, seven and a half was City money. And the advantage of that is, there's no strings attached to City money, so that's how we were able to create all these things over night because we didn't have to worry about what the state 01:14:00was going to say about what we were doing with the money. So that was the upside of me having total control, was that we had the freedom to do the right thing without the bureaucracy get in the way.

REED: When you were in that role, how did you balance the competing organizations that were coming up back then?

FAIR: Well I mean, we filed some general protocols around— If it was a new organization, we generally didn't risk a lot of money until they showed that they could handle it. We rarely turned anybody down, is really what it comes down to. I mean, it's like, there were so few of them that to not fund them didn't make any sense unless they were a total waste of time and I don't remember anybody being in that category. I mean, it was a lot of money; $6 million is a lot of money to have to play with. And small amounts of money made a big difference to people so, for example, giving $25,000 to ten methadone clinics so that they would do HIV testing is $250,000 01:15:00out of $6 million, but the enormity of what we're going to find, the number of people with HIV that we were going to find, because people in methadone clinics tend to be people who use needles. So, we were leveraging the money pretty well. We got into a lot of trouble with the downtown organizations because generally, if we were going to give $300,000 to Action AIDS for case management, we gave $300,000 to BEBASHI for case management and $300,000 to Congreso for case management because we were trying to build capacity in those communities and we got a lot of criticism for that. But I think the safest thing to say about how we survived that was that there was enough money for everybody so it was only when the funding started to get cut 01:16:00that people started fighting with each other. At least the time I was there, we successfully fought back most of the cuts so I didn't have to face that choice, generally. When I was at AACO we formed something called the Minority AIDS Coalition. No it wasn't called that, it was something equivalent to that, and we had two full-time people just organizing in Black churches about HIV, which we would still need to have if we had the money today. But that's how we wound up building enough of a constituency in the Black, primarily Christian community, so that they stood for us when the Betak crisis happened. I don't know why I suddenly thought of that.

REED: Are 01:17:00there any specific people or personalities or memories that you have of We the People either before you were director or after you were director that you could tell me about?

FAIR: Well, I mentioned Bob, Bob Pearson. He was kind of a crazy guy, very forceful personality, who really deserves the credit for making We the People into what it became as an organization, because he knew how to create an organization. Dominic Bash who I mentioned was something of a queen, so he had an outsized personality but was extremely smart. He was a hairdresser. Very smart guy, he wasn't politically active but he was very politically astute. 01:18:00So, a lot of the strategy discussions that we would have around how to address some particular issue, he was always extremely useful to those discussions and generally people thought of him as kind of flighty because he was always joking and always performing, but he was an amazing guy. There was a guy named Temple Minner who was a friend of Kiyoshi's who had been in prison and he and a guy named Mike Ruggieri formed a support group for people coming out of prison with HIV at We the People. That 01:19:00was sort of a unique kind of approach that we wouldn't have thought of on our own. It was one of the advantages at We the People. Temple was on the board for a while; you had an idea, basically people tried to find the resources to help you fulfill the idea. You didn't have to write a proposal to some bureaucrat somewhere. Roy Hayes, who's still around; he works for Philadelphia FIGHT now. He was sort of a very stable presence for We the People. He became very active at the time that it started to turn into a predominantly Black organization and he was president of the board for a long time. I remember him calling me when I was director of AACO. He called me from the hospital and was very depressed 01:20:00and thought he was going to die. He was always overweight and he was in the hospital actually because he was overweight, not because he had HIV, but nonetheless, he thought he was going to die. I remember him saying, "I have nobody to talk to," and I said, "there's this guy named Kiyoshi and Bob Pearson, you should talk to them because they're trying to get an organization together, people with HIV," which he did and he got very involved in that. He's still very involved in Philadelphia FIGHT, I think. God, there were so many. When you say We the People newsletter, are you talking about the newsletter that was called We the People? Because that's not the real We the People newsletter. The real We the People newsletter was called Alive and Kicking and that was a serious publication. It was like a newspaper that came out every month. So I'd recommend that you look at that; the library [John J. Wilcox Library and Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center] has to have them. But I thought of that because, I was thinking that if I had some Alive and Kicking's in front of me, I would be reminded of a lot of people. 01:21:00There was a guy named Zachariah Williams who was involved at We the People when I became president, became executive director. And I got the definite sense that he had—he never admitted this but—I got the definite sense that he had been opposed to appointing me as the executive director so he was a real pain in my ass when I became the director. And we, more or less, became friends in the end. I felt very close to him when he died; that was really an emotional period for me. He was the first person, actually, who named me the executor of his estate which consisted of the box 01:22:00his ashes were in, but I probably have been the executor for 150 people with AIDS over the years, the vast majority of whom had no assets so there wasn't really much of a role to play. Leonard West, I think speaking an executor of somebody's estate, I was the executor of his estate too and his estate included a house which belonged to We the People for a while and then was put up on the market. And I actually bought the house in the end. I was gone from We the People by then. I'm still living in that house. But Leonard was a teacher, a public school teacher. Another extremely smart guy who did a lot of anonymous writing for the We the People newsletters 01:23:00and for Alive and Kicking. I can't really remember specific stories about most of the people I remember and I think that's partly because I was probably already suffering from PTSD when I was working there, for a lot of the time that I was working there, so a lot of it sort of, just, suppressed. Even a lot of the good stuff is suppressed. I mean, I remember a lot of names but I can't really say much about them except that I remember them.

