Interview with Jim Littrell

REED: So maybe you can just tell me about where you were raised?

LITTRELL: Oh. Okay. Are we on?

REED: Oh yes, we're on again.

LITTRELL: I was born and raised for about 12 years in Lexington, Virginia. Which is in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. It's a beautiful, hot place. And it's the home of Washington Lee University and VMI—Virginia Military Institute, where my father taught and then did administrative work. And my mother was a teacher as well, taught French and English. 00:01:00So that's where I grew up. For my—I guess my most formative years were spent there.

REED: Did you move up here when you were 12?

LITTRELL: Nope. Then at 12, we took ourselves back to northeastern North Carolina, to my mother's home country. She was a Quaker. There have been Quakers in North Carolina forever. And she was of a family—one of those Quaker families that had been converted into Quakerism by George Fox in like 1680, and had fled Virginia because they were persecuted by the Episcopalians. And moved to North Carolina where they stayed, and stayed, and stayed, and stayed. A few escaped. So we moved back there to this little old town called Woodland. And that's where my mother continued to live until she died; my father lived there ‘til he died. And a 00:02:00couple years after we moved to North Carolina I was sent off to Westtown School up here—Quaker school out in Chester County, boarding school, where my ancestors had gone for many generations. I don't think that had much to do with my going there, but my sister and I both went, came up here to school. I think that was because the schools in northeastern North Carolina they thought were not very good—not very challenging. But, it sort of saved my life, I think, and certainly changed my life—coming north, and to Westtown and to the environment of the school, which was all about egalitarianism and Quaker values and stuff, and it was very absorbing in 24-hour, everyday kind of stuff. And a good school, as well. So, I spent 3 years at Westtown, and then went back to Davidson College, a Presbyterian college, in North Carolina. Small, then men's liberal art college. Really, really good college. Very, very different from Westtown. 00:03:00Full of the South, elite men—white men, I should say. Very white. And I spent four years there. Came back up here, taught for a couple of years back at Westtown, and then the Vietnam war arrived—had arrived—and I got drafted as I was about to go to graduate school—I was about to go to University of Chicago, to work on a PhD, and I got drafted. And I didn't—really, really didn't want to go to the war. I was gonna do my PhD in psychology and religion. And, so, I had a thought that I would go to seminary, which got me a deferment—as opposed to going to Canada, which would have gotten me cold. [laughter] And I claimed, and genuinely was, a conscientious objector. I was very formed, growing on a Quaker peace testimony and stuff. But I didn't get 00:04:00classified as a CO [Conscientious Objector] because when I was at Davidson it was required that you serve two years in ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps] as part of the curriculum, and it just never occurred to me not to. Because I don't think you could not. I've never heard of anyone who didn't. But it just didn't cross my mind. So they said, "Well, you were in ROTC. You can't be a CO." Which is—there's some logic to that, I guess. The big logic was I hadn't thought very carefully about it when I was doing it. I was very good in ROTC. I loved making maps. That's one of the things you learn at ROTC. [laughter] So at that point—and this is an important fact about 00:05:00me—at that point in my life I bumped into, I changed from being—my father had been a Presbyterian, and I went to this Presbyterian college and I was a Presbyterian and a Quaker sort of split personality. Like [unintelligible] and his Quaker mother and his military father. And I met up with the Episcopal Church in college and it was the only church in town that was doing any civil rights work. And I got really involved in civil rights work in college, in this little Southern town. And met up with these Episcopalians, and I had a professor who was an Episcopal priest, 00:06:00and decided the Episcopal Church was where I wanted to be, if I was gonna be in a church. 'Cause they were doing that stuff. And so I joined the Episcopal Church. So by the time I got back up here I was an Episcopalian. And there was a Bishop in Philadelphia named Bob DeWitt [Robert Lionne DeWitt], who was the Episcopal Bishop of this part of Pennsylvania, who was really prophetic and brave. He led the desegregation of Girard College; he desegregated schools in Chester; he was a huge civil rights—and sort of a radical civil rights—these days he would have been a Black Lives Matter guy. He was very involved in supporting the [Black] Panthers and had, or he hired priests like me to do organizing in Philadelphia around welfare rights and all kinds of stuff. And I was really impressed with him. So I went to him and I said, "This is the deal: I don't want to go to Vietnam. I wanna go to graduate school and get a PhD but I—I really, really don't want to go to Vietnam as a soldier." 00:07:00He said, "Well, why don't you go to seminary if you want to do that, and you can do your graduate work at Penn. You can go to"—there was a seminary at 42nd and Spruce, an Episcopal seminary [Philadelphia Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church], buildings are still there. And off I went there for three years, to ostensibly spend three years getting the religious part of my "psychology and religion." But I fell under the sway. [laughter] And decided that what I really wanted to do in life was to be a sort of unconventional Episcopal priest. And so that is what I did. So I got ordained and didn't go to graduate school. And right out of seminary I started a program in Philadelphia called Voyage House, which was in that being an alternative—creating an alternative culture for kids who were on the street. You know, referred to as at-risk kids, people under 18 who were living on the streets. And there were many then, as now. 00:08:00A judge in the common pleas court [Court of Common Pleas] in Philadelphia named Lisa Richette had written a book called Throwaway Children. So I went and talked to her and we pulled together a coalition. And I was just thinking about this with somebody else yesterday—I think it turned out to be 12 Center City churches—Episcopal churches, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, UCC [United Church of Christ], I guess, and Temple—at 17th and Spruce. And we did this. We did this thing—we started with our drop-in center at Rittenhouse Square and it grew into this big thing. We had group homes and an alternative high school at St. Mary's [Episcopal Church], my former church—which I returned to much later—and a counseling center, and all kinds of stuff. And that organization survived in one way or another for quite a long time. And the Attic [Youth Center] is its grandchild, sort of. The Attic was born in Voyage House's 00:09:00attic—one of their attics, which was a gathering place for GLBT kids in the days of Voyage House and that's where it gets its name. And that went off and became the Attic. So that's sort of the story of my life. That's one narrative. [laughter] Does that answer your question?

REED: That's great. Do you remember about what year that was, that you founded the organization?

LITTRELL: Yeah, 1970.

REED: Okay. And then what were you doing throughout most of the '70s? Were you working—

LITTRELL: I did Voyage House—I started on Voyage House as soon as I got out of seminary, which was '70. That same bishop sent me around the country for about six months to look at other programs that were doing the same thing and then 00:10:00I came back and we put this thing together. And I did that for about three or four years, I guess. And then I went off to a church in Buffalo, in New York, as a priest, to be just a regular—not exactly a regular church but a regular, big, wealthy, downtown Buffalo, New York church—where I was hired 'cause I had long hair and I was thought to be a hippie and I would do cool things for this church. They had a lot of money to spend, but didn't know quite how to do it, but wanted to be doing the right thing. It's one of those churches. And I had, by then, married a woman I met at Westtown, and we both—so we moved to Buffalo together 00:11:00and spent three years there doing that. Our daughter was born there, and then she decided she was a lesbian [laughter], and I decided I was gay. Although I had sort of thought I was gay for a long time. That was not news to her or to me. But her discovery was news to us both, I think. [laughter] So we split up, and I went for a year to Hobart and William Smith College[s] as a chaplain. Just when that was occurring, came out there, decided even New York was not a good place to be gay in 1977. [laughter] I mean, it wasn't horrible. But, it was in the middle of nowhere. And my ex-wife and daughter had moved back to Philadelphia, so back I came as well. So that's what I did. And then when I got back here I spent time—I was hired as the first, 00:12:00I don't know what—I became, eventually the first executive director of, at first, the Philadelphia Gay Task Force, then became the Lesbian and Gay Task Force, then became—and then went out of business. And for the bulk of the life of that organization, Rita Addessa was the director. And I did that for a couple of years. I wasn't—well, we did some good stuff. But I had just come out, I wasn't—I wasn't really maybe the best choice for that job. Although it got going and it lasted a long time and we did a lot of good things. When I was there we got the non-discrimination thing at Penn passed. Which was the first major—well, it was huge—because it was—Penn's the largest employer in Philadelphia and it made an enormous impact on shifting the political tide in Philadelphia. And then soon after I left, the non-discrimination ordinances in Philadelphia were passed. So, you know, it was a 00:13:00productive period of time. So that's how I spent the '70s.

REED: Do you remember the first time that you heard about HIV?

