Hey Straight DUers, I Have To Have A Word With You...

[DonRedwood]

126. The AIDS crisis hit our community hard in the 80s

and the statistics said that black youth were next.

For me, growing up in small town America (we had one African American student being raised by a white family) black issues never came up. In my ignorance I thought the Civil Rights Movement had fixed everything. But when AIDS hit and gays were having to take to the streets in protests we started crying out that we needed to educate minority children immediately, it fell on deaf ears.

It was quite obvious to me that the Right Wing was perfectly happy to let the disease run its course through the gays and then the Black community. It was suddenly really obvious to this small town boy that things were not very equal at all.

That's when I joined the civil rights movement. Not my own fight, but the big fight. Before that AIDS was a gay fight for me, something grownups had to deal with, but suddenly all those inner city kids were at terrible risk. Getting the word out suddenly became about saving children and nobody had the resources or the knowledge except the gay people.

Sadly, so many of the gay people who were fighting that initial onslaught of the disease were gone within a few years. And wave after wave of death ripped through the gay community and the AIDS crisis grew big enough to demand attention, and then, Thank God, a Democrat became President and it became a national issue.

But I will never forget those early years when the gay people fought so hard to save inner city kids. It has never been discussed much because the people who were there to discuss it are mostly dead. But we had your back. Man oh man, did we have your back.

And that's how I learned the struggle is long and hard and won't be done during my lifetime. But this generation still has its work to do.