REED: Was the PTSD experience a result of the loss that you experienced or was it about the constant fighting, struggling…

FAIR: I 01:24:00mean, I was hospitalized for a little while, not very long, but for a little while, maybe five days after I left We the People. And during that time, what came up mostly was just losing so many people because I was very active in the gay community both socially, and sexually, and politically, and so many people I knew died and... I was pretty consciously using that to make myself angry. I used to tell people that they shouldn't give me credit for being an AIDS activist because the reason 01:25:00that I wanted to be an AIDS activist was so that I didn't have to clean the bedpans of these people. Because I had people staying in my house in the early days because there was no place else they could go; and I hated it. I hated caring for sick people even though I loved them. I just hated the tasks. So a lot of my advocacy came from, "I want to find somebody else to do this task and I want them to get paid well to do it so it never comes back to me." It's really hard to describe what it was like to be in the late '70s in this sort of vibrant, thriving community that's just pretty much—and we were all of the age, our hormones were jumping. It was like nirvana, like the perfect time to be gay. The time in my life that I felt it was the perfect time to be gay because we were still different. We weren't as assimilated 01:26:00as I think we are today. We had our own social constructs, we had our own organizations, we had our own places to socialize. We had our own neighborhoods, and it wasn't just Center City, and we were having fun. It was a whole different kind of gay literature than had ever been seen before. People appearing in the media that weren't as stereotypical as they had always been. And then suddenly, out of the blue, everybody's dying. It was just really tough. I don't know how to describe it. I think it's different than being in the military because it was so much more subtle and the affection we felt for each other was not based on the fact that we were at risk; we were in this traumatic situation. It was like the trauma just sort of took over and people didn't talk about trauma in those days the way they talk about it today. We weren't even allowed to identify 01:27:00what was going on with us. It really took people starting to get healthy, for me at least, to notice that I had been living this life for years in these highly traumatizing situations and sort of being ignorant of that, not knowing what I was getting into. I mean, when I left We the People, it was my 16th year of doing AIDS activism and I haven't done anything else that long in my life; 01:28:00and every moment of it was highly emotional. And people died so quickly so it was like a couple funerals a week sometimes and that became its own social atmosphere, going to funerals for people. I often was asked to speak at funerals about people that I knew and it became very hard because they all ran together after a while and people's lives were so short so they hadn't—it's not as they had accomplished a whole lot that you wanted to put on a resume so all you could talk about was your emotional relationship with them. Which, at least for me, only aggravated the trauma; it didn't relieve it in any way. I was a recovering alcoholic; I stopped drinking in 1984. In fact, 01:29:00Friday is my 32nd anniversary and I brought that up because, in addition to AA, I did a lot of other mind-expanding kind of activities. I spent two weeks living with an Indian tribe to learn how they dealt with things like that. And one of the things I did was go to a place called the Caron Institute, which is somewhere up northern Pennsylvania, that ran a program specifically for adult children of 01:30:00alcoholics and both of my parents died from alcoholism. So I went to this program and it was these psychodynamic kind of things and they were trying to get people to peel away all the protectiveness they had put up with themselves and that's one of the places where I learned that I had been suppressing a lot of stuff and surviving that way, and common sense to me said, "well, if it's working, why should I unsuppress it?" And to this day, nobody's ever given me a good answer for that so I still suppress a lot of stuff. But they were doing some exercise, and I can't really remember the exercise, it was there—and this was probably, 1992, 01:31:00'93—it was there that I was forced by the counselors to talk about all the deaths and I had really not been aware that it had affected me that much until I had to go to a recall, psychological program, to notice that after 12 years a lot of people had died in my life and I was suppressing it. So I like to think that I used all that in what is ultimately a positive way by some of the advocacy work.