LITTRELL: Oh yes, I do. I remember exactly the first time I heard of HIV. I was—after I came out I had a hard time getting a job in the Episcopal Church. In fact, I couldn't. I couldn't find a job; no one would hire a gay priest. Which is one of the reasons I did the Task Force job. But while I was at the Task Force I also associated myself with St Mary's again, and David Fair was the parish administrator for St. Mary's at that time, and on the board of the Task Force. So, that's the first time he and I crossed paths. And we were also involved in a married gay men's group where some of us had kids, so an early iteration of sort of gay and lesbian parents back in the day, 00:14:00before any of us were quite sure what that meant. But David, when I first met him, was married to Sonya, his wife at that time. So we worked together there and then I left. And soon after I left that job I began to get sick and I—quite sick, with what everybody decided was very mysterious stuff. And I was also seeing a therapist. I was working through some of—all this stuff, and other stuff. But, one day I walked into therapy and my therapist handed me the clipping—the famous clipping from the New York Times ["Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals," New York Times, 3 July 1981]. And said, "Have you seen this?" And I said, "No." And he said, "I think this might be what you have. It sounds like what you have, you should go 00:15:00see somebody." And he sent me off to see somebody, who knew about such things, he thought. Turned out, well—who knows, maybe I had it and got rid of it. But, that's the first time I heard of it. I had heard rumors, and that was in 1981. I mean, I remember sitting in the office and his handing me this piece of paper, and going off to the doctor, and having a rash of tests. There was no etiology for this at that point, so nobody knew what it was. And there was no way to test for it, really but a lot of "rule-out" tests. 00:16:00So that's when I first heard about it, and made my way to, eventually, to John Turner, who was, if he were still alive, would be an informant for you in this project or whatever you call us, who was one of the early docs involved in HIV in Philadelphia and he was a close friend of mine. He was the first medical director of [Philadelphia] FIGHT, among other things. And he died of an unrelated disease later, in the '90s. But John got me enrolled me an—what turned into a HIV study, at the DuPont, was funding it. So I was followed for that for most of the '80s. 00:17:00And I had very strange titers, and very strange antibodies, and very strange stuff going on in my body, but none of it was HIV, as far as they could tell. At least, by the time the HIV test came along I didn't test positive for it, so I've never tested positive. But I—for about 5 years thought I was living with HIV, and then it turned out that whatever it was was not there. It was a very interesting experience. That's when I first heard of it. Soon thereafter, I had started doing some work as a counselor after I left the Task Force and so I had a—and I was in a practice with a psychologist. And he, one day said to me, "There's a meeting not very far away of a little group of people that are starting to begin to think about what to do about AIDS. 00:18:00And I thought you might want to go." So off we went. To Nick Ifft's house. Is Nick somebody you've interviewed for this?

REED: Mhmm.

LITTRELL: Oh, you should. I mean, not many people will tell you you should, but you should. [laughter] Nick [Ifft] was a guy, Nick was a doctor, a young doctor, who just had gotten out of a med school. And he got, he—as far as I know is the first person who did anything in Philadelphia in an organized way about responding to the epidemic. And it was in his apartment, at 20th and Locust that we met in his living room, for about a year. A group of about—when I first went there were seven of us and it grew into the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force. That's what it ended up being. But Nick is more and more than anybody else, and he and I had huge differences. That's why ActionAIDS was formed. But Nick was the person who I think sort of summoned 00:19:00and gathered this group of people together. And it started all gay, white men I think, except for one African American man who was a friend of David's named Leon Bacheus who came pretty frequently, and one woman who came for a bit and then didn't. At that point. But the core group was just sort of a group of us. And we met and talked and Nick went off to the first National AIDS Conference, which I think was in Denver, and came back with all these ideas about how to organize and we started creating a program. So, that's really where the HIV/AIDS epidemic response, outside of government—and there was no governmental response at all to this epidemic in Philadelphia for a very long time—but that's where it began. And I suspect that it would have begun anyway, 00:20:00had not Nick come along. But he was certainly the guy who pulled this together initially. Walter Lear, who was the first openly gay Pennsylvania official, and another doc who lived in Powelton, and is something of a saint in some communities, and was a good friend of mine. Walter was very engaged in—had been previously involved in putting together a group of gay health people, and had formed this—the holding company, as it were, for the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force. So that's where it was planted, into that group. 00:21:00So that's when I first heard about it, when that—I may have heard previously, rumors. I mean there were rumors everywhere. And before I saw the paper, a few people in Philadelphia had gotten sick, a couple of people had died. We all had friends—we had a good friend in New York who died very early of this very mysterious thing. Very early and very quickly. So, but it hadn't—nobody had sort of nailed it in that particular way. That's a long answer to a short question.

REED: You talked about the formation of ActionAIDS that arose out of differences with the AIDS Task Force?

LITTRELL: I would say it arose out of differences with the—well, as you said early on when we were talking before we started taping, that there was a chaotic time. By the time this became an epidemic, clearly an epidemic, and people started dying like flies all over the place, I think chaos is a fair way of describing how we all felt. 00:22:00Although we didn't behave particularly chaotically. I think we behaved—I think we did incredible things. I mean this little band of people that grew into a larger and larger group of people doing all the stuff. That initial formation though was at the Task Force, and there were tensions inside that organization. I became a vice president and tender of a couple of programs inside. Bob Schoenberg helped put together and eventually shepherded the kind of social support services. He set the Task Force—there was an education chunk of work that was done—prevention education. A big tension inside the organization was between whether we should spend our scarce, scarce resources on care or education or both or how to—you know there was lots of tussling about that. And there were personalities also involved in this. 00:23:00We were all people with strong opinions about everything. And so, then there were those who were not involved. And I think ActionAIDS grew out of—you've talked to Anna Forbes, right?

REED: Mhmm.

LITTRELL: Well, we—I was the chair of the committee that hired Anna as the first staff person for the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force, which is how she came to the work. I think she was working for the ACLU at that point, before that. So she came in that way and then began to staff out, a little bit, the social services, the buddy system, and all that, 00:24:00those kinds of things that were going on. Which by then was quite a big job. And at the same time, spent money that some people thought would better have been spent for prevention activities. And so there was more and more tension. But the other tension that I, and some others felt, anyway, arose out of the racial composition of the group—which was pretty much all white. And pretty much all male. And I think that, for me, the formative energy for ActionAIDS came from that issue, not from the internal tension so much. But from the reluctance of some of the leadership of the Task Force to take steps proactively to engage with people of color inside the organization. And so that was as much as anything, for me, the reason to 00:25:00get up and make my speech about, "We need to leave and do something different." But were there lots of factors, I'm sure, other than that that led into it. And I will say that David Fair had a good deal to do with that because he had—he was never involved with the Task Force as a working member. He was at 1199C doing his thing there. But he at some point fired one of David's shots across the bow of this organization, and sort of called us out about race. And the response of most of the leadership was to say, "It's not an issue." Just to ignore it. I mean it really pissed me off. Well, it pissed him off 00:26:00too, I think. But it really—I was inside the organization and it pissed me off. And it made Anna, I think, very mad too. So, I think for—I don't know if she had said this or not—but I think that it was for me one of the really important things that we tried to do. And when we put the ActionAIDS board together we wanted—we spent a huge amount of time making sure it was a board that was reflective of the population we were working with, which was still, at that point, lots and lots and lots of gay white men dying of AIDS. And lots and lots and lots of gay Black men dying of AIDS. And more and more women, who were living with HIV and dying of HIV. So, we wanted to have a board that reflected all of that. And I really want to think we achieved that. We had a board that was about half and half, Black and white. Not just a show board, but a working board with people working around this first board of ActionAIDS. 00:27:00But we also decided that our focus would be on providing care and doing ancillary work like the prison work. Which was both prevention and care in prisons, but it was— And then Heshie Zinman was involved in forming ActionAIDS as well, pretty early on. And he was really interested in education. So the nascent AIDS Library [of Philadelphia] was born there, pretty early on. So we ended up doing a whole bunch of things that emerged from that early work of ActionAIDS that either went off and became their own thing. In some ways I think FIGHT emerged from that same organization. I don't know what Jane [Shull] would say—probably would say that. FIGHT came along a good deal later. So, that's it for me—what drove ActionAIDS' founding.

REED: What sources of funding did you have in those early 00:28:00 years?

LITTRELL: Hardly any. The first money that came to the Task Force, I think, came from a small—I remember going all the time down to City Hall and standing in the mayor's conference room or somewhere down there and making speeches about—I don't know if I was the first person in the history of the world to say this, but I remember the speech I made about how "woefully inadequate the city response was." I mean the health department wasn't responding—there was nothing. And then eventually, somehow, and I don't remember exactly how—Nick was involved in this more than I was—we got a small, City grant from the health department. So I think that might have been the first AIDS Task Force money. And then we began to get a little foundation money. I wasn't directly involved in raising money for the Task Force so I don't know. There was never very much money, I mean, I think we're talking like $30,000 to $40,000 00:29:00all together for a budget. Even when Anna came on board, I think she was paid about $20,000, $25,000, and that was the bulk of the budget of the organization. Eventually other streams of money, private and public, started to become available. And when ActionAIDS was formed we—our first money came from individuals. I remember going with Heshie to a meeting with a guy named Ozzie something—he'll remember if you talk to him, who owned a bar up in Allentown. And he gave us $5,000. I sat down with my—I knew David Haas pretty well, and I sat down with David 00:30:00and the Haas—one of his family foundations gave us some money. And we got—we just pulled together a little bit of foundation money initially, from here and there, and individual donors gave money—the usual suspects in Philadelphia who are involved in that kind of thing. And then eventually there was more reliable streams of government money that started to come in. And then, I think the game changer was probably Ryan White [HIV/AIDS Program], which came later. But for that first decade there was—it was really, money was scarce. There was not a lot of money, there were not 00:31:00a lot of resources, we were really doing this. Almost all of it was volunteer work; there was very little paid stuff. And I was paid—when I took on the role of being kind of the administrator in the early ActionAIDS for a couple of years, I was working at half-time and I can't remember what I made. Not much. Maybe I was paid like $7,500 or something. It was a little bit of money. I don't think anybody was in it for the money. [laughter] And we didn't have much money to be in it for. Although after ActionAIDS was formed we grew pretty quickly to be able to hire some staff, so, by the time I left that job, we had a staff of five or six people working full time.

