SHABAZZ-EL: Okay, so this is Remembrance listening session. Today is Wednesday,
August 26, 2020, and we're here with Tom [Wilson-] Weinberg today. So we're going to go ahead and start the session by sharing our screen and just giving Tom a little brief introduction to the program. But before we do that, let's get some recording permissions. So Tom, are you all right with this session being recorded, and we have your permission?WILSON-WEINBERG: Yes.
SHABAZZ-EL: Perfect. And we may plan to use some actual footage—Ain there may
plan to use actual footage or materials from this session in some way in the future. Do we have your permission for that, as well?WILSON-WEINBERG: Yes. I wonder if there might be some question about permissions
for the people that I speak about?SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah, that's a good question. So the one thing that we've been
telling people is that if the person was not out with their HIV status, the person you're going to talk about, that you can feel free to give them a pet name or give them 00:01:00a nickname. That is your choice, and that's what we've been telling people and a couple people have chosen that option. And that's certainly your choice.WILSON-WEINBERG: Okay. So, actually, I'm speaking about two people.
SHABAZZ-EL: Oh, great.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Right—who are both deceased.
SHABAZZ-EL: Great. Yeah.
WILSON-WEINBERG: So I don't know if that means one doesn't need any permission, but—
SHABAZZ-EL: So, both of these people are deceased, that you're speaking about.
This is a program collecting stories of persons who are deceased, or who had lived with HIV. And so when we get to that part, we'll give you some time to think about it. You don't have to decide right this minute. Let's introduce ourselves. And we're just going to do that by saying our names, our geographical locations, our pronouns, the communities we identify with, and maybe one lesson that we've learned from this COVID outbreak. And I will start since I'm 00:02:00already talking and always talking. I'm Waheeda Shabazz-El. I am located—I'm here in West Philadelphia, right near St. Joseph's University. My pronouns are she, her, and beautiful. The communities I identify with are seniors, people of color, LGBT people, people living with HIV, formerly incarcerated people, people who are recovering from drugs and alcohol, and I could go on and on and on, but I'll stop there. And one lesson that I've learned from the COVID outbreak is how so connected we are as a human race: that what you breathe out, I have to breathe in, and how we have to, like, really depend on each other to live healthy, particularly right now, during this outbreak. Yeah. 00:03:00So, there goes—I wear the mask every time I go out, and for those who don't want to wear it, that's your choice. But I think that we really have this interaction that goes deeper than we really realize right now. And so I will pass it on for someone else to introduce themselves.GORDON: I'll go. I'm Ain. I'm in Brooklyn, New York, where I live. My pronouns
are he/him/his. Communities I identify with are definitely LGBTQIA, all the letters, seniors, artists—I could go on and on, too. I don't know, I'm just naming ones which—who I—to whom I belong. One lesson I've learned from COVID—don't trust one source, ever.SHABAZZ-EL: Thank you, Ain.
