THE BODY: No, We Didn’t ‘Lose an Entire Generation’ to AIDS

A spirit of celebration through stories is precisely what The Generations Project is all about. Formed in 2015, the project cultivates intergenerational community and preserves LGBTQ history through oral story sharing. The project has partnered with The Eagle NYC, LGBTQ aging organization SAGE, and other partners to bring LGBTQ people from all stages of the life course into a shared community. In June and October of this year, they explicitly centered the intersection of queer identity and HIV through a partnership with the New York City AIDS Memorial to produce REVIVAL: Survivors’ Stories.

Over a Zoom conversation, Program Director Kan Seidel described the vast diversity of the stories told, from those of bisexual Black women to lesbian caretakers of gay men, to mothers and children who shared positive HIV diagnoses. Seidel says, “There’s an endless number of ways these things can be experienced, and we need to keep finding people and letting them be heard.”