REED: You got access to the prisons really early on. Was it difficult to do that?

LITTRELL: Now, there was a lot of push and pull with the City, especially. Mainly we worked through the Department of Health on this, and there were folks in 00:32:00the Department of Health who were very supportive and very helpful eventually, and some early on. This was like, way before Marla [Gold]'s time, but—in the early days. And at some point there was a guy whose name—Anna Forbes has a better memory for these names than I do—but, I remember his first name was Luis. He was a Latino guy, And he was a great, great guy, And he was working in the prisons doing sort of, sexual health education and stuff, And he got involved in doing some HIV education and prevention work in prisons, and we worked with him and sort of partnered with him inside the prisons. That's how I think that whole enterprise got started. That was one way of getting to the prisons. The other way was that I was very involved with the Pennsylvania Prison Society, I think it was called. And I got involved with them and they were very interested very early in getting involved in HIV work in the prison, because, you know, they were thinking, 00:33:00"This is gonna start killing a lot of people"—as it, in fact, did, pretty soon. And so they started working on education and trying to provide some care in and outside of prisons, for people who were coming out of prisons. And that sort of turned into a little prison task force. And Anna was very involved as a staff person for these kinds of things, and staffing out some of these things, so she probably has a better institutional memory of how that grew: what the program actually looked like up close. But I remember Luis was really energetic about this. And this little task force of people who were working in prisons was very, very involved and did a lot of good work. It was hard to get into the prisons with anything. The prisons were a mess. 00:34:00Well, they still are a mess, I presume. But, I mean, administratively they were corrupt, and they were venal and—I had done some work in prisons early, when I couldn't get a job anywhere else(as an interesting side note). [laughter] I was hired by the diocese then to work as a prison chaplain at Graterford—no, at Holmesburg. Which, I don't even know if Holmesburg is still there.

REED: I believe it is.

LITTRELL: It's a horrible place, and in those days it was a really horrible place. And there I was, just fresh out of outness, openly gay priest in a prison doing prison chaplaincy work in like 1979–80. So I had met people inside the prison 00:35:00nexus. So I knew—that's, I think, how I got into the Pennsylvania Prison Society and I knew some other people who were involved in that work. REED: A lot of people talk about how entering this world of HIV brought them into contact with people that they hadn't really been in contact with before. Was that the case with you, or was it not the case because of the work that you'd already been involved with?

LITTRELL: Hmm. Well, I'm sure that it brought all of us in contact with people we wouldn't normally have been in contact with. It certainly got us outside our comfort zones in some ways; although the comfort zones we built out were pretty comfortable. I mean, I don't think I've ever encountered a more supportive community of people to work with than that—that grew up in the '80s, especially—around 00:36:00HIV care and education and stuff. That community we built ourselves because nobody else was doing anything. That was an incredible group of people, and it was also pretty diverse. It wasn't racially diverse so much, at first—or ever. But it was diverse in terms of economics and background and all kinds of things. And it was huge. So it might be that—I certainly encountered people I wouldn't otherwise have known, I don't think. To some degree I already—that sort of the business I was in. My whole adult life was working with people who weren't necessarily the people I was gonna spend time with otherwise. [pause] So I don't know how true that is. I think it pushed, it's—with one exception. I think the big exception is that it got me to 00:37:00better understanding of—it was the first time I really—I began to think about race when I was at Westtown. That may have been because I was just beginning to realize I was gay when I was there as a student. And I was—it was a very uncomfortable thing to be. Although, if there were a good place to be that would have been it. It was also very supportive in some ways. It turned out there were gay faculty—gay in the way that you were "gay faculty" in 1964—no, 1959. But there were people around who sort of recognized this, "We have a little gay boy on our hands. Let's see if we can, you know, help him." But I realized that there were a little group of us at Westtown who were sort of marginalized in some ways, and that included the three or four African American students that were there. And a little group of us who were 00:38:00probably—gosh, these days who knows what we might have been. We were different. So I started thinking about issues related to race and gender and stuff in high school. And when I went back to Davidson, to this white, Presbyterian school—incredibly segregated reflective of all this, you know, it was a Jeff Sessions school. Although Jeff Sessions would never have gotten in that school. He was too gauche—is too gauche, I mean—he wouldn't have prospered at Davidson. Davidson had standards. [laughter] But I think for me when I went to Davidson, after I got over the shock of being there, and I realized I'm back in this incredibly segregated—viciously segregated community. And the civil rights movement was just beginning to bubble up in the South 00:39:00in public ways. And I thought, "That's where I want to be." So I started doing that kind of thinking and work in college, but I hadn't thought about it a whole lot. That's not true as I think back on it—that's always a theme in my life. But, I think in the '80s, to answer your question, probably the group of people I got eventually more and more engaged with were African American and Latino people in Philadelphia, that I might not otherwise have crossed paths with, but who I bumped into either on purpose or just because we were all in it together in this work. And that was a pretty wide-ranging—it was a pretty large group of people. [pause] Otherwise I think I probably would have—in my life, I've rarely done anything that was confined. 00:40:00[laughter] In terms of the group of people that I was spending time with.

REED: Do you remember the first time that you heard about We the People?

LITTRELL: I do. 'Cause I was there at the beginning. [laughter] That's another thing. In the tumultuous early days of ActionAIDS, along came a guy named David somebody—I wish Anna Forbes was in here so she could tell me names.

REED: Chickadel?

LITTRELL: Yes! Thank you! [laughter] Good. David Chickadel came along and he wasn't all by himself, but David was the loud guy. And he—early in one of the earliest board meetings of ActionAIDS, David arrived and said—and I think he had been 00:41:00in conversation with Anna probably before he arrived at the board—to say, "We need a voice here on the board. You can't have an organization for people living with AIDS"—he's also one of the first people I knew who started talking about "people living with AIDS," as opposed to "people with AIDS"—and [he said], "We want a voice on the board." And that energy morphed into We the People, pretty quickly. And We the People formed itself up. And I was friends with a lot of We the People people—early We the People people. We worked closely with them. They got a little money together and got an office up on South Broad Street, a little office in the basement. And after I left AIDS Task Force, and David had gone on to run the AIDS Activities [Coordinating] Office 00:42:00in the city, he got me to go—he hired me and my partner, who was a social worker named Karen Lundblad, to go to We the People and try to stabilize it, which we did do. And I mean we went up and worked with the board of We the People, and the leadership of We the People and created some organizational shape and form and structure; and moved it, I think kept it alive, and then eventually David went there after he left the City and worked there for a while. But I think I was probably at We the People when We the People became We the People.

REED: Were you involved in imposing an organizational structure on the organization at the very beginning or was it after they'd been around for some time?

LITTRELL: Oh, it was after a while. I wouldn't say "impose" is the word, I wouldn't use that word. It was about to go under, I think was the problem. It was a cup of chaos. Of course it was chaotic because it was full of people 00:43:00whose life spans were very short, and people came and went very quickly. So there was not a lot of stability, I think. I would use the word stabilize, rather than impose. [laughter] But it was a real challenge, cause you're thinking about, okay—you've got a population who, at that point were not—you couldn't predict over time that there were going to be the same leadership group engaged in this for a stretch. So you're creating a structure that will hold that dynamic and still stay put. Which was really sort of an intellectually interesting challenge. 00:44:00And, I mean we just did things like created bylaws, and tried to create a board—you know, basic things. But We the People was an advocacy organization—almost completely an advocacy organization. So that's what we did. That came later though. We the People lived for a while without any, I think, locus—in terms of office or anything. And there was some money available and it was an office eventually—the first office I remember which was on the other side of where the Arts Bank used to be. 00:45:00I don't know if that was—that was a while later. There were a few years when We the People was, I think, meeting in people's—I think—in people's living rooms and stuff.

REED: When you look at the newsletters, it's very striking how quickly names disappear and new ones come in and memorials would crop up. You're actually thanked in, I believe the first newsletter.

LITTRELL: Me?

REED: Mhmm.

LITTRELL: Who knew?

REED: What was your early involvement with them, like before you stepped in to—

LITTRELL: With We the People?

REED: Mhmm.

LITTRELL: Before I stepped in to—

REED: To help structure.

LITTRELL: Oh, that came—that was at least—We the People was probably formed in, I don't know what year, '86, 00:46:00 '87?

REED: Mhmm.

