Opinions
Walking among HIV’s dead at Congressional Cemetery
Look closely at the tombstones for a World AIDS Day history lesson
D.C.’s historic Congressional Cemetery is the final resting place for many single men who died between the early-‘80s and mid-’90s, between the ages of 25 and 55. (Washington Blade photo by Damien Salas)
By NATHAN A. PAXTON
I encounter the HIV epidemic in unexpected places, particularly when I take my dachshunds out for a walk.
I live near the Historic Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., and one of the programs of the cemetery allows some of us to walk our dogs among graves of the well known and almost anonymous. The graves of J. Edgar Hoover, Elbridge Gerry (he of the “gerrymander”) and John Philip Sousa get most of the attention.
In quieter ways, I can read the toll of the killing years among gay men in Washington. Most often, the signs are demographic: single men, not buried in a family plot, who died between the early-‘80s and mid-’90s, between the ages of 25 and 55. Sometimes I’ll find these graves in clusters, as if friends and lovers wanted to share proximity in death as in life. Often, though, I will find these graves by themselves, and I wonder what story lies behind the solitariness.
Some graves proclaim their gayness loud and proud, like that of Leonard Matlovich, the first active duty member of the armed forces to challenge the ban on gay and lesbian people serving in the military. Another mentions being a “proud gay educator.” Once you know what to look for, you see these men everywhere. As Walter and Russell sniff and bound jauntily among the headstones, the three of us walk among HIV’s dead, just as we walk among Union and Confederate dead.
I study the politics of epidemics, especially HIV, and it’s often said that one’s research manifests one’s own demons. My own years of research on the development of different countries’ HIV/AIDS policies stemmed, I came to see, from a personal recognition, as much as intellectual motivations.
But for the accident of the year in which I was born, it is quite probable that—as a gay man in America—I would not have been alive to do my work and live my life. HIV, first understood as AIDS, made its first recognized appearance in gay men, and it is often still thought of as a “gay disease,” here in the United States and in the developing countries I study.
Had I been born just a few years earlier, I would be smack in the midst of that generation that first showed the evidence of one of the worst plagues in human history. It is quite probable that I would now be dead.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ’90s, it was hard not to notice that gay men between 40 and 60 were sometimes rare, even missing. Friends who had been living there less than 10 years earlier told stories: My friend Billy spoke of attending two memorials a weekend for months on end; Len remembered wearing full sterile garb to visit dying friends in the hospital in 1982; and people at my church, gay and straight, remembered constant care rotas for a changing and diminishing set of friends and lovers. Len, a retired professor, told me that caring for his ailing mother in the late 1970s kept him home and out of the bars: “That’s probably what kept me alive.”
As a social scientist, I think I have a pretty good understanding of the probabilities behind many everyday actions and circumstances. It is sobering to realize that only a matter of years may separate one from the near-certainty of the disease. Even now, I accept as normal that some of my friends have not escaped the laws of probabilities and plagues. Friends of mine speak of a time in their lives when they could count more friends and lovers who were dead than alive.
Each Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, and we generally don’t much mark the day here in the United States. For many folks, this titanic killer has become a “mere” chronic disease, thanks to the antiretroviral cocktail therapies available to us. As a result, gay men, for example, have been able to turn their social and political efforts toward a variety of other issues: marriage, employment protection, open military service.
We are hardly out of the woods, even in the United States. Recent CDC reports indicate that unprotected anal sex among gay men in America has increased 20 percent since 2005. The same trend has occurred in several other Western countries. While amazing progress has occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, HIV infections and AIDS deaths are on the rise in East Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa.
Even while MSM are the most-affected group in the United States and other developed countries, the most common type of HIV-infected person in the world today is a young woman of African descent. The epidemic varies greatly and remains consistent in its pervasive burrowing into those at the margins of our cultures: sexual minorities, drug users, women, sex workers and black people.
UNAIDS will tout good news this Dec. 1. The rate of annual new infections has decreased all over the world, falling by a third over the last decade. New infections and deaths are down in many regions and countries, including many of those most affected, in the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. Treatment access has increased dramatically in this last decade. ARVs have transformed from global luxury to what scholars Joshua Busby and Ethan Kapstein have called “merit goods” — goods whose consumers assert they have a basic moral right to have, like lifesaving drugs once priced too high to consider providing on a mass basis throughout the developing world.