GROSS: I
00:04:00can go next. My name is Steven. I am in South Philadelphia, near East Passyunk, on Lenape land. I use he/him/his pronouns. I identify with the queer community, young people, students, artists, theater makers, activists, allies, advocates, coconspirators. Sure, we'll leave it there. One lesson I learned from COVID is that time is absolutely meaningless, and you can do a bazillion things in the day or nothing that day and it still somehow makes one day.SHABAZZ-EL: That's brilliant. Thank you so much, Steven. And Tom, would you want
to introduce yourself?WILSON-WEINBERG: Sure. Tom Wilson-Weinberg is my name. I live in Center City,
Philadelphia, and that's where I am sitting right now. I identify as 00:05:00an LGBTQ person, a longtime political activist, a musician—I'm a songwriter and a performer—and a senior citizen and a Jew, and proud atheist. COVID has been extremely upsetting to me. And I find that one of the things about it that is so terribly difficult is how much it changes every day, the new information—GORDON: Oh, you
00:06:00 froze.SHABAZZ-EL: His bandwidth, maybe. We're not hearing you right now, Tom. Please
come back. So what may have to happen? Okay, so we just missed the—yeah. Could you—will you speak because you kind of froze for a minute.WILSON-WEINBERG: Oh, did I? I got a message—
SHABAZZ-EL: When you were talking about COVID—you said it changes every day.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Yeah. So I think I said that, that's the part that's been so
hard for me to get used to, even after four months of experiencing it.SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah. Great. Okay, great. So now that we're buddies, we all know
each other, we are going to introduce the project to you and give you a little background. Then we're going to ask you to share for about 10 or 12 minutes about a person or persons that you want to be remembered in this memorial. And then we're going to ask you a few questions, Tom, because we want your input into what this memorial should look like, so we'll ask you some questions in the end. 00:07:00And then there's a compensation form that I will send you in an email directly after this call, along with a thank you letter for joining us. So I'm going to ask Ain, will he, would you mind giving Tom a little background?GORDON: So Remembrance—what is it? Remembrance is a memorial to, or will be a
memorial to Philadelphians and the HIV and AIDS crisis enacted through civic and theater performances and oral histories. It is a project of the William Way LGBT community Center and its John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, in partnership with artists, activists, and community leaders. There are numerous components to Remembrance. One of the components is a community listening tour, which is what we're doing right now, to gather untold accounts 00:08:00of community members who are now deceased but have lived with HIV, who may have passed either unnoticed or uncelebrated, or unremembered. The collected stories we gather will be added to the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives. Also, there will be a dedicated portal on the William Way LGBT Community Center website for the whole project. And the input we receive from community members will be vital to shaping a memorial down the road to HIV/AIDS here in Philadelphia—or there, since I'm not there.SHABAZZ-EL: Perfect. You want to keep going, Ain? You're doing so well.
GORDON: Remembrance team includes program coordinators—that would be Waheedah,
and others—grant writers, a faith leader who's not on this call right now, community engagement coordinators, which Waheedah calls GALS, —that's Waheedah, too—artists, and a playwright. That's me.SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah. And the actual program coordinator
00:09:00is Chris Bartlett, who's the executive director of the William Way LGBT Center in Center City. And so we're gonna stop and see if Tom has any questions for us before we go ahead and ask him to talk.WILSON-WEINBERG: I think I don't have any questions at the moment.
SHABAZZ-EL: I just want to take a minute to just thank both Steven and Ain
because they are not facilitators of this project. They are observers of this project, pretty much, but they're also willing to help out. So, with that, I'm going to see if Steven—do you want to help with the next part or you want to ask the questions in the end?GROSS: Whatever's good for you.
SHABAZZ-EL: Why don't you do this?
GROSS: All right. So we are going to start the process of hearing your story and
you talking about those that you wish to remember. As Waheedah said earlier, 00:10:00if the person you're sharing about was not open about their status when they were alive, feel free to use a pet name or a nickname, if you want to. And we really just want to know what you want the world to remember about this person, both who they were—their personalities, what they liked, what they did in their free time, who they were as a person—as well as struggles that they had—if you want to talk about—with their family, or with their sexuality, or with their diagnosis, and what that was like for them. And, just in general, we just want to keep the memory of this person alive with this project, so anything and everything that you wish to share with us. You'll have about 10 minutes, and I will give you a two-minute warning. I'll put up two fingers when you are at, like, nine-ish minutes so that you can wrap it up, but you don't have to come to a stop right then. Any questions about 00:11:00 that?WILSON-WEINBERG: No.
GROSS: All right.
SHABAZZ-EL: So can you tell us the first person that you're going to talk about
today, Tom?WILSON-WEINBERG: Oh, yes. I'll just use his first name, Barry.
SHABAZZ-EL: Mary?
WILSON-WEINBERG: Barry.
SHABAZZ-EL: Barry.
WILSON-WEINBERG: B-A-R-R-Y.
SHABAZZ-EL: Barry, okay.