LITTRELL: And that work I think we went to We the People probably in '89 or '90, Karen and I, to work with them for that period of time. So there was a chunk of time there before I actually worked with them in that role. So the early work I did with them was just nurturing this group. I mean, I don't think there was any resistance to this idea—I don't know why it hadn't occurred to us. [laughter] I think it didn't occur to us, to many of us, because we all thought we were people living with AIDS. I mean, I thought for a whole chunk of this time that I was a person living with AIDS. And any of the people involved in the AIDS Task Force and at ActionAIDS were people living with HIV. So it wasn't—we'd never really differentiated those identities. 00:47:00Until, I think, the organization became more professionalized and staffed, and it became—if you're not careful when you do that you start representing for people instead of with people. And I think David was probably right to perceive that that drift was happening. But maybe that's why we didn't think about it earlier. But I don't remember there being any resistance to the idea of having it. I think that we nurtured that organization early on, as best we could. And it was very helpful in terms of advocating for resources to have a group of consumers who were—I mean all over the country that same thing was mirrored everywhere in the country. That same PWA movement was huge.

REED: Did you attend any of the dinners that We the People held weekly?

LITTRELL: Mhmm. I think we started 'em. They were for a long time out at the [University] Lutheran Church 00:48:00in West Philly. And I had a friend who was the—couple of friends who were ministers there in that period of time. And yeah, I went to those fairly often. I forgot about those.

REED: What were they like?

LITTRELL: That still goes on, I think. Under a different name, but it's the same dinner. Excuse me?

REED: Oh, what were they like?

LITTRELL: Uh, well, they were interesting because not everybody went to them, because they were for people who were hungry. They were not, I think, viewed by many people as a social place, or as a gathering place for people living with AIDS, as much as they were for people who were hungry and needed food. And they fairly quickly became a place where a lot of homeless people came. That says how hungry you can be, too. I remember remarking on this fairly early, going in and seeing there all these guys who may or may not have been living with HIV, but who were willing to publicly 00:49:00identify themselves as people living with HIV in order to get a meal. So that was one thing that struck me very early at these meals was that they were very full of people who were very hungry. And for whom this was a really important meal. And the other good thing about that endeavor was that it brought together people who made the food, and prepared the food, and engaged in sort of making this operation work, and making the meal happen. And that wasn't the first time that had happened in the HIV epidemic, but that was a major enterprise for a whole bunch of people. And I think that people who were involved early in the food work—that was all people who worked at ActionAIDS 00:50:00and at the Task Force, as early on, getting people food to eat. And that's where MANNA [Metropolitan AIDS Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance] came from as well. So MANNA—the impulse for MANNA came out of that same need to feed people. People at First Presbyterian Church, who were involved in volunteering to put these things together. I think that was fairly—I'm not sure when MANNA was founded but I remember the day when the two people who founded it came to talk to me in my office, at my counseling office. And we sat there and talked about what such a thing would look like. So I think the best thing about those meals was this mix of people who—well, aside from the fact that 00:51:00there was food. Which was really, really important for folks who don't have food. And very important for people who were living with HIV in those days, whose food requirements were varied and sometimes very complicated, but who really, really, really needed food and often didn't have any money. So, that's one of the first things we did at the AIDS Task Force was form a—there was a fund there that I was administering called the John Locke Fund, and it was just—most of the money we spent out of the John Locke Fund was to pay for the food for people who had lost their jobs, been kicked out of their homes or whatever.

REED: What was the relationship like between ActionAIDS and We the People, and We the People and other organizations that existed at the time?

LITTRELL: Early? I think that the early relationship—I mean David was a firebrand, I mean he was something. [laughter] He was incredibly irritating 00:52:00sometimes, but he knew it, right? He meant to be irritating. And he was—his group, the group of people who initially formed We the People, I think—well, and this is true of the entire enterprise for the whole time I was involved with it: underlying everything was this enormous anger. I mean, like anger is now—that kind of anger: at a system, or set of systems, a government, a population who absolutely didn't respond and wouldn't respond. And Ronald Reagan and his crew who wouldn't even mention us by name. And everything. And that got internalized a lot in these organizations, I think. You know, a lot of this—like it does in families, you know? So there was a lot of anger floating around. And there was a lot of anger at We the People, 'cause—well, people were dying. I mean, in very unpleasant ways. 00:53:00And every day you'd wake up and say, "There must be a way of stopping this." So, I mean, there have been books now written about the anger. But that was a really, really—that was a very real thing. So the relationship between We the People and ActionAIDS was sometimes fraught with that kind of anger. At the same time I think that my memory of it was that there were—I remember board meetings where David would come in and shout and scream. But at the same time, I remember—well, I didn't know I'd been thanked in the newsletter but—there was that. I mean there was this—I never—I remember a lot of shouting. But there was always a lot of shouting. 00:54:00There was a lot of anger. And I guess I sort of thought, "Well, there's a lot of anger, of course there's a lot of anger. How can there not be a lot of anger? We're all angry." And it was also, you know, there's a lot of energy in anger if you harness it. And so, I thought well, "That's good." We the People, in some ways, was a way of using that energy and that anger to get things done. And it was a very effective advocacy organization. So, I hope we were allies for most of the time we were there.

REED: You mentioned David Chickadel—

LITTRELL: Well, you mentioned David, [laughter] I mentioned David. Yes, I did. Thank you for the 00:55:00 "Chickadel."

REED: He was one of the founders of the organization [We the People] but we haven't heard too much about what he was like. Can you describe him at all? What he looked like, and just what his personality was like.

LITTRELL: Yeah, although, did you ask Anna?

REED: No, we didn't really talk about him very much.

LITTRELL: You ought to ask her, if you get a chance to go back to her. She will tell you in detail. She has an incredible memory for these people. Well, she was—for one thing she knew them better than all of us. Because she was the sole provider of, sort of, case management. So all the early cohort of people that ActionAIDS was working with, she at one point was working with like, 125 people. And she was really into these lives, she knew folks deeply and well. And David was one of those people. And she could describe him. And she has an incredible memory for people. When we sit around, as we sometimes do 00:56:00and something will come up and we'll talk, I'm always amazed at her recall of particularly names. But in my memory, David was a, David was—well, everybody was thin. Everybody who was sick was thin. But David was always thin, I think. David was a thin person. And, I don't know, maybe 5' 10", thin, I think he wore glasses. He has a sort of sharp, angular face. Dark. And he was smart and he was vicious. [laughter] I mean, purposely vicious. Although he was also, I think, eventually—there was a lot of dementia floating around in the HIV/AIDS community, and the consumer community eventually. There were all kinds of weird brain diseases that people's brains got infected with various things. And people got pretty crazy. I mean literally, quite 00:57:00lost their minds. And at some point I think that began to happen to David. And his way of losing his mind was to get more and more and more angry and aggressive and sort of, out of control. And I remember there were times when we just sort of really worried about David being like, "Is he gonna, like, kill one of us, or kill himself or something?" He would be so, so distressed. But his anger around HIV/AIDS was completely legitimate. And his expression of it, especially in the early days when he was founding the organization, was very effective. You didn't want him coming into your meeting and calling you out about something—on the one hand; and on the other hand, you did sometimes. He'd show up somewhere where we all thought somebody needed to show up who could make an impression on this system. 00:58:00So, I don't know if that's helpful. I think he was young—I mean, compared to me. We were all young, but I was older than a lot of people. I think David was probably in his late or mid-20s. Maybe younger. And I can't remember how long he lived, maybe a couple years after We the People was founded.

REED: Who else do you remember from that time? Are there other personalities you could talk about?

LITTRELL: You mean from We the People or from—

REED: Mhmm. From We the People.

LITTRELL: From We the People. Well, one of the people who got involved at We the People fairly early on was a guy—he's still around—named Roy Hayes. Have you talked to Roy?

REED: Yes, we talked to Roy.

LITTRELL: Yeah. He was involved, I believe, early on. And he was—I know that he was at We the People when Karen and I went to work with them about organizational stuff. 00:59:00And I loved Roy. Roy was around at ActionAIDS when ActionAIDS got our first office, when we moved out of St. Luke's [The Church of Saint Luke and The Epiphany] back room and moved into the office that eventually became the We the People office at Broad and Locust. Roy was around a lot in that office, that's where I remember him. And he was involved 01:00:00early on at ACT UP, as was I, early on. So, I remember Roy a lot. One of the guys I worked with a lot when Karen and I were there was a guy named Bob, whose last name I'm not going to remember. I have all these people upstairs, I could bring it out and look 'em up. I have a bowl of, I have a pottery thing with a lid on it, in which are the names of everybody I knew who died of AIDS. And I have a project going, I'm writing poetry about those people. So, but Bob, his name I don't remember. Except, this is what I remember about Bob—he was a white guy, a gay white man, incredibly high energy, really, really good looking. Had been a Marine 01:01:00and had been blown up in Lebanon when the marine barracks in Beirut was blown up in the 80's. He was there.

REED: Was it Bob Pearson?

LITTRELL: Yes! Thank you!

REED: When you talked about him being handsome, somebody else mentioned him being handsome.