REED: How 01:32:00much longer after that realization were you able to stay involved in the work before you needed to move in a different direction?

FAIR: Well I never went back to it after I got out of the hospital. Something broke, something, some understanding really got created in my life that showed that I was really going down the wrong path, and that even though I had all sorts of things that I thought of as accomplishments, I was losing myself in the process. So, Estelle Richman, who was health commissioner at the time, who I had annoyed greatly as an AIDS activist, was very relieved when I went to her one day and said, "You know what? I want to stop doing this, but I can't. I have to feed myself," 01:33:00and I had just met my partner, who is now my husband for 20 years. "I want to settle down. I want to do something that's not going to engage me the way the AIDS stuff engages me." And she had just gotten this federal grant to set up mental health services for kids who were being raised by their grandparents in nine South Philadelphia schools. It was like a demonstration project for school-based behavioral health, which I knew nothing about so it was the perfect job. Literally, I had the job for about six months before I really understood what the grant was for. But 01:34:00I feel like I had a break, I don't know if you would call it a psychotic break, but I had a break, and I just didn't feel the way I had felt before. Part of it was the process that began after I had gone to this program and then spent the next several years still having people die around me. But the reality was, by the mid '90s, it was slowing down a lot. The person that I met in 1997, that I'm still with, is a person with HIV so it's not as if I ever left it altogether; and he runs an HIV program so he comes home and complains to be about AACO all the time. But I made a pretty clean break, I think, 01:35:00and the children's services world was a lot less toxic than the AIDS services world. I mean, people like Heshie will say, I caused a lot of the toxicity so it's like, I can't be complaining about it, but I want to do both. I want to be able to be a cause and the fact that it was affecting me just like it was affecting everybody else; I wasn't the only one. And it was like a breath of fresh air to work in the children's system because first of all, it was a big, mature system. It was a lot harder to be the center of the action than it was in the tiny little AIDS service world. And it was a more mature system, so people could argue with each other without it being the end of the world. If a child's been abused, you still fought with a lot of passion but it just was—I didn't get personally engaged 01:36:00in the same way that I got engaged with…And these weren't kids I knew. I had no kids and to this day I'm still working in children's services, but I notice that I tend to avoid situations that will have me develop a personal relationship with some of the kids that I'm responsible for. It's not my job; I'm an administrator. I'm not the direct service person, but also I know how dangerous that is for me. It's one of the self-protective things that I do so that I don't get involved. Just the other day, I was in this very room, getting very angry at somebody about what was going on around a particular child, so I can still get emotional about it but it's just not the same. It's nothing like what was going on in the AIDS world. And it's probably not a good thing to say for somebody who spends full time doing work with children, but I don't take them home with me. When I was doing AIDS work, I was going home 01:37:00to it.

REED: So, if we could wrap up and talk a little bit more about Philadelphia today. So you mentioned this a little bit, but anything else you wanted to say about how AIDS affects your life today or HIV?