WILSON-WEINBERG: And he is a person that I met many years ago. I can't exactly
remember when we first met, but it was through some sort of political endeavor. And it would have been in 1974 or -5. We were on a committee together. And at the time, Barry, who was a lawyer, was identifying 00:12:00as a heterosexual person. He was a few years older than I. And we—in his work, he was involved in social issues. And he worked for Community Legal Services. I might go back a little bit and say that he was born into a very privileged family. His family had a large business and they were quite wealthy. They didn't particularly want him to go into the business. They wanted him to become a lawyer. But they didn't expect, I think, for him to become the lawyer that he wanted to become, which was not a corporate lawyer or a tax lawyer or a divorce lawyer. 00:13:00He wanted to represent people who needed—who couldn't afford legal advice. And he was a person with a big heart and very good values. He was, I think, quite tormented by his own sexual feelings and he acknowledged in a book—he and his wife wrote a book. I'll hold up part of the cover for you just so you can see it, because I'm not sure if I want to use his wife's name or not—but obviously they weren't hiding much of what I'm going to tell you because they wrote a book. And the book was published by Prentice Hall, a respectable and important publishing company. And it's called Barry and—well, I'll call the 00:14:00other partner Alice. It was about their bisexual marriage, which they didn't really quite discover for a while, when they married. Barry was quite closeted. And I don't know to what degree he shared his sexual feelings for men with Alice or not. But they had a loving relationship, they were—and I do recall feeling in my own young days as coming out as a gay man that I was skeptical about bisexuality as a legitimate sexual orientation. And I do think that a lot of people did say it was easy, as a step, to say, I'm bisexual. 00:15:00Just made it a little easier. And then eventually maybe they would come out and say, well, I am gay, or I am a lesbian. Barry changed my mind about that because he was bisexual, and his love and sexual attraction for Alice was decades in length. Eventually, he did come out, and they agreed, after some struggle, to stay together because they loved each other, but they also allowed each other to have other relationships. And all of this is in the book, so this—I'm not breaking any news. This was public information. Barry was born in 1943, and Alice 00:16:00in 1945. They both went to Temple University, and that's where they met. And they married in 1966. Barry went to law school at the Dickinson School of Law, which is in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Alice studied social work after her undergraduate years, and she got a degree from Bryn Mawr [College] and became a therapist and a social worker and therapist. They went into the Peace Corps together. They did their training in Fort Rico, and then their service in Panama. They worked with extremely needy people. 00:17:00And then they came home to Philadelphia after their tour with the Peace Corps, and that's when Barry went to work for Community Legal Services and Alice worked as a social worker. They had a baby in 1972. They had a big circle of friends. And at a certain point, as I mentioned earlier, Barry and I met at a meeting. And he asked me to come to lunch with him after the meeting. And he came out to me and for some reason, right away, felt that he could tell me some things and 00:18:00he knew a little bit about my own background, and he thought I would be—in the book, he says something of a mentor and therapist. I didn't think of myself as either. I'm not qualified to be a therapist, and I don't want to be a therapist. But I think I was helpful to him in that I listened to his struggles. And he eventually came out. And we—the governor had an organization—I wrote it down here somewhere because my memory for it is a little bit vague, but—it was a commission for sexual minorities [Pennsylvania Council for Sexual Minorities, created in 1976] that was assembled by Governor Milton Shapp. This was in the 00:19:00mid-'70s,—and nothing like this had ever happened in any state before—but he put together an organization, a committee, to deal with sexual minority issues. And Barry at that point was working for the attorney general. He was an assistant to the attorney general of the state of Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and he was in the civil rights division of the attorney general's office. And I was on the governor's commission,. and Barry went to the meetings representing the attorney general's office. And then my husband John who participated in one of these—SHABAZZ-EL: Yes.
