New Book Explores Latino Gay Activists
[Writer] This is research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago. Today, Jesus Ramirez-Valles, UIC professor of community health sciences, talks about his new book examining how gay, bisexual, and transgender Latino activists and volunteers are transformed by the AIDS epidemic.
Here’s professor Ramirez-Valles:
[Ramirez-Valles] Compañeros is a group of individuals that come together to fight in solidarity an epidemic – the HIV/AIDS epidemic that has threatened their individual lives and the lives of their communities.
They fight an epidemic, HIV, that is more than a virus and the deterioration of health. It’s actually two major forces that fuel this epidemic. This group of individuals come together to fight the epidemic by fighting racism and homophobia and in the process they change themselves.
More generally, Compañeros tells us what it’s like to be an activist and a volunteer. What it’s like to get involved in community affairs. In this case we’re talking about Latino gay men and transgender individuals, but it speaks to the broad idea of getting involved in the community. Not only to change major social forces that shape our lives, but to change ourselves, to get connected with others, and in the process become better individuals and better citizens.
This book came about in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the time, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was still pretty severe and antiretroviral therapies were becoming successful. And we started seeing individuals that were not dying immediately or right away, but individuals who were surviving.
And little by little, early 2000, the disease became a chronic disease.
So late 1990s and 2000 I was very interested in seeing how individuals who have seroconverted, that is became HIV positive or got AIDS, transformed their lives by becoming activists in a range of activities, from protesting against the inactivity or inaction of the federal government, the National Institutes of Health, to volunteers at the neighborhood level that were distributing food and taking care of patients, and so forth
and so on. That caught my attention; however, I’m a public health profession and researcher so I’m very interested in prevention. So my interest was preventing HIV and AIDS. So how could I put these things together?
And late 1990s, my mentor and dear friend Dr. Rafeal Diaz, at the time professor at University of California San Francisco, had put together a group of scholars doing research on sexuality in sexual minorities around HIV and AIDS in Puerto Rico. And during a break I was telling him about this new project that I wanted to start but I was struggling in how to put it in the context of public health in a meaningful way; that had actual implications for us to do something around prevention and treatment.
And at that point as I was telling the story he said, ‘well you know that being involved as a volunteer and an activist has some positive effects in your self esteem, decreases depression, improves many health outcomes’– and boom, that’s what it was – so that’s how the idea of Compañeros was born.
Compañeros is a rich account of the life histories of individuals. I’m interested in the life histories because they provide the voices of individuals and their subjective experiences. In this case we see how activists, how a Latino gay man in California or in Mexico or in Chicago, was born, raised. How he, and she as a transgender person, learned and acquired a social consciousness about changing society and to something to change the social forces and eventually becoming an activist.
The life history was interesting to me also because the voices of Latino gay men in the AIDS epidemic have not been heard and in many instances have been distorted. So I wanted to contribute to the AIDS movement by bringing the voices and experiences of activists who are of Latino decent, Latinos who are gay, bisexual and transgender.
In the process of writing this book I was concerned about how to reach a larger audience because I felt the life histories of these individuals, these Compañeros that I had met primarily in Chicago and San Francisco, but through my life and my work in Latin America, they were very powerful. And I felt sort of a responsibility to share them with a larger audience. As an academic I was concerned that my audience would be reduced to
other academics.
A colleague of mine, yet another colleague, we were going to a conference in flight and we were catching up with each other and I was telling her about my struggle in the middle of the book and how difficult and how lonely it is and I was worried about not reaching a large audience. And she said ‘why don’t you do a play, like a theater play?’ And I immediately, when she said that, I said, ‘no, how about a film, a documentary?’ So at that moment the idea of “Tal Como Somos (Just as we are),” which is a documentary film, was born.
And what happens is I connect with a producer and director from Juneteenth Productions, a local Chicago production company. So I gave Juneteenth Productions two chapters of the book that I had completed. They focus on the stigmatization that these activists have encountered through their lives because of their sexual orientation and some of them because of their HIV status. “Tal Como Somos (Just as we are)” became an idea about portraying the lives of Latino gay, bisexual men, and transgender individuals and those living with HIV and AIDS. An idea about changing negative attitudes, particularly in the heterosexual community.
In Compañeros, academics and non-academics will find inspiration and hope. They will find the pain and the deprivation that oppression in the form of poverty, homophobia and racism creates. But it also will find how individuals, as a group in a collective, are able to transform those forces and in the process create better lives and better destinies for themselves.
[Writer] Jesus Ramirez-Valles is a professor of community health sciences in the UIC School of Public Health.
For more information about this research, go to www.today.uic.edu, click on “news releases,” and look for the release dated October 5, 2011.
This has been research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