LITTRELL: Oh, he was incredibly good looking. He was charismatic. He was also very smart, he was also a huge, very good friend of mine, and he was determined to stay alive. He was one of those great people who just decided he was not gonna die. But did. And Bob was not as early as David. Bob probably was the next generation of people to come on and get engaged with We the People. But when he was there, he was certainly a leader, and he worked a lot with us in just trying to create ways of stabilizing things. There was a guy named—gosh, gosh, gosh—um, can't remember his name. 01:02:00African American man who was really good with friends with my friend Bill Roberts, who's a buddy leader—who was one of the first people who came, who also was one of the first people who came to meetings. Uh, he had a really interesting name, it may come to me. [laughter] And he lived in Powelton. And Kiyoshi [Kuromiya] was involved with everything, including We the People, very early—from the beginning, I suspect. And Kiyoshi was also like the—I don't mean to diminish anybody else's brains, including mine, but Kiyoshi was also the brains behind the operation, whatever the operation was. I mean, he was amazing. And he was—but he was also very low-key in the ways in which he engaged. So, he was—he was 01:03:00present and working on things that nobody even knew about, often. But he was involved early on with all of this stuff. In that sort of Kiyoshi way of his. I don't remember. But what I remember. If you mentioned somebody I probably would remember, but I don't.

REED: Kiyoshi was so universally beloved. What was it about him, you think, that made so many different personality types respond so well to him?

LITTRELL: Well, I met Kiyoshi in 1970. That's how far back we went together. When I began to work on Voyage House, we had this drop-in center in a house in Rittenhouse Square that the diocese owned—that was being torn down to make way for Rittenhouse Hotel. But, they had that. And Kiyoshi—I went out into Rittenhouse Square and to the walls that were closed briefly, where, then as now, people were sitting smoking dope and doing stuff. And there was Kiyoshi, sitting on a wall, 01:04:00like the pied piper, surrounded by these kids. And that's where I first met Kiyoshi. And I think, what Kiyoshi brought to this, and to every endeavor as far as I know was, incredible—well, he was a man of, I think, absolute, subversive 01:05:00integrity. [laughter] He hadn't much use for a lot of things. And he didn't have any use for people who were not, at least trying to live in that kind of way. And he was very impatient with people who were dishonest. And he was pretty impatient with people that were mean. But he also brought to everything he did an incredible amount, an incredible kind of intellectual construct. Which I think guided his work a lot. And he was—well, everybody knows he was our tech guy, way before there were tech guys, way before I knew any tech guys—I mean, he was it. 01:06:00So, he brought that to every game. But he also, he was an incredible reporter, and he was an archivist and he was an historian. And he had this past, from which he had learned an incredible amount about what people will do to each other. And I think he brought all of that. He was also very gentle in some ways. At least, in my relationship with him. He was always very kind. And I think he was—he was, I don't use this word very often about people, but he was a compassionate person, in a deep sense. But he was—he didn't tolerate venality. Especially when—well, venality is always purposefully—but he didn't like that. And he never, he was very careful about not associating himself too closely with anybody. Or anything. I mean, except the endeavors that he had—that was his work. 01:07:00He was a very easy person to respect—and to love. And a lot of people did. Does that answer your question?

REED: Yes, yes. That was great. I feel like he's—

LITTRELL: I miss him. He was—he did some things in relation to my work that were—and he was also an incredibly courageous guy. If he saw bad things happening he wouldn't even run. He didn't care.

REED: I feel like more than anybody else, he's really come alive with people's descriptions of him.

LITTRELL: Well, he was—everybody was afraid of David, who was a terror. I mean, David was a terror. David was horrible to everybody—I mean, pretty much everybody, including me—and vicious. And Kiyoshi is the only person I know who wasn't afraid of 01:08:00David Fair, and who would name it—and did, from time to time. And the only person David ever responded to, by amending his ways a little, perhaps. [laughter] But, I think that says something about the power of Kiyoshi's just lived—the way he lived his life. There weren't many people in Philadelphia that had that kind of personal integrity and the power that issues from it. There have been very few in my life, I would say, and he's one of them. So, I'm glad that he's coming alive for a lot of people. He was a wonderful guy. And he almost made it. Oh, it's so sad. That was one of the saddest deaths. But he wasn't sad.

REED: He wasn't?

LITTRELL: No.

REED: Did he know he was dying?

LITTRELL: Yeah. Yeah, 01:09:00absolutely, he was dying. Yeah. I was there. There was a little group of us there with him when he died. Yeah, he knew. He regretted it, but I don't think he was— I think he was disappointed not to stay alive to see what he had worked so hard for. I mean, most of his life—I mean, one of his big focuses was just getting—the same focus as ACT UP in some ways, and a small group of people around the country were just really focused on getting the pharmaceutical industry off its butt and engaged in this, and get them to do what they could do, what everyone knew they could do if they just spent some time and money and on it—and did do, you know, six months 01:10:00later. After he died. I think he was disappointed not to see what was coming next. 'Cause he had this idea—you know, his Critical Path [Project] idea. He thought he was on this critical path, and he was pretty sure where it was gonna end up. The last conversation I had with him was that he was just disappointed not to be able to see it. But he was very sure it was gonna come—that medical part was gonna come; he was not so sure the rest was gonna come. And lo and behold, it didn't. I mean, he was pretty sure this was gonna be an epidemic that would be global and become—well, it was global by the time he died, and it would become, you know, kind of evisceratingly global. 01:11:00And I don't think he had much confidence that path could be changed. But he thought it could be ameliorated a little bit. I think he was right about that. So, next? Before I start crying.

REED: At some point you went from thinking of yourself as a person living with HIV to somebody who wasn't living with HIV. When did that happen, and what was that like?

LITTRELL: Oh. Um, and I've never really told anybody that I thought I was a person—I mean, I had a few friends—my friend Pat, the psychologist I work with, knew, and Louis, my partner, knew. It was very uncertain. I don't know that I—I don't think I ever, when I say "I thought I was living with HIV," I guess what I thought was—and what John thought 01:12:00was—that as soon as the test came along I tested positive. I went to get a test in Atlantic City, as soon as the tests became available. But I went to Atlantic City because it was far away, and because I was afraid. And I tested positive for HIV in Atlantic City. And then I came back, and John re-tested me and I came back negative—as part of the DuPont study. And in those days, tests took a really long time. It was like six weeks, as I remember. And then he, you know, I kept getting tested after that. So, I knew, then both of us became pretty sure that whatever this was was HIV. But John's theory was that there was a group of people—and I think it's still my theory that there were a whole lot of people around like me who probably did have HIV and then it went away. That we just got beaten back for some reason or another. I have friends—same 01:13:00kind of thing, as happens with men who—like my friend Jesse Milan [Jr.] who has been living with HIV for, you know, 30 years. It's something that no one's yet figured out, why this little cohort of people stayed alive, long before there were drugs to keep you alive, to stay alive. And then there were—John had a huge patient population of gay men, and he said that there was a little cluster of us who had been sick in the late '70s and early '80s with what sure did look like HIV, that had just gone away. How it felt to me was relief. I remember how relieved I was. When I began—it wasn't sudden, because we never were sure. And I had all these other weird things going on in my body—still do, that no one can really explain—that were markers of HIV—that is to say, 01:14:00often accompany HIV. But I just remember when I got the first test back from John that I was surprisingly—I didn't realize how anxious I had been about it. I didn't have any clue how anxious I was. But I was very aware of the absence of that anxiety when I got that test back. That's how I felt.

REED: And over time it just held?

LITTRELL: As far as I know. [laughter] 'Cause, here I am. Yeah. And I never had a—I'll have a couple of other things that 01:15:00sort of auto-immune things that were those markers that are pretty rare, and that every now and then will, if I'm not careful, in moments of stress—I got sick after the election. And I'm pretty sure that was part of why. Because I think stress especially will knock me out. And this stuff won't come back. But I think that, you know, I've been pretty healthy since then.

REED: And what period of time—how long was it that you were living with the diagnosis?

LITTRELL: Well I never got a diagnosis. Cause there was no diagnosis to get. [laughter]

REED: From the time when you had that conversation with your therapist, up until—

LITTRELL: Oh. That was probably—I wanna say, four or five years. I think that 01:16:00conversation with my therapist happened in, I was living in St. Mark's Square so, maybe in '80? Maybe? That happened before the Task Force or any of that. Um, 1980–81? Whenever that article appeared is when that happened. And so from—and I had been sick the whole summer and fall before that. And so from then until probably 19-, well, whenever the test arrived. The first test. '85, maybe? You'd know. I don't remember.

REED: I don't remember either. You're just in this unique position of somebody who was doing this work, who was a member 01:17:00of that community.