WILSON-WEINBERG: He and I became socially friendly with
00:20:00Barry and Alice. They lived nearby; we hung out with them. At first, Alice didn't really want to know us. Barry told her about us, but she didn't want to know us. But then, at a certain point, she gave a birthday party for Barry and invited us. We were the only gay couple, or out gay couple there. But apparently she sized us up as okay. Her heterosexual friends decided that they liked us and she decided that she liked us and we became quite close. At a certain point they did decide to separate; this was some years later. Barry felt that he had to become—he had to have the gay life that he missed as a young person. 00:21:00And he gave up being a lawyer. He went to Key West and worked as a house boy in a gay guest house. And it was probably there that he contracted AIDS. And he and Alice still maintained a relationship, but from afar. And then she remarried and moved to South Carolina with her husband. In 1987—and I'll wrap this up pretty quickly now—I was not living here. I was living—my husband and I were living in Boston. But a show of mine was running at the Walnut Street Theatre in one of the studio theaters there, and I came down to be with the show for a month. And I hadn't seen Barry in quite a while, and to my surprise, he came to the show. He was very 00:22:00weak. He was held up by two friends who brought him. I was so touched to see him, we had a nice talk, and then they helped him out. And then he invited me to come to lunch a few days later, which I did, to his mother's house. And he got so sick that day that we had to stop the lunch and I left, and that's the last time I ever saw him. He died a little while later. I was in Boston at the time that he died, so I wasn't present for his demise, or his memorial service. And a sad little touch: Alice, some years later, died of AIDS. I had fallen out of touch with her when she moved to South Carolina. I don't know if her husband contracted AIDS. But 00:23:00that's my story.SHABAZZ-EL: Wow, thank you, Tom. Very compelling. I'm going to open up and see
if Ain or Steven have any questions. I have a couple, but I'll let you guys go first.GORDON: Do you know if he—did he have a partner in the end of his life? Or was
he single?WILSON-WEINBERG: He was single. He did have partners. He had boyfriends over the
years. But he didn't have a long-term partner and he was single at the end of his life.GORDON: And would that be in the mid- to late '80s that he passed away—or do you
remember when? Uh oh, he froze.SHABAZZ-EL: It was 1987.
GORDON: Did he say?
SHABAZZ-EL: Did Tom freeze again? Looks like Tom froze.
WILSON-WEINBERG: I beg your pardon?
SHABAZZ-EL: I thought you were frozen again. We can hear you though. No, we can
hear you.WILSON-WEINBERG: Oh, okay. He died at the age of 44.
00:24:00He—I see a sign here that says my internet connection is—SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah, your bandwidth is getting low. That's why you keep freezing
but you're okay.WILSON-WEINBERG: I'm okay. I'll just—we'll muscle our way through it. I'm sorry
if I'm freezing up. His life was full and he did the things that he wanted to do. But it was also a sad life, I think, in so many ways. He was such a terrific person and I miss him. We were good friends. But John and I, as I said, we were away. We were away from Philadelphia for eight years. And actually it was during the major part of the introduction and huge outbreak of AIDS in 1981—in Minnesota for three years 00:25:00and then five years in Boston. So we were away from Philadelphia for those eight years when AIDS was such a big thing everywhere, of course.SHABAZZ-EL: Tom, could I ask you about—you mentioned that, you know, his family,
they wanted him to be a lawyer, but they thought he would be a corporate lawyer. They didn't know he was going to be a lawyer for marginalized folks. But his family still supported him and that's what I'm hearing. How did his family support—how did his family feel about his sexuality, when he decided to come out? Were they supportive?WILSON-WEINBERG: You know, I actually, I'm not sure about his parents. His
father died, and his mother was still living when Barry got sick. And he went to her home, because she knew he was dying of AIDS—died at her home. Alice's mother 00:26:00was—parents were more accepting of the whole situation. But I don't know if his father lived long enough to really experience the choices that they made.SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah. Did he have any siblings—you know? Was he an only child or did
he have siblings?WILSON-WEINBERG: He had a brother and a sister.
SHABAZZ-EL: Okay, there were three of them. I wanted to say I liked the way you
talked about him coming out, as people were coming out and saying bisexual seemed to be a step before just saying that, I'm gay. And I need to say, I can really relate to you because my stepfather came out as gay. And it was right, it was all right there, my mother was there, and we all kind of watched it come out, and he still remains to be the best dad that a girl could have, even through all that. I just want to ask you a question. You said 00:27:00you were not there for the memorial, or the whatever. Do you know if there was a memorial?WILSON-WEINBERG: No, I actually didn't hear that he died for quite a while. And
I don't know if there was a memorial. And it wasn't until some years later, when we had moved back to Philadelphia, and I ran into a cousin of Alice's on the street—I had known him from many years ago—and I asked him about Alice. And it was he who told me that she had died. But I was away for the death and for the memorial service. And I actually don't even know if there was one. I could probably find out.SHABAZZ-EL: Okay. Is there a picture around of Barry? Is there a picture in that
book, like on the insert or something?WILSON-WEINBERG: Well, yes.
