By Karen Ocamb

Phill Wilson, who turned 50 on April 29, was diagnosed with HIV in 1985 and with full-blown AIDS in 1989. The executive director of the Black AIDS Institute (www.blackaids.org), Wilson was an early activist and co-founded several important organizations, including the National Black Lesbian & Gay Leadership Forum, and with friend Michael Weinstein and Wilson's lover Chris Brownlie, the AIDS Hospice Foundation and its Chris Brownlie Hospice. In 1990, a year after Brownlie died, Wilson was appointed AIDS coordinator for the city of Los Angeles. By then, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported 179,000 AIDS cases since 1981, of which more than 113,000 (63 percent) died. In 1990, the CDC reported 43,339 AIDS cases, a 23 percent increase from 1989. Gay/bisexual men and IV-drug users represented more than three-fourths of reported cases.

Michael Weinstein, now president of AIDS Healthcare Foundation, came up with the idea to have an AIDS coordinator for the city of Los Angeles, Phill Wilson told IN Los Angeles magazine. Wilson was among those who suggested it to L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley.

"Mayor Bradley was the first keynote speaker of the first Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Conference in 1986, so I had a good relationship with him," said Wilson. "From the beginning there was controversy around my appointment. I was publicly living with AIDS and (first AIDS Coordinator] Dave Johnson left because of his health. A reporter asked Mayor Bradley if it was wise to appoint someone in my health condition, and the mayor, without missing a beat, said, 'We appoint the best people to the job and I'm confident Phill will do a great job, whether he's here for a day or for 10 years.' And it was just such an affirming response and so typical of Mayor Bradley."

The position dealt with HIV/AIDS policy and implementation and with using the mayor's bully pulpit to address discrimination and HIV/AIDS awareness. Wilson also addressed HIV/AIDS in people of color communities. "The epidemic had been clearly an aggressive force in people of color communities from the very beginning," said Wilson. "But there had not been policies and specific and explicit attention paid to people of color communities. And that was the bulk of the work that we did under my stewardship from 1990 to 1993."

Wilson conducted training sessions for all city employees, including police, fire fighters, and paramedics. To his surprise, Wilson discovered he also had to raise HIV/AIDS awareness among the city councilmembers as well.

"Councilman Nate Holden came to the council with a purported case of people attempting to deliberately transmit HIV by contaminating salads in restaurants," Wilson recalled. "The theory was that someone could cut themselves either by accident or deliberately and blood would get into the salad and then the virus could live that way and thereby infect people."

Wilson held information hearings in the council chambers and called medical experts to provide HIV/AIDS education. By the time he left office, Holden supported the city's AIDS programs. "I think that was, in part, because we took the time to do the education," said Wilson who credits Councilmember Joel Wachs as a "huge hero" during this time, along with Wendy Gruel, Bradley's point person, and Jan Perry, Councilmember Mike Woo's deputy.

"The late '80s and early '90s were some of the worst times for people living with AIDS. There was a series of false hopes around treatment issues and huge numbers of us died. My biggest memory is of the repeated calls in the middle of the night and all of the memorial services and night vigils and the deathbed watches. I think people forget that up until 1996 with the advent of the protease inhibitors and the triple combination cocktails, people died. And so much of our time was trying to provide some amount of dignity for people in that process," Wilson said.

That year Wilson almost died. "My doctors basically felt that it was over. My family was called and everyone was notified that it was going to be just a matter of days before I died. And I came out of that and the message for me was that there was something that I still needed to do. And that's why I'm still here," Wilson said.

Wilson returned to work in 1999. "It seemed to me that the unique offering I could make was to focus on the epidemic in black America and that's why we founded the Black AIDS Institute. It was undeniably clear that African Americans and other people of color were hugely disproportionately impacted by the disease and by and large, that fact was being ignored."

In 2006, AIDS in America is a black disease, Wilson said. "We represent roughly 10-12 percent of the U.S. population but we represent nearly 50 percent of the 1.3 million Americans living with AIDS in America today. We represent 54 percent of the new HIV/AIDS cases in America; AIDS is the number one killer of black women between the ages of 24-34; and an estimated 46 percent of black gay and bisexual men in some of our urban cities may already be HIV positive and two-thirds of them don't even know it."

Meanwhile, Wilson said, "the fight against AIDS on the domestic front has been undermined over the last six years. The response has been one of either flat funding or reduction in funding ... [while] the epidemic is still having a devastating effect. The question for the LGBT community is: What did we mean when we said, 'Until there's a cure?' It is truly a moral challenge to us to be in the fight as aggressively as we were in the mid-'80s because if we abandon this battle now, then we were really only interested in us. And, as they say, justice cannot be 'just us.' And if we believe ourselves to be a people in a justice struggle, then we really have to be there until this epidemic is over."