There will also be bad news. Men who have sex with men are 13 times more likely to be living with the disease. In east Asia and the Middle East, the number of infections is on the rise. Sexual behavior has become more risky in many places, with increasing numbers of partners and less consistent condom use. There are still more than 35 million people — roughly the population of California — infected with the virus.
Most of the people who have died or will die from AIDS have not been and will not be obvious to those of us who walk in cemeteries, with or without canine companions. The statistics of their deaths won’t reveal the manner of that death so easily. We will not be able to tell who the African-American men and women who bear some of the highest burdens in this country were. There will be little evidence in their cemeteries of the widespread injection drug use in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that spreads the disease there. The same will be true of sex workers, transgender people, closeted men who have sex with men and poor women throughout the world. We will forget them more easily, in death as in life.
Just as HIV has proven amazingly adept and complex in the hiding places it finds in our human bodies, it has proven equally adept at hiding in the bodies of our societies. HIV survives and thrives in our biological and social bodies, adapting itself to work quietly and slowly, doing its work at the edges until it is powerful enough to harm those bodies. The complexity of HIV’s biological place pales before the social complexity in which it is enmeshed. If there is an evil in any disease, it lies not in the vector itself but in what we humans do or do not do for the people living with it, that is, by the evil we have done and the evil done on our behalf.
It is easy to miss the first casualties of the HIV epidemic, and most of my human cemetery friends have never noticed the plethora of these dead until I point the matter out. In another world, some of these dead would be alive and walking their dogs among the grass and granite, chapel and colombarium where they are now buried. The HIV-infected and -affected of the future will be much harder to find, more invisible than the men that Russell, Walter and I have become familiar with on our walks.
Nathan Paxton lives in Capitol Hill and teaches political science.
Opinions
D.C. is the place for the Democratic Socialists of America
Our endorsed candidates hold their affiliation as a badge of honor
D.C. is the place for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). We believe in a District where everyone can live a happy and dignified life. That means housing, healthcare, transit, education, and safety are treated as guarantees rather than privileges reserved for the wealthy and well-connected.
Our endorsed candidates do not hide what they believe. They engage in the democratic process openly, explain their politics clearly, and ask their fellow members to spend long nights and weekends doing the hard work of campaigning. And as the last six years of local elections have shown, including three successful D.C. Council campaigns and the overwhelming passage of Initiative 82, D.C. voters are often a great deal more interested in the endorsement of Metro DC DSA than in the handwringing of the Washington Post editorial board.
That is what makes Peter Rosenstein’s April 2 op-ed in the Blade so revealing. His piece was not just wrong. It was smug, unserious, and politically disconnected from the actual lives of queer people in this city. Worse, he used the platform of our local LGBTQ outlet to disregard Palestinian humanity while scolding democratic socialists for refusing to join him in that moral failure. Put plainly, Rosenstein has been publishing crank op-eds for years, and this one was no exception.
My name is Hayden Gise. I am a transgender, lesbian, Jewish, Democratic Socialist, and I am a union organizer. I do not speak on behalf of the national DSA organization, the local chapter, or any campaign. But I will not sit quietly while Rosenstein wraps himself in the mantle of queer Jewishness to sell the lie that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
He packages that lie in the same kind of pinkwashing rhetoric used by Benjamin Netanyahu, who mocked solidarity with Palestinians by saying, “Some of these protesters hold up signs proclaiming ‘Gays for Gaza.’ They might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’” Rosenstein’s liberal Zionism is not thoughtful, brave, or nuanced. It is just a more polished way of telling Palestinians their lives matter less and telling queer people we should be grateful for the empire so long as it flies a rainbow flag. Which, by the way, is showing itself to be a losing strategy.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is not some tragic deviation from the history of an otherwise peaceful Israel. The Nakba was the mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s establishment in 1947–49, when hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes. My Jewish values tell me that is wrong. Rosenstein’s politics treat anti-Zionist Jews like me as illegible. No serious person should treat that accusation as an argument.