SHABAZZ-EL: We could probably get a picture.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Yeah. So this is the book
00:28:00and that's—can you see that?SHABAZZ-EL: I can see that. I can see him on the left, right? Is that Barry on
the left?WILSON-WEINBERG: Yes. And then you can see Alice and their little kid.
SHABAZZ-EL: Oh, wonderful. That's a nice story. That's a nice picture. We need
to get a picture of that—maybe you could take a picture of that and send us a picture of that. We'll put that with his story, if that's okay. Steven, do you have any questions for Tom?GROSS: No questions here.
SHABAZZ-EL: You said Barry had a big heart. He had great core values. You said
he was just a great person. I'm just wondering when he did decide to come out, how old was he? He died so young at 44.WILSON-WEINBERG: Yes. Let's see.
00:29:00I have a note here.SHABAZZ-EL: We're just hoping he had some years of, you know, living his life,
living his own truth.WILSON-WEINBERG: Well, I think he did. I think he lived his life in Key West. He
had a good time. He made friends. John and I went down to visit once and we saw him briefly—and we had quite a few friends in Key West. Sounds a little preposterous, but all of our gay friends in Key West died. And we stopped going there. It was just too sad for us. Some people went there to die, I think, and others, like Barry, 00:30:00came home to their family, to his mother, in this case. I do know that there was a memorial service for Alice, because I—the other day, in preparation for this, I did a little bit of research on the internet and discovered when she died and when the memorial service was. And to my surprise, I know that the doctor she married was Catholic.SHABAZZ-EL: Okay.
WILSON-WEINBERG: The memorial was held at a Catholic funeral parlor. And so, I
don't actually know whether she changed her religion or not. She was Jewish. Barry was Jewish. I was taken by—in lieu of flowers, the family requests memorials be made to Doctors Without Borders.SHABAZZ-EL: Oh, okay.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Which Barry and Alice both would have
00:31:00 liked.SHABAZZ-EL: You say you don't remember a lot, but you remembered a whole lot.
You gave us a really beautiful story about an amazing person who died young but who lived their truth, even going into the Peace Corps and learning what it is to be marginalized, working with people who were in poverty, and then coming back and being able to do that work here, his wife as a social worker and he as a lawyer for Community [Legal] Services. Yeah, thank you so very much for sharing, and we will be stewards of Barry's story for you. And I know you've probably held this story for a very long time, but that's what this program Remembrance is about. It will be archived. It will be on the portal of the William Way website. 00:32:00And it will also be a part of this great memorial that—I don't know what part Ain's going to use in the play—but we'll see, right?GORDON: We will see.
SHABAZZ-EL: This is emotional labor. And I want to ask you, Tom, did you want to
go on with another person? Or did you want to make another—do another session for another—you talked about another person. You mentioned that you want to mention two people.WILSON-WEINBERG: Oh, well, I was referring to Alice.
SHABAZZ-EL: Alice? Okay. I wanted to make sure. Because we kind of did—okay,
perfect. That was two people. So, yeah, sounds like Alice was an amazing woman. She reminds me a lot of my mother, because my mother was there when my dad came out and she was just supportive. That's all I remember. I remember her being very supportive. I don't remember any arguments, no fighting, no anything. It was his choice. He sold Avons. Back then, 00:33:00you went door to door selling Avons, right? So yeah, he was a supervisor at the Acme market somewhere, but in the evening, he went out and sold Avons door to door. And then he started using the products. I'm like, okay, this is interesting. But it was, he was a wonderful, wonderful person. And he was the best dad a girl could ever have. So we just have a few questions for you, if that's okay, and then we'll finish up.WILSON-WEINBERG: Okay.
SHABAZZ-EL: So Steven, you want to ask these questions or—?
GROSS: Sure.
SHABAZZ-EL: Great. Thank you.
