Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is an author and advocate for civil and social justice, a gay rights pioneer and early HIV/AIDS expert. He spoke up and spoke out as voice for all, right up until the end of his life. Today's Out Spotlight is Kiyoshi Kuromiya.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya was born May 9, 1943 in a Japanese internment camp in rural Wyoming during World War II. Steven Kiyoshi Kuromiya grew up in the LA suburb of Monrovia,California with his parents and younger sister. In 1961, he graduated with honors from Monrovia High School and was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania. While a student at Penn he became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

A committed civil rights and anti-war activist he participated in demonstrations and protest around the country . He served as an assistant of Martin Luther King Jr. and took care of King's children immediately following his assassination.

To protest of the use of napalm in Vietnam in 1968, he announced that a dog would be burned alive in front of the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt Library. Thousands turned up to protest, only to find a message from Kuromiya: "Congratulations on your anti-napalm protest. You saved the life of a dog. Now, how about saving the lives of tens of thousands of people in Vietnam."

He was one of the founders of Gay Liberation Front-Philadelphia. He participated with Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings and other LGBT pioneers in the first organized gay and lesbian civil rights demonstrations. These "Annual Reminders," held at Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell each Fourth of July from 1965 to 1969, laid the groundwork for the Stonewall Riots and the LGBT civil rights movement.

In 1970, he served as an openly gay delegate to the Black Panthers convention, where the organization endorsed the LGBT liberation struggle.

From 1978 to 1983 he traveled worldwide with his mentor, architect Buckminster Fuller, and collaborated on the last 6 of Fuller's books, writing the last book posthumously in 1992. (Fuller died in 1983) Including Fuller's book, Critical Path, which argued that people can control their destiny through technology. Kuromiya later called his AIDS newsletter, ``Critical Path.''

Diagnosed with AIDS in 1989, he became a self-taught expert on the disease, operating under the mantra "information is power." Believing that patients fared best when they understood the disease, explored treatment options and actively participated in medical decisions he created the resources to empower those with HIV/AIDS.

Kuromiya is perhaps best known as the founder of the Critical Path Project, which brought the strategies and theories of his associate/mentor Buckminster Fuller to the struggle against AIDS.

This provided information and resources to people living with HIV and AIDS, creating a community medicine chest to help patients get free drugs, publishing a newsletter for up to date information and resources, and ran a 24-hour hotline for patients needing information -- even prisoners calling collect.

The Critical Path newsletter, one of the earliest and most comprehensive sources of HIV treatment information, was routinely mailed to thousands of people living with HIV all over the world. He also sent newsletters to hundreds of incarcerated individuals to insure their access to up-to-date treatment information.

Critical Path provided free access to the Internet to thousands of people living with HIV in the Philadelphia area, hosted over a hundred AIDS related web pages and discussion lists, and showed a whole generation of activists and people living with HIV that the Internet can be a tool for information, empowerment and organizing.

In the first issue of Critical Path, published in 1989, he wrote, "it is our conviction that . . . a heroic endeavor is now needed both to provide for the continuing health maintenance of Persons With AIDS the world over, and, by the year 2001 to find a cure for the ravages of AIDS for all time."

On his Web site, he posted graphic AIDS prevention and treatment news that he believed was necessary to patients' health. Seeking to protect the public's right to such information, he was a plaintiff in a suit claiming that the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which criminalized the circulation of "patently offensive" sexual material, was unconstitutional. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed and struck down key provisions of the act.

Kuromiya understood science and was involved locally, nationally and internationally in AIDS research. As both a treatment activist and clinical trials participant, he fought for community based research, and for research that involves the community in its design. He fought for research that mattered to the diversity of groups affected by AIDS, including people of color, drug users, and women. In 1996 he sat on the FDA panel that recommended approval of first potent protease inhibitors.

Around the same time, Kuromiya became the first employee of We the People with AIDS and a founding charter member of ACT UP-Philadelphia and the ACT UP network , a pioneering organization that helped bring AIDS to the national consciousness. He was the editor of the ACT UP Standard of Care, the first standard of care for people living with HIV produced by PWAs.

Kuromiya became the lead plaintiff in a federal class action lawsuit calling for the legalization of marijuana for medical uses.

Known for his intelligence and wit was also a nationally ranked Scrabble player and a master of Kundalini yoga.

To the end, Kuromiya remained an activist, insisting on and receiving the most aggressive treatment for cancer and the HIV that complicated its treatment. He participated fully in every treatment decision, making sure that he, his friends and fellow activists were involved with his treatment every step of the way. He never gave up.

He died May 10, 2000, due to complications from AIDS he was 57 years old.

"I really believe that activism is therapeutic."

Programming Note: On Monday,April 25, PBS stations unveiled a new documentary about the Stonewall Riots. Check your local listings for times and dates of encore presentations.