Interview: Terry McGovern
Tell us about your history in the AIDS epidemic.
In the late 1980’s, I was an attorney at MFY Legal Services working with low-income people in Hell’s Kitchen, the theater district. We began seeing a lot of people with AIDS, and I was the only staff attorney who would take these cases. Everyone else was afraid. The receptionist would spray the seats with Lysol when people left. I had to quickly develop expertise in this emerging field, and one of the first things I noticed was how closely HIV and poverty were intertwined. Many gay men who came in were poor. The link between HIV and TB had not been recognized; the different opportunistic infections that women were getting was not yet recognized; women of childbearing age couldn’t participate in clinical trials; and no one knew what to do with their kids.
My job was focused on housing issues, so I went out into the community to get information. I learned a ton at ACT UP, and I got involved. At one meeting, I met Len McNally from the New York Community Trust, and he gave me $30,000 to do this work full-time. At MFY, the legal work I could do was limited. I couldn’t take on the kind of class action suits that were required at the time to change so many bad policies, including how the AIDS definition was excluding people from services; the lack of same sex partner succession in public housing; and women with AIDS being excluded from clinical trials. In 1989, I founded the HIV Law Project, where we created history – changing the lives of women, poor people and other marginalized communities struggling with HIV.
After the advent of the cocktail, things changed dramatically. I left the HIV Law Project in 1999 for a fellowship at Columbia studying health and human rights. I also began teaching at Columbia and then became the HIV Program Officer at the Ford Foundation, where I directed a lot of funding to groups in the South and was a member of a three-person team making a case for why the foundation should fund LGBT issues, which it did! I tried to get money to where it was needed most, to Black MSM’s and women with HIV, to study intellectual property and patent issues relating to the funding of drugs. I was also able to fund How to Survive a Plague, AIDS in Black America, and United in Anger. It was so rewarding to provide resources to the things I believed in.
What do you think about the Memorial?
I’m happy it’s going to be there. It’s really important to remember. People can quickly forget. It’s important to have a place to pay tribute in some way to those who died, but also to your own life. Did all this really happen? The enormity of the loss is indescribable. Words are not enough. The site was such an important place in those years. I really like the idea of the Memorial.
What are your hopes for the Memorial? How do you think it could be used?
I just taught an HIV class at Columbia, and students don’t know this history. I use film footage in the class, and the students are transformed by it. History is key to unlocking a lot of creativity and courage. Activism in the HIV epidemic is so important to teach, and the students are emboldened by it, like what we did in ACT UP – teaching.
Who or what will you be remembering at the Memorial?
I had so many clients that I truly loved, and so many friends, who died so young. I don’t have just sadness, but fond memories of them. They generally had such a great sense of humor. It’s incredibly intimate to go to court with someone, to go to a hearing with someone. I’ll remember this at the Memorial.