But the deeper problem with Rosenstein’s piece is that he has no real understanding of why Democratic Socialism resonates here. For queer people in D.C., Democratic Socialism is not an abstract theory. It is rent that does not consume half your paycheck, a union on your job, childcare you can actually afford, public transit that works, and a city where working-class Black and brown queer people are not displaced so developers and donors can cash in. Queer politics is not only about recognition. It is also about whether ordinary people can afford to survive.
That is why D.C. is fertile ground for Democratic Socialism. In the race for mayor, one of the leading candidates is Kenyan McDuffie, whose campaign already looks like a focus-grouped merger of Andrew Cuomo’s slogan and Donald Trump’s graphic design instincts, backed by big business interests and the super PAC money that follows them. The other has the endorsement of the major labor unions in the District. Who has a cohesive vision to make D.C. more affordable and childcare universal. Who puts people over profit and human rights over political expediency. Our next mayor, and our first Democratic Socialist Mayor: Janeese Lewis George.
D.C. is exactly the kind of city where Democratic Socialism should grow: working-class, queer, tenant-heavy, union-minded, and tired of being told that dignity is too expensive. Which side are you on? I know what side the queer people of the District of Columbia will be on.
Hayden Gise is a union organizer in Washington, D.C.
For half a century, the arc of LGBTQ progress in America has bent—slowly, imperfectly—toward justice. We fought for visibility, for legal protections, for the right to marry, serve openly, and live with dignity. Each generation built on the courage of the last.
And yet today, that progress is in peril. Across the country, lawmakers are rolling back protections, demonizing LGBTQ people for political gain, and trying to erase us from public life.
Opponents of our equality are working to erase us from the Constitution, and indeed, public life. In moments like this, based on my personal involvement working with one of the most effective leaders for LGBTQ rights I find myself asking a simple question: What would Jeffrey do?
Jeffrey Montgomery—the focus of a new documentary “America You Kill Me” and a long time Michigan activist and founder of the Triangle Foundation—was never content with quiet advocacy or compromise. He was a rabble-rouser, a strategist, and a relentless thorn in the side of powerful bigots. When politicians tried to marginalize LGBTQ people, Jeffrey didn’t politely ask for scraps. He forced the issue.
Jeffrey Montgomery started with his own determined voice and turned it into a movement. His story is living proof that personal courage can spark national conversations about justice and inclusion.
At a moment when the LGBTQ movement again faces hostility and regression, Jeffrey’s playbook offers lessons we would be wise to remember.
First, Jeffrey understood the importance of punching above our weight. In the early days of LGBTQ organizing, our movement was small, underfunded, and politically marginalized. But Jeffrey refused to let opponents see us that way. Through visibility, media savvy, and relentless organizing, he made LGBTQ advocates appear larger, stronger, and more unified than our numbers alone might suggest.
That perception mattered. Political opponents think twice before attacking a movement that looks organized, energized, and capable of mobilizing public pressure. Jeffrey knew that power is partly about reality—but also about what your opponent believes your power to be.
Second, Jeffrey never compromised on the value of our lives. Movements make compromises all the time. Politics often requires it. But Jeffrey understood that some things are not negotiable. The basic humanity of LGBTQ people is one of them. You can’t put our basic rights on the ballot. You don’t tell people to wait their turn. There are no turns. It’s now. It’s always now.
Too often, our opponents frame equality as something to be bargained over—as if the dignity and safety of queer people were a policy preference rather than a fundamental right. Jeffrey rejected that premise entirely.
You can negotiate strategy. You can negotiate timelines. But you cannot negotiate the worth of human lives.
And finally, Jeffrey understood the power of coalition. Today, one of the most effective tactics used against marginalized communities is division. If LGBTQ people can be fractured—by identity, ideology, generation, or strategy—our collective strength weakens.
Jeffrey instinctively resisted that trap. He worked with civil rights groups, labor leaders, faith communities, civic leaders and allies across movements. He understood that the fight for LGBTQ equality was never isolated from the broader fight for justice.
When opponents try to divide us, the answer is not retreat into smaller camps. The answer is to build broader ones.
If Jeffrey Montgomery were here today, he would not be discouraged by the backlash we are seeing. He would recognize it for what it is: the predictable response of those who feel their power slipping away.
