2
Early Risers
The first period of community organizing saw a small handful of new nonprofit
organizations (NPOs) arise in response to HIV/AIDS in New York City: notably GMHC, AIDS
Resource Center, the New York AIDS Network, the Haitian Coalition on AIDS, and HEAL.
Each one set out to address HIV/AIDS on behalf of its particular perception of the affected
communities. The first organizations were either informal offshoots of existing organizations, or
re-groupings of activists with a shared history. Each drew upon different sources of initial
resources, reshaping them to the situation of people living with HIV/AIDS. There was no
relevant expertise, and so community leaders sought to create their own. Each NPO also acted, at
first, as though it were at the center of HIV/AIDS work in New York City. Each started with the
impression that it was working essentially alone, and four of the first five actively sought support
from existing agencies in the domain of health and human services. As more information became
available, and as the organizers gained experience, they discovered that they could get more help
and better information from each other than from the state.
Numerous factors impeded the formal response to HIV/AIDS early on. One was that
research on sexuality of any form was discouraged during the Reagan administration. It was not
an auspicious time to have a sexually transmitted disease. A second factor was the larger social
stigma attached to all of the issues pertaining to HIV/AIDS, from homophobia to fear of death. In
response to both of these impediments, the organized community sought to “normalize” the
discourse on AIDS. A significant goal of much of the early organizing became, in the words of
one informant, to “get AIDS on the screen.”
Among the first organizations of the early 1980s, GMHC was the most self-conscious
Convention