FAIR: I would say that—I mean, it doesn't really affect my life. My partner has HIV and he's perfectly healthy and has always been the time we've been together. There's no reason to think that's going to change and I really don't make much of an effort to know what's going on in the AIDS world either, but this is the age of social media 01:38:00so it's hard to avoid it. I am much more ignorant about the treatments available to people with HIV than I was back in those days so I don't know much about that. But what I do know, mostly because of my husband's work, is that there's a lot of very sick people with HIV who are not connected to the AIDS system, and they're not only people of color. There's just as many needle addicts among poor, white people as there is in other communities and I'm still extremely frustrated that the system, and AACO, don't get exercised about that. It's like, a few years ago, 01:39:00ACT UP actually dragged me into an advocacy effort they were doing with the health department. It was probably 2011. They were advocating for more housing money and somebody had told them, a guy named Jose de Marco who had been at We the People, still active in ACT UP, asked me to strategize around this. It included having a meeting with the health commissioner to ask for more money for housing. And I went to the meeting and I was very uncomfortable because it was exactly the toxic atmosphere that I had escaped, 01:40:00but I did my thing. And one of the things I always had going for me was that I was always connected enough into the political world and the bureaucracy to know what was going on, why people were being resistant. Most of the time they weren't being resistant because they hated people with AIDS; they were being resistant because they didn't think they had the money or the authority to make something happen and I like to think I was more effective than some others because I generally advocated aggressively only when I had identified a person who I knew wanted to give in but who needed the approval or somebody else or who needed to be convinced that this was more important than something else so they could put some money into it. And that's what I was doing at that meeting. I was advocating to the commissioner that, while he didn't have enough money to deal with all of the homeless people who had HIV, they had a waiting list of something like 200 or 300 for 01:41:00AIDS vouchers. I said, some of those people were mentally ill. And I had just read in the paper that there was this new grant for housing for mentally ill people that had come to Philadelphia. What's keeping you from prioritizing sick people with AIDS who happen to be mentally ill? And he didn't have an answer and it was a very tense environment and everybody left unhappy, but about two months later, he found money among mental health money for homeless mentally ill people and added new slots to the AIDS voucher program. I don't know why I brought that up other than to brag. Oh, I went to a couple of ACT UP meetings during that time and it's a tiny little group; it's a shadow of what it used to be but, almost everybody in the room was desperately poor. This was not a fun activity for them. This was something 01:42:00that they were coming together to do because they were in serious trouble. It was very frustrating for Jose and the other organizers of ACT UP because there's so little they can do for them. So they get them riled up but that's about it. Now I remember why I brought that up: in the work that I was doing with them around that, I came into contact with somebody at the health department who told me that they had done a study which showed—it wasn't a sophisticated enough study to be published, but they had looked at surveillance records and discovered that Philadelphia had one of the 01:43:00highest rates in the country of people who were diagnosed with HIV disease at their first hospitalization. Which meant, they had to be sick enough to be in the hospital before anybody found them and we had a high rate of those people. And I sort of gave it up, but at the time I remember having a couple of conversations with various people at the health department about how this was big news as far as I was concerned, and it showed that the AIDS bureaucracy was not finding these people, or these people are not finding the AIDS bureaucracy, and that this is exactly the kind of thing that should remind us that we have to have services that go where the people are, rather than expect the people to come to us. And that's what really does my husband. That's what he does every day and all he's trying to do is HIV testing. It's like he can't do much else than that, much more than that. And that's probably my biggest frustration. 01:44:00Every once in a while I get asked to sit on a panel to talk about something having to do with AIDS. There was that ACT UP movie a couple of years ago about New York ACT UP; I was on the panel after that and I want to say to people, "Be angry," because there's as much to be angry about now, and there's as much to be passionate about now as there was in the mid-1980s. It's just not happening to us at the same scale as it was happening to—"us" being the white, gay community. We just have to do something about it. I don't think we do something about it by just writing more grant proposals. And we don't necessarily do something about it by jumping over counters and ripping papers out of people's file cabinets either because that was in its time. Today with social media and stuff, there's probably other things that we could do. And I'm not 01:45:00going to lead the charge, but when I'm given the opportunity I do say to people, "You should be angrier," and I just wish people were angrier. So it affects me today, the same way it affected me 20 years ago: it traumatizes me.

REED: Before we end, is there anything else that you'd like to say or talk about?

FAIR: No, I don't think so.