LITTRELL: I don't think I was unique though. That's what I don't think it was. I really do think that a lot of us—I mean we—the period of time from 19-, well, particularly from Stonewall on, until HIV arrived on our doorstep, was for gay men a very lively period of time. And we were incredibly—I mean a lot of us were incredibly, incredibly—I mean sexual activity was social activity. There was like a—when I first came to Philadelphia in 1970, came back in '78–-'79, there was a bathhouse on Sansom Street called the Barracks. And every Tuesday night you could rent a $2 locker there. And everybody 01:18:00I knew could be found at the Barracks on Tuesday night. I mean people would just play, and then sit around and talk, and organize and do politics and do—I mean it was like your living room with sex on the side. [laughter] But everybody I knew was—I didn't—there were very few virgins in my acquaintance. And so I would say that in that cohort of seven people that sat in Nick's living room originally, every single person in that room with maybe the exception of my colleague Pat, who had been married and who was still married, actually, to a woman and had a child, I think was probably not sexually active outside his marriage for a long time. But everybody else probably, I think we all felt like we—if we weren't sick, we would be. I mean what we very early understood was 01:19:00that people who were dying in 1982, or -3 or -4, had been sick for a—or had been infected for a long time. And we found that out from a study of liver titers. That was done for hepatitis C and hepatitis B studies in Pittsburgh and somewhere out west. So there was this biological information about a cohort of gay men, 'cause hepatitis B was really epidemic as a consequence of a lot of that sexual activity. And so one early theory 01:20:00was that—and later it was verified—that these HIV antibodies were found in the blood of people whose blood was drawn in the mid-'70s. So we knew that people were living with this virus for a long time before they got sick. So I think we all just assumed we were going to eventually, sooner or later, you know, get sick. Until there was a test. There may have been a few people who didn't because they had never—they hadn't been sexually active one way or another. But I was not one of ‘em. And I don't remember very few people who were. So I don't know that I was unique in that way. The only unique thing was that I had been sick and somebody had pointed this out to me. A lot of us had been sick. I mean a lot of us had these strange, weird illnesses. And people were sick all the time with these sexually transmitted diseases. When I started doing my counseling practice, I had a practice of about—I saw probably 35 people a week, and almost all gay men. And 01:21:00I don't know, two-thirds of those guys died, but almost every single one showed up sooner or later with some kind of sexually transmitted disease going on. It was pretty nasty. So there was a lot of disease. Most of it—and everybody thought, "Well, it's all curable." You know? You can get a shot, or we can—the public health clinic at Broad and Spruce was like another great gathering place. People would show up for their penicillin, you know, after a weekend. Looking back it was very amazing, our confidence in this. Until we lost confidence. But I don't—I wouldn't want to say that I was unique. I don't think that was true. I think unless you bumped into somebody who wasn't involved in that— And this was not a racially defined community either. There was a Black bathhouse and a white bathhouse—that is to say, mostly Black at this one, and mostly 01:22:00white at this one—but they were both very full. And there was a lot of crossover. I don't know if there were—and bathhouses were just one venue for sexual activity. Sex was going on everywhere. So the first friends I knew who died were in New York, and they were people I'd met usually in some kind of sexual venue or another, or partially sexual venue. And they were—looking back, some of those guys died in like 1979–80. I'm sure they died of HIV. So I think we all thought we were gonna—that's I think, where a lot of the anger came from and a lot of the energy, as well, came from that sense that we were all doomed, in the early, early days, before the test. And then, when people started getting tested, then there was this—that's when, I think, We the People sort of became an issue. Because—maybe that's how it happened, actually, in 01:23:00terms of the narrative—because, until then there was no We the People. We were all "we the people"—I mean, all of us that were in this at-risk group of people. We were all sort of "we the people." And then there were people who weren't and there were people who were.

REED: And you were the interim executive director at We the People in '89, and then you became the executive director in 1990.

LITTRELL: Is that right?

REED: Mhmm.

LITTRELL: I didn't know that.

REED: At least according to the newsletters.

LITTRELL: I guess I was. That's I guess where—that was—I didn't realize I'd ever been the executive director. I thought—well, Karen and I, Karen Lundblad, who is still a good friend of mine. I'm gonna see her in a couple weeks. She was—I met Karen at Pennsylvania Hospital on my first hospital visit to see somebody at Pennsylvania Hospital with HIV, or with this strange disease. 01:24:00And Karen was a social worker there. and she was—she and her boss were just determined that people with HIV, or whatever this thing was, were not gonna have their dinners put out in the hall, and be left to die in their own poop. And that was an unheard of response in the hospital community in those days. So I met Karen there, doing that work. And then later she and I became partners in this—after I left ActionAIDS. You know, we put together this little consulting business called the AIDS Resource Group. And it was as the AIDS Resource Group that I went to We the People to do that work. I didn't remember that I had been 01:25:00the executive director. But maybe I was. Maybe that's what they called it. It's not how I remember it. I don't remember doing much direction. But I—that's interesting. It couldn't have been for very long.

REED: Mhmm. Yeah, it's just listed for a time in 1990. And then, did you write columns for the newsletter at some point?

LITTRELL: I'm sure I did.

REED: Okay. What would you have written about?

LITTRELL: I don't know. [laughter] I have no idea. I don't know, do you know—are the newsletters around? I guess you could find out.

REED: Yeah, there are.

LITTRELL: Did I write columns?

REED: You did, I'm trying to remember now what they were about.

LITTRELL: I would be interested to know. I don't know.

REED: Your 01:26:00name's in there. Yeah.

LITTRELL: I don't know. I was a busy guy in those days. I don't remember what I was writing about. Probably stuff that had to do with living with HIV and the organization, and probably diatribes, I don't know. I was pretty angry. That's interesting. I had no idea. Hmm.

REED: And what was your role in the creation of FIGHT?

LITTRELL: Well, FIGHT is Jane's creation. Well, I shouldn't say that. That would be a misstatement. Jane might think it was Jane's creation, but FIGHT was the creation of Jonathon Lax and Jane in partnership, I think. And maybe John, my friend John Turner. Jonathon was a person living with HIV. Had done very well in 01:27:00his career, had a lot of money, and was very, very, very smart—was another person who was really, really determined that we create an organization that would focused entirely on getting drugs developed that would stop this thing. And he spent a lot of time working in the pharmaceutical industry as a spot, so he—at the time, industrial espionage was his business, which was really an interesting thing. He was the first guy I ever knew who did that. And he was really, really good at it I guess. But Jonathon was determined that this could happen. He hooked up with Jane, who was determined about whatever it was she was doing—she was coming off, at the point, of a career in credit unions, where she had worked forming community credit unions. I think that's right. And I'm not sure quite how they got hooked up, but they did. I remember the first board meeting at Graduate Hospital, which turned out to be the focus for a lot of our early AIDS work. It was a hospital whose president was very hospitable and there was staff there, that 01:28:00was—that's where John was based, and all our early Task Force meetings were held there. And it was in a room at Graduate Hospital that we had our first board meeting and there were, I don't know, eight or ten people there. And I was—I don't know, brought on because Jane and I had sort of become friends, and I was involved at the Task Force and then ActionAIDS. And, I don't know—she just asked me to be on the board, so I did. Does that answer your question?

REED: Mhmm.

LITTRELL: I do know that early on—I mean, a group who were on the early board, and I stayed on the board for maybe four or five years—and I—that was, but I don't know—and I'm getting my narratives and my timeline a little confused here. Because I think FIGHT was born 01:29:00in—just before I went to [T]he [Philadelphia] AIDS Consortium, I think. Because I remember having a conversation with Jane later, I think I left the board for a bit when I was at AIDS Consortium, I wasn't on the board. I'm not quite sure when the—do you know when FIGHT was founded? Do you remember?

REED: I don't.

LITTRELL: Well, anyway, I know that I was there at the beginning, and then I think that there was period of time when I wasn't there. I remember—and Jane was on the board of the AIDS Consortium, and I remember she and I have a conversation in which she said to me, "Do not underestimate me." [laughter] I've never forgotten it. And I've thought, over and over, 01:30:00you know—anyone who would underestimate Jane Shull would be a fool. [laughter] But the early—the focus of the organization for several years after it was founded was just clinical research. And Jane had a larger vision, which was what FIGHT is now. That was always her vision. And so there came a time when some folks left and went off to do other things, because of the loss of focus, that we thought was gonna be originating focus. I was after Jonathon died; it wouldn't have happened had he been still alive. And it 01:31:00didn't—I think it turned out to be a good thing. But, it was just different. It wasn't the path.

REED: And you left the board, because of your involvement in the AIDS Consortium?

LITTRELL: I'm sure I left the board at one point because of my involvement in the AIDS Consortium. Then I think I came back on the board after I left the AIDS Consortium. I think I was on the board for a period of time—I'm sure I was on the board for a period of time after I left the AIDS Consortium. Now I'm not quite sure how that happened. That's a place where I don't know the narrative exactly. I was on no other boards when I was at the AIDS Consortium—that would have been a really bad conflict of interest. Everybody thought I had huge conflicts of interest anyway.