GROSS: So, first question we have is, do you remember when you first heard of
HIV and AIDS and what was that like?WILSON-WEINBERG: Yes, I do remember. I was in Rehoboth Beach. And I was on the
beach with friends, and 00:34:00my friends fell asleep. I was looking at a guy a few blankets away. His friends had fallen asleep, and we're looking at each other. This would have been in, I think, maybe 1980 or 1981. And we got up and walked together—neither of our groups even knew it—and we spoke and he invited me to come back to the guest house he was staying in. And when we got there, he showed me an article from the Washington Post [likely the July 3, 1981 article in the New York Times titled "Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals: Outbreak Occurs Among Men in New York and California—8 Died Inside 2 Years"] about eight gay men in Los Angeles who all had appeared with similar symptoms of a disease and that it was probably sexually conveyed. And pretty soon 00:35:00it was called GRIDS [sic]—Gay Related Immunodeficiency—and we both were worried about it. We both proceeded to have unsafe sex. And that's my memory of first hearing about AIDS.GROSS: Very specific memory.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Yes. I might also say that John and I were already together at
that point—we never have been monogamous for the 46 years of our loving marriage—but he was getting medical journals. And he started reading about AIDS very early on before there was much information about it. So he and I knew early what was going on.GROSS: Awesome. Thank
00:36:00 you.GORDON: It's interesting foreplay to show you that article.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Yes, really. [laughter] I could have just walked right out the
door, but it seemed so—well, first of all, it was three—eight people who are sick—3000 miles away from us.SHABAZZ-EL: Exactly.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Yeah.
GORDON: Right. And then you had just what was normal sex? Because we didn't have
safe sex yet.WILSON-WEINBERG: That, well, that's right. Safe sex, you say?
GORDON: Yeah, didn't really exist. We didn't have that term yet.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Right. We felt quite free to have sex without condoms; there
was no chance of making a baby. So yes, the idea of gay men wearing condoms—that was still a few years away.GROSS: Thank you.
WILSON-WEINBERG: You're welcome.
GROSS: The next question that we have is, do you remember the first funeral or
memorial service you attended for someone who died of 00:37:00HIV- or AIDS-related illnesses? Can you describe what that was like?WILSON-WEINBERG: The first service that we went to—well, memorial event—was—John
and I moved to—we were in Philadelphia for the first seven years of our relationship. Then we moved to Minneapolis for three years where he did a medical residency, and we started, with another man, the Minnesota AIDS Project. There were only a few people in the state with AIDS, and we had a lot of volunteers and very few people who needed us. We sort of, I think, overwhelmed the people who had AIDS. But a few of them died pretty early in the epidemic. And the first memorial event that we, that I remember, 00:38:00was held at our home. And it was to talk about and remember a very young man who died of AIDS. He had lived in San Francisco and he came back to be with his family, and they really did not take him in, so he ended up in a nursing home. He would get visits from nine people who wanted to be of help, and he eventually said, I am too tired to have all this help. And then he died and we hosted a memorial event. And I do remember feeling that everybody was a little nervous. We put out some snacks and beverages and we talked about the man who died. And people were a little bit afraid to touch the glasses and touch each other, almost like COVID.SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah.
WILSON-WEINBERG: We didn't know, at the time, that you could
00:39:00hug and kiss a person and share a glass with them and not get AIDS. We didn't know that. So that was the first memorial event that I remember.GROSS: Amazing. Thank you.
WILSON-WEINBERG: You're welcome.
