A colleague recently said to me, if you want to start a fight with someone just talk about sex, money, politics or religion. Then she said, your course is about all of those things. I remember this now because this is the first of quite a few sessions in this course that may raise value disagreements among us, especially disagreements about gender and sexual orientation. So I remind you, the path to learning involves careful consideration of points of view, with which you may disagree. It also involves a close honest examination of one's own values and attitudes. And if, if this examination suggests that you might want to make changes in your belief system, that takes courage. Today's session is an excerpt from a conversation with one of my colleagues at the University of Michigan. It is the first of several session in which I ask people to remember what it was like for them when AIDS first came on the scene. Professor Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Larry, is one of my favorite colleagues at the University of Michigan in the Department of American Culture. He is brilliant, funny, clear, and well-informed in all of his areas of study and interest. He is associate with my own department of American culture but he is also a professor of romance languages and literatures and women's studies. In our department of American culture we have several important ethnic studies programs. Larry is Director of our Latino Latina Studies Program. As you can see, he was educated in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and at Harvard College and Columbia University in the United States. In today's video conversation, he will focus on memories from his teenage years at home in Puerto Rico and then, when he went away to college at Harvard. Larry studies languages and literatures, gender and sexuality, and he is also an artist, a creative writer, and a performance artist, and a critic. Here is the cover of a recent book by Larry, which deals with queer culture among Puerto Ricans, and how cultural production has changed over time. Here is another book cover, the book is a bilingual collection of short stories that Larry published recently. Larry's a person of many talents, both creative and scholarly. In our conversation, Larry talks about AIDS activism and also about his experiences in being tested for HIV. Testing and activism are on our agenda for future sessions. Larry is a particularly important contribute, contributor to this course. He comes from Puerto Rico. And the Caribbean is one of the world's hotspot regions for the AIDS epidemic. He is also deeply knowledgeable about Latin American culture, which will help us tune in to the global complexity of the epidemic. We will hear from Larry later in the course, but here's our first excerpt of a conversation with professor Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Larry let's begin by ha, having you tell us basically how AIDS and the existence of the epidemic has affected your life. Definitely. I was born in 1968 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. So, by the time that AIDS appeared it was broadly recognized, in 1980,81. I was pretty much hitting puberty, around I was 12 or 13 years old. So for me, sexuality has always been tied to AIDS. I have never lived at a moment in which I, I didn't tie the 2 or didn't think of sex and its relationship, at that time to death or at that time to, to illness which was not understood which was feared by many people and which which there was no medicine for. So I started a volunteering when I was in high school in hospital in Puerto Rico the Presbyterian Hospital I went to Catholic school and they required that we do community service. So I worked as a candy striper, so to speak helping patients in, when they first arrived at the hospital, and to get to their rooms, and I distinctly remember the anxiety that the AIDs patients would generate among the receptionists. Like, we had to wipe down chairs and desks with alcohol because these women would become very, very nervous. And for me it was a very strange process to see how some people with illness were being treated in a different way than other people with illness. So you perceived that stigma immediately? It was very dramatic. Also in part because at that time many people with AIDS were experiencing profound wasting, so they were almost emaciated you could see the weight loss you could also see the Kaposi Sarcoma so, so they had lesions on their skin they were very skinny so they immediately presented or most of the time presented the image of a person that was profoundly sick and the people at the hospital were reacting in, in a very nervous way. So you're just coming of age as a teenager and this fear of the disease is added to the normal anxieties of puberty, of the teenage years, and so forth. Absolutely because at the time I already had a, a inclination, or an awareness, of my preference for men which in Puerto Rico, or for me in my context, in my community, in my family, in my home, seemed like something absolutely unacceptable. So, add to that, to, to the stigma of homophobia or fear of going out with men, you have the fear of this illness, of death, and of the social stigma attached to this, to this condition which was not really know about at the time. So that, that's a, a very, very heavy burden to bear. It was and as a consequence I didn't really date or, or have sexual experiences while I was in high school. I only came to come out of the closet so to speak and to start dating and being sexually active when I moved to Cambridge Massachusetts. To go to Harvard University, and that was a very interesting experience because clearly that was a very different environment, there were lots of openly gay people. I had lots of scientific information about AIDs prevention but here I was having more personal information engaging with people, dating people becoming a peer educator and a community educator. I went on to become oh I did work study at AIDS Action Committee, which was, or is the main AIDS service organization in the greater Boston area. Well, tell us about those experiences both as an educator and as, and as, as an activist. So being a peer educator came naturally. I have always been- You've always been a good teacher, Larry. [LAUGH] I've done lots of different kinds of, of peer education, so to speak, or in, I was always involved in clubs, I was always interacting with my