REED: Was it difficult to avoid the perception of a conflict of interest since you were at the Consortium and then there were organizations who you'd been—

LITTRELL: Oh, yeah, I guess it was, although everybody on the AIDS Consortium board had conflicts of interest. It was a consortium. [laughter] I mean, it was a—as I look back, I was so naïve. I don't know how 01:32:00I stayed naïve for so long, but I was. When I came to the AIDS Consortium I knew nothing about the political matrix of Philadelphia, or that—I didn't understand any of that at all. I was just trying to do a good thing. [laughter] That was my—and I didn't—yeah, everybody had a conflict of interest. Everybody on the board had a conflict of interest. It was like—it was a consortium. And so, the trick, from my point of view, was how do you balance these competing interests? It's not that there's an absence, you can't—I don't know a nonprofit in the world that doesn't have conflicts of interest somehow, in that sense, built into it. But my—I thought my job, and the job of the consortium was to stay as free of conflicts—to balance those interests so that there was no—to level that playing field. That was my goal, anyway, there, was to keep it level. And other people thought that it should be 01:33:00leveled in a different way, and maybe tilted in a different direction. But I think we did a pretty good job. I never felt bad about my tenure there. Except it was very hard work. It was just, you know, incredibly difficult.

REED: How did you find that balance?

LITTRELL: Organizationally, you mean?

REED: Yeah.

LITTRELL: Well, we built out an organization that we—I mean, we had groups of people who reviewed everything for conflicts of interest, we had rules about it—who could review. There was a lot of money at stake, so, I mean, had there been no money, there would have been no issue. But there was a lot of money. This was all the Ryan White money, and eventually all the state money and all the federal money came through this organization. And a very little bit came through the City. So we built review committees—Kiyoshi was key in that. 'Cause Kiyoshi was one of the people—Kiyoshi chaired the committee that reviewed proposals. Cause he was thought by everybody to be a person 01:34:00who would bring, you know, who would level that field, who would judge these things on their own merit. And we tried to get a group of people who were similarly—that was the principal way in which we did it. And then we had an independent staff who were not affiliated with anybody in particular, who reviewed progress and wrote plans. But that was a hugely political process, and so every stakeholder was at the table yelling, and often more, and so. And the City, which was, by then under the—when I was at the AIDS 01:35:00Consortium, Marla was at the City running that piece of the health department. And she really wanted all this money at the City. Except for—she had both theoretical and practical reasons for wanting that to be the case. And a lot of cities, that's where the Ryan White money went: it went into the City and then went out. And I think part of her view was that if it went through the City it would be more—it would be freer of conflict. And I wasn't convinced. It turned out not to be, particularly. For a long time it went to the City, and it was no less or more political there than it had been; just different. So there was that tug of war going on the whole time, as well. I think it was probably a fraught enterprise—at its creation. But I also think it was modeled on similar enterprises, 01:36:00HIV and AIDS enterprises all over the country. And in many ways I think we did a really good job.

REED: At some point did you transition out of working professionally in the world of HIV and AIDS?

LITTRELL: After I left that AIDS Consortium, yeah. Well, there was a transition—that's a good word. 'Cause I left the AIDS Consortium under some duress. And there was a lawsuit and stuff, so I—it was not a happy ending. Well, it was a happy enough ending for me, but it wasn't—it was a physically hard job for me. It was incredibly stressful. So when I left I was 01:37:00really tired, and I formed a little—yet another little company with a guy named Robert Esposito, who had raised money for the AIDS community. He was a guy who, at the AIDS Consortium, had worked for us writing grants mostly, and he was very, very good at it. And he and I put together a little company and started doing consulting, doing pretty much that kind of work not only for HIV and AIDS organizations but for anybody. And one of the jobs that we got, because, probably, of my experience, was essentially running the Cumberland County HIV/AIDS money. Which is a very different game of politics than the urban, Philadelphia matrix that I had been working in, 'cause it was rural and they got a whole lot of AIDS money because they had a huge prison population; there are like seven prisons in Cumberland County. And HIV 01:38:00was—every one of them was full of HIV. So they had these huge numbers, but a population about like, what?—25,000 people?—county-wide, maybe. And so I got really involved with them doing HIV work there, and doing HIV work on behalf of the state of New Jersey, and on behalf of this constituency around the country of rural AIDS—and those areas that were getting money because of some strange thing. Sometimes a whole state—like Vermont, or South Dakota—would get a grant, as part of Ryan White or another federal funding stream. But that territory is very, very different from, you know, Bergen County or Philadelphia, or DC, or Houston, 01:39:00or—and there was very little expertise. So I got involved for a couple of years working a lot with that group in Washington and in Jersey. That was fun. That was kind of a transition period. It was really interesting. That's where I bumped up against the pharmaceutical industry for the first time. So that was a whole different tale. Now there are vicious people. [laughter]

REED: You mentioned leaving the AIDS Consortium, you said under some "duress." Can you tell me about your experiences with that?

LITTRELL: Not a lot. 'Cause there was a lawsuit. But—I was, I think, wrongly accused of—well, I know I was wrongly accused of stealing money, a lot of money. And I don't know if the word was used, 01:40:00"stealing." Misappropriating. But hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it was not true. It was just a lie. There was no money misappropriated or otherwise misspent, as far as I know—at the AIDS Consortium. There were organizations that we funded—many of them, David's friends, who went to jail. Some of whom you've interviewed. [laughter] For misappropriating and misusing and misspending money. And there were some people in the health department who were similarly accused. But at the AIDS Consortium I don't think we—as far as I know we didn't misappropriate or misspend a dime. But there was an accusation made about me and about other people at the AIDS Consortium, that was proven untrue, but—it was thought, and I think I agreed, that it would be better for the AIDS Consortium if I left. But I didn't want to leave after having—I wasn't gonna leave with that kind of cloud over my head. So I wanted to be cleared of that. 01:41:00And I did what I had to do to get cleared of it. So that's about all I can say. It was hard. It was a hard time for me. And I don't think anyone ever seriously thought that I'd taken money. I think most people wanted to get rid of me because I was not giving money to their friends. [laughter] And I was perceived to be giving money to my friends, maybe. I just think I was giving money to people who were doing a good job. But Philadelphia has a political culture that has this kind of—well, this is probably insulting to pigs, but I call it the "pigs at the trough" culture. [laughter] And if there's a public trough to be at, then people will be there, and, you know, that was no less true of HIV/AIDS money than other kind of money. So, I got caught up in that. And I think maybe my Quaker formed character got in the way a little bit. One of your informants said to me, said to a friend of mine, famously—another person living with HIV—when he asked him why 01:42:00he was so upset with me, that in his view I was a good person trying to do a good job, and the response was, "Well, we've just had enough of goodness. There's such a thing as too much goodness." And maybe that's true, I don't want to make myself out as a saint, 'cause I'm not. But I mean, I think that had something to do with it. I just—that's enough said about that, I guess. It was, as these things go, a small—it didn't scar me for life, I don't think. It did, however, leave me exhausted. And so when I left the AIDS Consortium and went to do—I mean it didn't keep me from being able to make a living, or do what I wanted to do, or represent the kinds of things I wanted to represent or stand for what I stand for. It didn't impend on that at all. Certainly didn't stop my sister, who was the main, you know that's at the vector that really got people upset—was that she was running ActionAIDS while I was at the AIDS Consortium. 01:43:00Now, if anybody knew my sister and me, they would know there's no conflict of interest there. [laughter] Except maybe my fear of her. But—for either one of us. But, there were different—there were certainly different politics about that, you know, different political interpretations of how this money should be spent, based on political considerations and that's the same narrative that gets played out every day in places like the City, still. 01:44:00But it certainly didn't stop Ennes [Littrell] from continuing on the path that, you know, grew ActionAIDS into a sort of formidable thing. And then left behind Kevin [Conare]. Which was, I guess, a good thing. No, I just think it was all about money, and about who had it and who didn't and where it should go. Access.

REED: You had mentioned earlier, this is a pretty big shift—

LITTRELL: Shift away, I'm tired of that one. [laughter]

REED: You had mentioned some—I can't remember the words you used exactly, but 01:45:00parallels between what was happening back then and then what you see happening now under this new political climate, and administration.

LITTRELL: Oh, I was—yeah. I was talking about anger when I said that, and the anger that fueled our whole construction of a response to the epidemic, in its early and middle life, in the '80s and early '90s—that fueled ACT UP, that fueled the formation of these organizations that I was involved with. And it reminds—what's going on today, in terms of the "resistance," in these early days—and these are very early days. But I said to somebody the other day after I was marching in Center City in one of these marches, and there were a bunch of speakers at City Hall, and there was a very mixed group of people that were there. It was racially mixed, it was mixed by gender and sexual orientation and all kinds of things. And it was 01:46:00the first time, for me, since actually the late days of the civil rights movement and the early days of, sort of, feminism, and our gay rights stuff—the first time I'd seen a coalition of people across race and gender and so forth, at the same platform at the same time, genuinely focusing on the same sort of, perceived enemy, and the same goals of transformation and resistance. And it's—and I think that resistance is fueled, enormously, by anger. And some self-loathing perhaps, on our parts, for having allowed this to happen. I mean, some guilt floating around maybe a little bit. But I don't feel too guilty. But a lot of anger—I mean, it's sort of like, it reminds me a lot of those early days with HIV. Anger at people not paying attention, 01:47:00anger at letting—you know, it's not nothing when a nation is stolen. And that's my analysis of this, this sort of—I think it's not nothing, and I think that there's just legitimate anger. I hope it—my concern about it is that it sustains itself over time. I hope people don't just burn out in the first month. That's always my caution to my young colleagues who are out there being angry. But I'm really, really impressed with the rapidity with which people are getting organized in a really serious way. You know, not just sort of floundering and flailing about, but actually building out constructs that will last. And that's what we tried to do in those days, was actually construct stuff that could sustain this onslaught. And sustain those of us who were involved and affected by it. I don't think this growing movement right now is on purpose very good at taking care of 01:48:00its members so much. But I think that will come. There's a certain amount of caretaking just by being involved in organizations like that. That's what I meant though. Does that make sense?

