For AIDS Awareness Month I will be profiling the people involved in the community. Andrew Velez is a founding member of ACT UP and is still an active member.
Until the epidemic is over we are all living with AIDS
Entering Andrew’s home you might mistake him for a historian. He is a man surrounded by movie memorabilia and artifacts from around the world. In another life he did writing for entertainment, such as reviews for movies and articles about the stars. Not only did he write about the industry, but he also became friends with a few of the people involved. He used to go to the theatre with Eartha Kitt and has a photo of himself from his younger years with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. However it’s the artifacts from around the world that speak to his work as an ACT UP activist. ACT UP, which stands for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, has taken Andrew around the world to push the movement along in their on-going fight to raise awareness about AIDS and change laws that hinder research into treatments and block access to them with high prices and governmental inaction. Formed in 1987, ACT UP was created response to the fear and confusion many in the gay community felt. It was a way to take control of the then dire situation and demand that AIDS not be ignored and that it was not just a gay disease, but a disease that affected society as a whole.
In 1987, Andrew was going through a divorce which threatened to limit, or even eliminate his access to his children. Lost and desperate to feel useful, he had heard about this illness and the treatment called AZT (otherwise known as azidothymidine). AZT turned out to be so expensive that the cost put it out of reach for most patients. A march on Wall Street was organized to bring attention to this issue and a nervous Andrew joined, knowing that if he was arrested he could potentially lose all access to his kids. Having a strong lifelong sense of what injustice is and seeing this epidemic come along, and how it hurt specific communities, he looked beyond his fear and joined the protest. Since then ACT UP has become a regular mission in his life and he has garnered an encyclopedic knowledge of AIDS and the different treatments available to the public. In the almost 30 years that he has been involved he has come to realize that this epidemic is reflective of all that is broken in society. It reflects problems with race, gender, age, housing and much more. ACT UP has responded to these issues in the way it has grown over the years. Creating such programs as the Women’s Working Group and demanding attention for children.
Andrew has watched ACT UP grow and has seen the definition of AIDS evolve from a “mysterious disease” that affected gay men, to it being referred to as gay cancer, to Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), and finally to AIDS. The treatments have also evolved to the point where, in New York state, there has been no transmission from mother to child of the disease in the last year, and preventative drugs are now available to keep people that are exposed to AIDS free of the virus (as long as you maintain the before or after treatment).
While the future of treatment for AIDS looks promising, more so because of the relentless work of people like Andrew and organizations like ACT UP, when asked about the biggest obstacle facing society in the fight against AIDS Andrew replies “Most people don’t want to know anything about AIDS, forcing people to look at something they don’t want to look at”. This self imposed ignorance is what keeps the end of AIDS elusive. Safe sex, needle exchanges, treatment for at risk communities all becomes taboo when people want to ignore the activities that happen in their own backyards and this puts everyone in danger. As Andrew says “Until this epidemic is over, we are all living with AIDS.”