And he would remind us that progress has never been linear. It has always required courage, persistence, and a willingness to challenge power directly.
So, when the moment feels uncertain, when the political winds shift against us, and when our opponents try to make us feel small, the question remains a useful one: What would Jeffrey do?
If history is any guide, the answer would be simple. He would make some noise. And making noise, today, means refusing to let fear, fatigue, or false unity quiet us when our lives are on the line.
Sean Kosofsky was director of policy at the Triangle Foundation.
Opinions
D.C. not the place for antisemitic Democratic Socialists of America
Candidates like Janeese Lewis George should reject its endorsement
D.C. is not the place for the antisemitic Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who advocate for the end of the State of Israel from the ‘river to the sea.’ The candidates they endorse agree to their platform, which includes not talking to any Zionist organizations. Being a Zionist simply means supporting the existence of the State of Israel. It does not mean supporting the war criminal who heads the government, or what he is doing, including murdering innocent Palestinians, or bombing civilians in Iran and Lebanon. As Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, wrote in a column in DC Jewish Week, the views of the DSA are totally unacceptable.
The Council is non-political, but I am not. I can say one candidate for mayor, Janeese Lewis George, has asked for, and received, the endorsement of the DSA, and by doing so agrees to its antisemitic platform. After her endorsement became public, George tried to ‘privately apologize’ saying she didn’t see the questionnaire submitted by her campaign, rather it was submitted by a staffer. Now George says she is both not antisemitic, and supports Palestinians. Well, that sounds good. But she, and anyone else who accepts the DSA endorsement, has to answer a series of questions: 1. Are you for a two-state solution and the continued existence of the State of Israel, contrary to the position of the DSA? 2. Do you support BDS? 3. What is your definition of a Zionist? 4. What is your acceptable definition of antisemitism? 5. Will you meet with Zionist groups in DC?
Then, we must recognize if one candidate, like George, can go after and accept an endorsement from an antisemitic organization, it gives tacit permission for others to do the same with organizations that might be Islamophobic, racist, homophobic, sexist, or anti-immigrant. All unacceptable. I urge D.C. voters to reject any candidate, for any office, who has the endorsement of the DSA. That is not what we want the leaders of our government to represent.
Thankfully, there are many choices in this year’s Democratic primary elections for every office. There is a race for mayor, congressional delegate, attorney general, Council chair, two D.C. Council at-large seats, additional Council seats, Democratic State Committee seats and ANCs. D.C. political leadership will look very different after this election.
I urge voters to whittle down their choices by first rejecting anyone endorsed by the DSA. The DSA’s platform, aside from being antisemitic, also includes suggestions to ‘Defund the Police.’ That is a slogan some of the candidates running adopted a few years ago, thinking the people wanted it. They quickly found the people of D.C. didn’t want fewer police, they wanted their police better trained, with better community oversight. They wanted to be sure the police were here to protect them, not to harass them. People should know the DSA at one point even withdrew its endorsement from Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as she wasn’t strident enough in her opposition to Israel and actually met with a Zionist organization. There are many Zionists like me — a gay, Jewish man — who support the existence of the State of Israel, yet want to see Netanyahu, a war criminal, a murderer, tried for his crimes and in jail, and his government replaced. Zionists who support Palestinians and want them to have their own free state.
As you decide who gets your vote, one way to find out about a candidate is looking at their website. I would suggest you reject any candidate who doesn’t have a strong issues section. The least you can expect of a candidate is to tell you in detail what they intend to do if you elect them. That includes our delegate to Congress, even if they won’t have a vote. If Democrats take back the House of Representatives, we can expect our delegate to once again get a vote in committee, and that can be very important.
In the next couple of weeks, I will make some endorsements and share them with you in the Blade, for anyone who might be interested. They will detail why I endorse a particular candidate. I will not suggest second, third, fourth, or fifth choices. That is for you to decide. No matter who you give your first vote to, even with ranked choice voting, you can still vote for only one person. If you decide to list more choices, make sure the views of your second, and other choices, coincide with those of your first choice.
So here is to an honest election season, one in which we end up with candidates winning who really care about our city, who have proven track records, and who will make us proud. Your job is to VOTE, and I hope everyone will.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
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