REED: Do you feel hopeful that the anger will be transformative in any way?

LITTRELL: Oh yeah.

REED: Sustainable?

LITTRELL: Well, I think—I don't know. I think the anger will be sustained. I think people may underestimate—and this is a lesson that I learned not so much at the AIDS Consortium or in Philadelphia, but when I was working in Washington with the states and the 01:49:00jurisdiction in the sort of heart of the beast down there. I think people may underestimate how ruthless people like the crew in the White House right now can be, when given the kind of power that is inherent in that place that they are. That's a whole lot of power, and a whole lot of bad mixed together. And 01:50:00I'm hopeful. Because I think it might self-destruct. If yesterday's little display is any—I mean, I don't think that's sustainable, that kind of performance, government by performance. I think it's got a short shelf life, even for my Republican friends in the Senate, I think. I think about half of them will see the light before six months go by. Or see some light—mostly the light they'll see is that they're in danger. They themselves will be. Yeah, I think the anger will sustain, cause I think people are gonna get really badly hurt and the more people get hurt the angrier they're going to be at something.

REED: Oh, could you watch the mic?

LITTRELL: Oh, I just did that!

REED: Everybody does it.

LITTRELL: I just did—

REED: I would do it, everybody does it.

LITTRELL: That means I've forgotten the mic, which is, I guess, a good thing. Ah, so that's what I meant. And it's very similar to 01:51:00me—feels similar to me. And I'm not nearly as engaged in the actual construction of these enterprises, but I have joined this group in Philadelphia—mostly women that is now Philadelphia Up, I think it's called. But it's like, you know—I don't know how big that group is now, it's a Facebook group—secret Facebook group, which makes me laugh. [laughter] But, you know it's a group of, I don't know, maybe 10,000 people? Most of whom, at the beginning, were women, who just blow me away in terms of how well-organized and how focused, and how—I think, effective. They are deploying these troops like me, you know, and it's not a lot of flailing tolerated. And it's not mean governance, but it is governance. 01:52:00And it is a similar organization I belong to of Quakers, who have a lot of difficulty with that organizational stuff, 'cause consensus is hard. But I belong to a national group of Quakers called Quaker Uprising, and there, too, there is this sense of long-term purpose and focus and lots and lots of different people from all over the place engaging. So I'm—we'll see. But it's very early. And bad things—before the election, I used to say to my friends—'cause I'm from North Carolina and after I retired from St. Mary's in 2012 I was planning to go to Vermont to live for a couple of years, because they told me I couldn't be having any contact with the people I had in my church, which for me was very hard because I had been associated with St. Mary's my whole life in one way or another. So I thought I'd just get out town for a while, Louis and I were thinking about going to Vermont to retire. But then my daughter got very, very sick 01:53:00and I spent the better part of that winter in North Carolina with her, and it was then that—that was the winter that the Tea Party Republicans took over the state of North Carolina, and I was living with an Episcopal priest, a woman down there who took me in, and with her family. And every morning she and I would get up and look at the—they have a really good newspaper in North Carolina, in Raleigh, called News & Observer—we'd get up and, as I do with the New York Times these days, and look at the headlines and think, you know—what fresh hell do we have 01:54:00for us today? Really, I mean it was like every day something enormous had happened. So I started telling people when this thing with Trump seemed like it might happen, "What you need to do is be very careful not to underestimate these people." Like Jane. They move very fast. So, what encourages me—and they are moving very fast in the states that they control—but at the national level they are not moving very fast. There was an article in the Times today about how frustrated Paul Ryan is that he's not getting anything done because of the chaotic nature of the White House, it's very hard for them to focus on their 01:55:00real agenda. Which from my point of a view is a really good thing—I'd rather have chaos in the White House than that agenda passed. So, that's where my hope comes from. I think chaos will be productive, but not maybe in the way they think.

REED: Anything else you want to talk about?

LITTRELL: Anything else you want to ask me about?

REED: I don't think so.

LITTRELL: Let me see if there is. [pause] No. That's enough.

REED: Okay. All right, thank you. [Pause in Recording] Okay, so we're recording again.

LITTRELL: Okay. So this is what—this goes back to the time when ActionAIDS was formed, 'cause it was a very quick formation, it happened—almost [snaps fingers] like that. There was big meeting of all the people who were buddies 01:56:00at St. Luke's. I made a speech about our needing to form something—we called a meeting of people who were interested in forming the organization, that was held down at my church in Grays Ferry. I was, then, Louis and I lived down there, I was like a quarter-time vicar at this little church, this whole time. So we met down there, which was really strange in and of itself, if you had known Grays Ferry then. It was the home of the most rabid, racist white people in Philadelphia, probably. And we lived there, right in the middle of that community. Well, on the one side of the street were rabid, racist white people; and on our side of the street there were this old, ancient African American community that had been—used to go from Pine Street down to about Washington Avenue. So it was a very interesting place to be. But anyway, they had a huge—what was called a parish hall—big room, so we had this big meeting. And that's how ActionAIDS was formed. It was formed at that meeting, and we organized and put 01:57:00together committees and groups, and task forces and this and that, and it all didn't take very long. So there's all these—I found a file up there with all these sort of formation documents in it that I should give to somebody. But, at the same time as this was happening, there were meetings of the Task Force going on at Graduate Hospital, and very soon after we made our move, Rashida [Abdul-Khabeer, formerly Rashida Hassan] showed up and made the BEBASHI [Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues] move—and formed BEBASHI out of that. Same, kind of, matrix gave birth to two organizations, and BEBASHI was the other one. And that was exactly what it was named. And it was Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues, and it was—our compact, the sort of nascent kind of 01:58:00agreement I made with Rashida, I think, was that we would focus on support services and case management and care issues, and she would focus on education, and prevention and stuff. in the African American community in Philadelphia; which was a good, I think, territorial split. We didn't want to do education and prevention at all. I mean we really did want to focus, as an organization, at least initially on the care stuff. But it would be a huge oversight not to mention that, because that—I think BEBASHI perhaps wasn't always the most effective organization in the world, but it made a huge difference in terms of representation, and did a lot of really important work. 01:59:00And I am a huge admirer of, and am more of an admirer now than perhaps I ever have been, of Rashida. So, I don't know if you've talked to her.

REED: Mm mm.

LITTRELL: I think you should. I think you should. Do you know who she is?

REED: Yes.

LITTRELL: I think you should. She has quite a story to tell. And she'd be a really good informant with a different, really, really different perspective on it. But she watched this whole thing unfold; it'd be interesting to see how she remembers it. But I would trust that memory pretty much. She was a real pioneer. She was a pioneer way more than me, or any of us. She was an African American woman, Muslim woman, talking about sex 02:00:00and sexual orientation in a positive way in 1985, in Philadelphia. That's a pioneer. And I think she gets airbrushed out of the picture a lot, and I don't like that. I saw her last at the ActionAIDS, whenever it was—35th anniversary gala. She and I sat together, and we had such a good time. We had the best time. She turns out also to be very funny. [laughter] Do you know the song, "My Funny Valentine?" So they had a very bad vocalist at that event—were you there?

REED: No.

LITTRELL: It was a very strange event. It was strange to me because it was so white. It was really, really full of rich, white people. 02:01:00But we were sitting together and this very bad vocalist who was the entertainment, sort of launched herself into "My Funny Valentine." And Rashida turned to me and she said, "You know, I've never liked that song. Have you ever listened carefully to those lyrics?" And she proceeded to recite lyrics as this woman was singing them, and they are awful. I mean—the woman being described as "my funny valentine" is just eviscerated. I mean, she sounds like a complete—I can't remember the words. But if you look up the words and just sort of read them, you'll see what I mean. And it was incredibly funny. And it's very, very sexist, just hugely disrespectful of the valentine of the song: "When you open [them] to speak," out comes garbage, essentially. But Rashida would be a good thing. 02:02:00If you're gonna do an oral history you should talk with her.

REED: I think next year's interviews are going to be women specifically, women of faith is who they would like to speak with next.

LITTRELL: Well, that would be good, but it wasn't principally as a woman of faith that she was doing this. She was really—she was as much of a pioneer in the HIV/AIDS and founding person as anybody I know. And David always took credit for Rashida, but I think that Rashida never needed David. I got to Rashida from Tyrone [Smith], but I think that her contribution to this, in terms of the racial divide in the HIV/AIDS world, 02:03:00that persists to this day, was enormous. And undervalued. That's all I wanted to say about that. That's an important thing to include though, I think.

REED: Thank you.