_Why We Fight

by Vito Russo

excerpted from a speech delivered in front of the
Department of Health and Human Services during a demonstration on Monday, October 10, 1988

I'm here to speak out today as a PWA who is not dying from --but for the last three years quite successfully living with --AIDS. If I'm dying from anything it's homophobia. If I'm dying from anything it's racism. If I'm dying from anything it's indifference and red tape. If I'm dying from anything it's Jesse Helms and Ronald Reagan. If I'm dying from anything it's the sensationalism of newspapers and magazines and television shows that are interested in me as a human interest story only as long as I'm willing to be a helpless victim, but not if I'm fighting for my life. If I'm dying from anything it's the fact that not enough rich, white, heterosexual men have gotten AIDS for anyone to give a shit.

Living with AIDS in this country is like living through a war that's happening only for those people in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes you look around to discover that you've lost more of your friends. But nobody else notices--it isn't happening to them.

The media tell people they don't have to care because the citizens who really matter are in no danger. They don't spend nights and months and years trying to figure out how to get the latest experimental drug, and which dose to take it at, in which combination with what other drugs and for how much money--because it isn't happening to them. They don't spend their waking hours going from one hospital to another, watching the people they love die slowly of neglect and bigotry--because it isn't happening to them. They haven't been to two funerals a week, so they don't give a shit.

All I read in the newspapers tells me that the mainstream heterosexual population is not at risk for this disease. All the newspapers tell me that IV-drug users and homosexuals still account for the overwhelming majority of cases. Then can somebody please tell me why money allocated for education and prevention is directed almost exclusively at white, heterosexual teenagers who, they keep telling us, are not at risk for this disease?_

Why every bus and subway ad I read and every advertisement and billboard I see is not specifically directed at gay men? Don't believe the lie that the gay community has successfully educated its people. Minority populations, including so-called sophisticated gay men, are abysmally ignorant about AIDS. We have a right to demand that education and prevention be targeted at these people and it is not happening. We are being allowed to die while low-risk populations are panicked--not educated, panicked--into believing that we deserve to die.  Remember that someday the AIDS crisis will be over. And when that day has come and gone there will be people alive--gay and straight people, black and white people, men and women--who will hear that once there was a terrible disease, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and in some cases died so others might live and be free.

I'm proud to be out here today with the people I love, to see the faces of those who are fighting this war, and to be a part of that fight. And after we kick the shit out of this disease I intend to be alive to kick the shit out of this system so that it will never happen again.

--Vito Russo
October 10, 1988