GROSS: The next question we have is, how would you memorialize those lost to
AIDS in Philadelphia? If there was a large memorialization of some sort in the city, what would that look like for you?WILSON-WEINBERG: You know, I've never really thought about it. What I've thought
of is the [AIDS] quilt—is an amazing, amazing memorial and it doesn't have the permanency of a monument, a concrete or marble or granite monument, but it's an amazing thing and it's where we first grieved together as a community. First time I was 00:40:00at—I was at the [Second National] March on Washington [for Lesbian and Gay Rights] in 1987—huge gathering. And that was the first showing of the AIDS quilt, and it was immense. And we all walked around it in silence. Sometimes we would find a name that we knew. So I don't know. I haven't really given much thought to what I would think of as a proper AIDS memorial when the quilt has always had such a powerful meaning for me.GROSS: Do you think that there's value in that temporary nature of the quilt,
rather than having something permanent? Is that something that you think would be useful or helpful for continuing that style of memorialization?WILSON-WEINBERG: I do. At a certain point, it got so big that it couldn't be displayed
00:41:00in one piece anymore, so smaller communities would ask for the loan of a portion of it, as much as they could handle. At William Way we spread out and hung on the walls portions of the quilt, and I don't know if that is still happening or not. But I think it's still living, even though it can't all be shown in one place.SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah, the quilt project is still going on. And there is a piece at
the Prevention Point [Philadelphia], syringe exchange. There's a woman, her name is Terrie Hawkins. She's the point person whenever we need quilts here in Philadelphia; we can order it through her.WILSON-WEINBERG: Oh, I see.
SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah.
GROSS: Amazing.
SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah.
GROSS: Great. The last question that we have
00:42:00for you is, has the current COVID-19 crisis brought back any memories for you of the HIV/AIDS crisis? You talked a bit about at that memorial service. But are there any other memories that have been brought back through this entire crisis? What are those, and what's that like, having that connection?WILSON-WEINBERG: Yes, I have—of course, there are a lot of parallels, and many
people have expressed their feelings of fear—of COVID-19, reminding us of the fear that we had in the 1980s and '90s. I have heard a few people, including my older brother, who's a lovely man—totally accepting of—he loves being and John. He now has an openly gay teenage grandson. 00:43:00But he said to me something on the phone one day about, this is—there's never been anything like this before. Can you imagine what we're living through right now? And I said, we had this before. It was AIDS. We've had other epidemics as well, but AIDS was huge. It was simply enormous —and with so many unknowns, just like COVID-19. So certainly, it brought back many, many feelings about HIV/AIDS. And the scope of the crisis then is very much like what we're experiencing now.SHABAZZ-EL: Thank you. Last week you were all on vacation. Are you—how was your vacation?
WILSON-WEINBERG: It was good. Thank you. We were in Provincetown.
SHABAZZ-EL: Right?
00:44:00Yeah. Because John interviewed, I'm like, why are you interviewing on the vacation? That was so nice. Thank you, both.WILSON-WEINBERG: I was in the other room of our little tiny apartment up there.
We were renting for two weeks. I could hear his end of the conversation. And I thought it was lovely the way he spoke about his friend Curtis.SHABAZZ-EL: Yes, you know, it's lovely. And it's—for me—people have said to us,
they feel a freedom, being able to hand this over to somebody knowing that someone's going to steward these stories for us. And it kind of frees you up to do other things and to hold other things. We have you. We got you. We got you with this, and everything's being recorded. We're still recording. And we're just going to end this session, again, just by thanking you. You did say you were going 00:45:00to send us a photo so we'll make a notice, in case you forget, to ask you to send us a photo. If there's anybody else that you know, that may be willing to share a story, or they may have a story, just let us know. We'll be happy to reach out to them. You've done an excellent job. We couldn't ask for anything better. Thank you for being so gracious and for your time. And I will send—you'll get a thank you email right after this. And if you don't have any more questions, we can end this session now.WILSON-WEINBERG: I'll try to take a close up picture of the one that I just
showed you and then send that to you, Waheedah, or do you want to just—SHABAZZ-EL: Yeah, send it to me.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Okay.
SHABAZZ-EL: [content removed] So Tom, you enjoy the rest of your day. Steven and
Ain, I hope I see you in a bit. Take a break.GORDON: Tom, it's nice to finally kind of meet you. Many people in common over
the last few years, so I'm happy to—WILSON-WEINBERG: Nice to meet you, Ain. Also Steven, nice to meet
00:46:00 you.GROSS: Yes, thank you so much for sharing.
GORDON: Stay safe, everyone.
SHABAZZ-EL: Okay, everybody. Enjoy the rest of your day. So long.
WILSON-WEINBERG: Bye.
SHABAZZ-EL: Okay.
00:47:00