Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis · 2 Comments

1990: Visiting the AIDS Quilt with My Mother

I’d already seen the whole AIDS Quilt twice, but my mother hadn’t seen any of it ever. I think going to see this display of a small part of it was her idea, but I was up for it. I also think she bought me the T-shirt, but I was up for that too.1

For the record, although the T-shirt says “Boston,” the display we went to was at MIT in Cambridge.

1990 stands out in my memory as the year Martha’s Vineyard discovered AIDS. Since HIV/AIDS was already looming large in the gay community, and increasingly in the lesbian community, when I left D.C. in 1985, this caused some cognitive dissonance, to put it mildly.

In D.C., since I was immersed in “the community” and worked at the feminist bookstore, I was generally and accurately assumed to be a lesbian. I never had to come out. When I got to the Vineyard, I realized I didn’t know how. Life was further complicated by the fact that at the time, most women dressed like the dykes I knew in D.C. — jeans, flannel or button-down shirts, shoes you could walk in. I learned to surreptitiously check for the presence or absence of a ring on the ring finger of any new acquaintance, though this could be misleading.

Me in my Common Threads shirt, 34 years later.

Life was even further complicated by the fact that if you said the word “lesbian” out loud everyone would (a) turn to look at you, and (b) assume you were one. This was OK with me but it wasn’t OK with others.2 So people really did use the American Sign Language sign for “L” or say (I’m not kidding about this) “Lebanese” when they meant “lesbian.”

As related in “1985–1986 (etc.): Adult Child of Theater,” I lucked out early. I’d arrived on the Vineyard in search of a 12-step program, and in finding ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) meetings, I also found lesbians — one lesbian in particular, the late Mary Payne, founder and artistic director of Island Theatre Workshop. She lured me into theater, and through theater I found my tribe(s).3

Is it fair to say that the island in general was less welcoming, less friendly? Since little if anything made it into the public eye, e.g., the newspapers or the island’s bulletin boards, it’s hard to know what people “in general” were thinking. I do remember attending a public meeting about HIV/AIDS in the very late 1980s where one of the main speakers, a locally prominent mental-health professional, implied that HIV/AIDS could only be contracted through blood transfusions and dirty needles.

This was beginning to change, however. Around that time, or maybe a little later, a proposal to install condom dispensers at the high school sparked controversy. Naturally some people disapproved because it was seen to condone students being sexually active, but the tide seemed to be moving in a more practical direction: if/when students were sexually active, they should be safely sexually active. Condoms helped avoid pregnancy, yes, but they also helped prevent the spread of STDs (sexually transmitted diseases), and the scariest STD at that time was HIV/AIDS.

Here’s where chronology gets a little fuzzy. My memory is clear, but so far I’ve found nothing to confirm or correct what I remember. What I remember is that a youngish Vineyard man named Joel Counsell died in a house fire in Vineyard Haven. The backstory, which I knew through word of mouth, mainly through 12-step connections, was that Joel, an addict and/or alcoholic who was also HIV-positive, had been trying to get help, but the island’s health-care options were too fragmented. The only support he found was in AA meetings that included gay or lesbian members.

After Joel’s death, and at least partly in response to it, the AIDS Alliance of Martha’s Vineyard was formed, both to coordinate and publicize the services available to people with HIV/AIDS, from testing to counseling to treatment, and to educate the public about the disease.4 (Rumors and misinformation about HIV/AIDS spread much more readily than the disease itself.)

Around this time, and related at least indirectly, the Island Lesbian & Gay Association (ILGA) was formed. I was one of the 26 Vineyarders at the first meeting, which was held in the big room at the Wooden Tent, then owned by a lesbian couple.5 More about ILGA in the next installment of The T-Shirt Chronicles.

NOTES

  1. In my defense, I’m pretty sure this was at least a decade before I swore “No more T-shirts!” ↩︎
  2. It took me a while to fully understand how small towns were different from big cities. Once words came out of your mouth, they couldn’t be taken back — and they traveled. Fast. Depending on the subject, you wouldn’t believe how fast. Many of my D.C. friends had moved there from, you guessed it, the small or smallish towns they’d grown up in and, often, where their families lived. So had I. Going in the opposite direction taught me a few things. ↩︎
  3. This included Wintertide Coffeehouse, which until January 1991 happened only on winter weekends. Music, theater, and the grassroots arts more generally tend to be where we outsiders and misfits find each other. ↩︎
  4. AZT was available at this point, but its effectiveness was limited and it was very expensive. Treatment options began to increase and improve in the early 1990s. Here’s a brief summary of how they advanced. ↩︎
  5. A couple of years later, in 1992, I became their tenant, moving into the separate guest house on the property. I lived there till the fall of 2001, which at that point was by far the longest I’d lived anywhere on the Vineyard. ↩︎

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis · 4 Comments

1978: Justice on the Job

Stepping back a bit in time here: This is from the Washington Hospital Center nurses’ strike in May–June 1978. I’ve got several shirts from events, causes, and groups that I was at most peripherally involved in, and this is one of them. The strike went on for 31 days, so I might have joined the picket line once or twice, though this seems unlikely: I didn’t have a car and I did have a 9-to-5 job. I might have known someone who worked there, or I might just have wanted to support the strikers by wearing the shirt. In the women’s community we showed up for each other’s rallies, events, picket lines, meetings — if it involved women fighting for justice, we helped pass the word and mobilize support.

This graphic might have been the reason I got the shirt: I love it. The small print says “whc nurses strike 1978.”

A Washington Post story from May 27, 1978, led with this: “The Washington Hospital Center has more than quadrupled its security force in the face of a threatened strike by registered nurses called for this morning.” It quoted the president of the nurses’ union expressing outrage that “the Washington Hospital Center has seen fit to hire 93 additional guards. The Hospital Center’s vicious attempt to intimidate and divide us should be protested by all responsible citizens.”

Sound familiar? Keep in mind that this was two and a half years before the union-busting Reagan administration took office. When I revisit press clips from the late 1970s, it often feels that the ensuing four decades somehow wound up on the cutting-room floor. This is especially striking (sorry!) when it comes to the environmental movement. We knew all this stuff by 1979 but the economic and political powers that be did precious little about it. (See my blog post on the subject: “1979: Three Mile Island, etc.“)

This Flickr site includes a photo of picketing nurses on the first day of the strike, and a good account of the issues involved, starting with this:

The strike by about 300 of the 425 registered nurses by the District of Columbia Nurses Association (DCNA) at the area’s largest private hospital was mainly over schedules and performance evaluations, but also involving benefits and wages.

Prior to the strike, the hospital administration attempted to decertify the union, filing a petition with the National Labor Relations Board challenging its representation of the nurses.

The independent nurses union was only a little over a year old at the time having been certified in December 1976 and obtaining a first contract in May 1977.

When striking nurses attempted to go into the pool at other hospitals, they found that the Hospital Center administration had sought to blackball them. While initially getting hours at Howard Hospital, that administration banned them during the strike.

The strike ended on June 26, when the nurses accepted WHC’s final offer. The results were mixed. The Flickr article notes, “Perhaps the biggest gain of the strike was the nurses preserved their union.”

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