colleagues. And when you have information, it is easy to transmit when you're talking to people who are. Similar to you, the same age, and the same educational context. Being a community educator was a little bit more challenging. Off campus. Off campus. [CROSSTALK]. On the one hand, it was very excited, because Harvard can be a very insular place it is self contained. Sometimes it forgets that it is part of a profound urban leave. And as a gay Puerto Rican from the Caribbean that could be quite frustrating. So there were lots of motivations to want to cross the Charles River, to get into Boston, to interact with different communities. And I fortunately got to do peer education in two communities, one in Roxbury, which is a predominantly poor, working class, African American community. And the second Jamaica Plain, which at the time in the this would have been 1990 roughly speaking was still predominantly Latino and working class although it also had a lot of lesbian and some gay men. So there it is very different when you are engaging with people who you do not know. Approaching strangers on the street to give out condoms or sitting at a table at a health fair. It really it really takes committment and braveness to, to do that kind of work. I would say, I would say courage not only out in the, in the community, but there must have been homophobia on, on campus at Harvard, as well. I just remember it it was a, it was a period of great committment and excitement around activism. So it was clear that there was a terrible situation that was not being addressed by the government. By that time, there were, it a, ACT UP was very visible, so for example I participate in ACT UP protest, I made a short film about a rally against Cardinal Bernard Law, who was the maximum authority of the Catholic Church in Boston who was not sympathetic to the needs of people with AIDS or to issues about AIDS prevention. So, that was all very exciting. But you're right that homophobia also played a part. For me, homophobia, well, that, that fear of AIDS tied to the fear of otherness and fear of queer sexuality. I recall, in the hospital in Puerto Rico, but also going being tested, being tested in Cambridge, going for HIV test. Tell us about that. That should be that should be a positive sympathetic setting. Well I had over the years I've had many experiences getting tested for HIV. And I distinctly remember one in, at a Cambridge public hospital, in which the person that was interviewing me. Had a very long questionnaire asking about lots of sexual activities, many of which I didn't even know that you could engage in and that, that's strange enough. But it wasn't exactly good sex education? But, well this person was very angry. The person was very, very angry, frustrated, it was clear. She did not want to be there, or she did not like doing this. It was an unpleasant experience. So add to that already you come in with nervousness. You want to know if you have an illness which is potentially deadly. At that time in the late 1980s, there was no medicine or AZT, I don't remember exactly when it came about, but, but people were dying. People were dying left and right, and then here you are a young person having sex for the first time with lots of knowledge, but part of that knowledge is that you can contract this deadly disease. And our understanding was that there was really no such thing as completely safe sex. There might be safer sex but ,- That is correct. Yeah. Because as we were always told condoms can break. Condoms can break. So for example well there's categories. Safe sex would be mutual masturbation, with no exchange of bodily fluids. Which means rubbing one body against the other. At the time there were questions about saliva. Right. So you didn't really know if kissing so general consensus was that kissing did not present risk. Oral sex was on that, that liminal space in between. So anal sex, if it had condoms, if you used condoms, was supposed to be safer. But as we all know, condoms can break, or condoms can have defects from the factory. So, so even if you were very conscientious of what you were doing there was always a possibility. And that meant that there was always a slight level of paranoia associated with having sex and also with being tested. And waiting for those test results was pretty grueling. And waiting for because it used to take at least a week two weeks and that was a period of absolute uncertainty. That you did not know what was going on, you hoped for the best, and actually, you tried to prepare for the worse, that was the whole psychological framework, like you would, the, it was part, the, the counselor was supposed to rehearse with you, what are you going to do if the result of your test is positive. Are you aware of the support structures in place available, that will allow you not to become extremely depressed, for example, or suicidal? that, th, that will lead you to try the get the medical help that can help you, but that can also try to manage the, the very present risk of disclosure, which at that time meant, you could lose your job, you could lose your friends, you could be kicked out of your house. So, there were very grave consequences for AIDS disclosure among people who were prejudiced. I'm going to ask you to move into the fa fa, fa, move forward in time. But just before that, tell us a little bit about the activism in Cambridge in those days and, and your view of it. Mm-hm. Your participation. So. I, I was never a member of ACT UP, but I was very aware of their existence. I think we, we saw ourselves as, as very committed to raising awareness on campus. On campus at, at Harvard College, and also more broadly in the Boston community. So for me, that came through volunteering at service organizations, the Ac, AIDS Action Committee of Boston. I remember the, I remember when I first learned about ACT UP organizing in Puerto Rico in 1991, and in fact it was a group of Puerto Ricans from New York City who travelled to Puerto Rico. And, you know, due to action at the Forte Lisa, which is the mansion of the governor, that appeared in all the newspapers. That seemed quite important because in Puerto Rico, there hadn't been that kind of visible AIDS activism. And it was Puerto Ricans who became involved at learning skills, those activist skills in New York City that then went to Puerto Rico and demanded that the Puerto Rican government respond to it as well
