Interview: Mickey Rolfe
Interview with Mickey Rolfe, NYCAM donor and Recipient of GMHC’s 2015 Judith Peabody Humanitarian Awards
How did the early days of AIDS affect you and the LGBT community?
Being nearly 60 years old, I can remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, and a lot of those other life-milestones etched into each generation’s sensibility. I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when the article about what was then identified as a gay cancer appeared in the New York Times. I was already in the theatre business and had already known an agent who mysteriously died around 1981. He supposedly had a heart attack, but he was only 28 years old. A lot of the gay community was still closeted then and the news, the rumors, the confusion and the fear spread like wildfire. Then came what became known as “GRID.” In those days you went from diagnosis to death within literally a few weeks, months. Then a little bit of research accounted for some advancement, and a link to AIDS was realized, creating what was then the purgatory of HIV. Still everyone kept dying; there was no treatment except for palliative – and that was if you could find a provider. The gay community had to look inside itself to solve its own problems. It certainly seemed no one else was interested. Out of this horror came a much more unified LGBT community. AIDS made us grow up fast. It taught us how to get organized and how to give. Back then, my now-husband Bruce and I didn’t have great means, but I like to think we gave what we could, and did what we could. Many though did much, much more. That’s when I discovered and owned within myself the true meaning of philanthropy, which is a joyous thing. I think of it more as an outlook on life, motivated by love, and an impulse to help. To me, philanthropy is a feeling, a desire, while charity is an action. We did what we could, sometimes just “being there for” someone who had lost a lover, brother or son.
What do you think about AIDS philanthropy today?
In 2010 I was recruited to be a board member of GMHC, I think because of long-standing financial support of the organization, but also in part because I remembered a time before AIDS. By then the nature of AIDS service organizations had changed, diversified and had become specialized. What a difference 25 years makes. Not long after my joining GMHC’s Board I became its Chair, and if I do say so myself I think I helped my colleagues there to realize we couldn’t keep doing what we’d been doing for the past 30 years, and to become super active instead of maybe a little too reactive. It’s hard to take a good look in the mirror, but we did, and after a few years the organization kept what worked well, while modifying its outlook. Its services became more collaborative, more relevant.
What do think of the Memorial?
It will give a focus to all of us survivors – a literal, physical place to focus. The idea of a park is so much nicer, and really so much more appropriate, than the idea of a cemetery. Life goes on, in spite of AIDS and other killers, and we have to live for the people who don’t live anymore. Working with NYCAM to poignantly place the Memorial opposite the former St. Vincent’s Hospital is an enormous act of philanthropy by the Rudin family.
Chris and Paul came to visit me with the then-CEO of GMHC to talk about the idea when it was still just in concept stages, and of course we were all for it. It seems like only yesterday I was invited to a dizzyingly brilliant dinner at The Palm. The design the guys revealed to those of us gathered – and what they hoped for – was so compelling. Such a homerun. In just one or two strokes they really catalyzed the room, not only with the what, but the why, where and how, bringing all these single elements together into a major chord.
I can’t wait to go there – I wonder what it will feel like. It will blow me away all these years later that Bruce and I helped to make this happen. How grateful I am for this opportunity and how much I look forward to that day.