Out Spotlight

Today's Spotlight is a community organizer, activist, educator and an outspoken voice on the issues of race, sexuality. Faced with his own health crisis he founded the Black AIDS Institute and became one of the most articulate spokespersons addressing HIV and AIDS issues in the African-American community in the US. Today's Out Spotlight is Phill Wilson.

Phill Wilson was born on April 29, 1956, in Chicago Illinois, to Tebo and Ina Wilson. His parents had moved north from the southern states like many black Americans did after World War II. Both his parents worked, his father was a small business owner and his mother, a banker, all the while providing a strong, supportive environment within the family. He grew up learning a commitment to family and community, as well. Wilson was often involved in civil rights activities in the Chicago area, such as Operation PUSH, Operation Breadbasket, and Black Expos.

Busy with community activities all through high school he still managed to graduate early and went directly to Illinois Wesleyan University, where he earned a Bachelor's degree in theater and Spanish. He had originally intended to go to law school after completing his degree, but never got there. He said in an interview with Out that, "I just didn't like law professors, I didn't like lawyers, I didn't like law students." Instead he went on to try to meet some other of the usual family expectations. He went on to work for AT&T and was married for a short time and having a daughter.

Naive to his sexuality until he heard a radio interview with a publisher of gay magazine, he then went about trying to find the gay community in Chicago and there met his partner of 10 years Chris Brownlie in 1979.

He credits his family with continuing to support him after he came out to them regarding his sexuality. He told OUT magazine, how he and Brownlie, had been to a family reunion and an in-law commented to a cousin about their presence after they had left. "My cousin," said Wilson, "who is a very committed, active, and faithful Jehovah's Witness told this woman, 'that man is my cousin. He is welcome here, and his partner's welcome here. They're a part of our family. You can't come to my house and talk about my cousin and his partner that way. That's not allowed.'"

In 1981 they "had enough of the cold weather of Chicago " and he and Brownlie moved to Los Angeles where they ran a giftware manufacturing company called Black Is More Than Beautiful. Around this time they both heard of what would late be called AIDS. Some of their friends had been ill or had died and it was around this time both had biopsies of their lymph nodes taken, because they had been swollen for a long time. "No one knew what caused AIDS then, the doctors told Chris and I that there were abnormalities to the lymph nodes but they couldn't tell us what it meant." Wilson didn't know for certain that he was HIV-positive until he was 27. At that time, in the 1980's, a positive test was assumed to be a death sentence.

As the years passed more friends grew ill and people learned of a virus caused AIDS. In 1986 California placed Proposition 64--a proposal calling for the forced quarantine of all people with AIDS--on the election ballot. Both Wilson and Brownlie volunteered to work for a committee opposing the passage of this proposal.

About the time of the 1986 elections in November, Brownlie became ill. Wilson said Brownlie's illness, plus the amount of time they found themselves working on the ballot proposal led them to close down their giftware business. With their efforts Proposition 64 went down to defeat. Also in 1986 Wilson founded a group called the AIDS Prevention Team. This group was started with a small grant he received while volunteering with a social organization called Black and White Men Together.

In early 1987 he and Brownlie were both diagnosed with HIV infection, which at the time nearly always gave way to full blown AIDS. In fact, Brownlie's illness was classified as AIDS. The diagnosis just seemed to make Wilson and Brownlie work harder. They also founded the AIDS Health Care Foundation around that time, which has grown into the largest nonprofit HIV medical services provider in Los Angeles County. It now includes the Chris Brownlie Hospice.

It was then he became concerned that AIDS was too easily being ignored in the African American community and noted that the scant information available to the minority community ignored black gays and lesbians. Wilson went about to change that through the founding of the National Black Gay and Lesbian Conference and one year later the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum (BGLLF).

Beginning in 1988, he was more frequently involved on the national side of the issues close to him. He took part in a major conference in Virginia with other lesbian and gay leaders originally summoned by author Larry Kramer. He led a protest to the conference's lack of racial parity and gained some respect from attendees.

After already experiencing losing many friends and colleagues to the disease he was fighting, he lost Chris to AIDS in 1989.

After Brownlie's death, he channeled his anger and grief into work for HIV/AIDS prevention. Wilson developed AIDS in 1990, and nearly died in 1995, but the development of the new antiretroviral drugs enabled him to recover.

In 1990 he was instrumental in putting together the first "Summit on Homosexuality in the Black Community" at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta. This meeting eventually led to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) endorsement of the gay, lesbian, and bisexual March on Washington in 1993.

That April Wilson was one of the key note speakers at the march. In August he was back in Washington as a keynote speaker for the 30th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. When President Bill Clinton invited lesbian and gay leaders to meet with him shortly after his election, Wilson was chosen as one of the gay community's spokespeople.

As his organizing and activism has continued, the awards and recognition of Wilson's work has grown. In 1990 he was voted Man of the Year by the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. Mayor Richard J. Riordan of Los Angeles awarded him the AIDS Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. In January of 1994 Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund said, that Wilson "ensured that voices of African Americans were heard in the struggle for lesbian and gay rights as well as in the fight against AIDS," as they awarded him their Vision Liberty Award.

"AIDS has always been personal from the very, very beginning," says Wilson. "In 1980 I discovered that I was gay. It just kind of happened, and I began to figure out what that meant. In that process I met Chris Brownlie, and we fell in love . . . and began a relationship that lasted until he died. In 1981 we moved to Los Angeles, and by that time we guessed that he had been infected along the way, and consequently we guessed that I was also infected, but we didn't know."

By 1999, when he was well enough to return to the frontlines of activism, he founded the Black AIDS Institute. Prior to founding the Institute, Wilson served as the AIDS Coordinator for the City of Los Angeles from 1990 to 1993, the Director of Policy and Planning at AIDS Project Los Angeles from 1993 to 1996. He was co-chair of the Los Angeles County HIV Health Commission from 1990 to 1995, and was an appointee to the HRSA AIDS Advisory Committee from 1995 to 1998.

On celebrating his 50th birthday in 2006, Wilson said, "I didn't think 30 was an option, so to be 50 is amazing."

He served as the coordinator of the International Community Treatment and Science Workshop at the 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th International AIDS Conferences in Geneva, Switzerland, Durban South, Africa, Barcelona, Spain, Bangkok, Thailand, and Toronto Canada and has published articles in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, the Los Angeles Weekly, Essence, Ebony, VIBE, Jet, Poz, HIV+ and Arise. The Ford Foundation named him one of the 20 award recipients for the Leadership for a Changing World, in 2001. He was a member of the US delegation to the 1994 World AIDS Summit in Paris, and has worked extensively on HIV/AIDS policy, research, prevention, and treatment issues in Russia, Latvia, the Ukraine, the UK, Holland, Germany, France, Mexico, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, India, and Botswana.

Among his many award is a recent recipient of the Delta Spirit Award from the Delta Sigma Theta Los Angeles chapter, he was given the Discovery Health Channel Medical Honor in July 2004, and was recently named one of the “2005 Black History Makers in the Making” by Black Entertainment Television (B.E.T.).

Many times he speaks of his work as war. But it is the necessity of it that keeps him going. "If you don't do any of that long term planning, then you're assuring that it's going to be around another 5, 10, 15, or 20 years." "By the time we have the infrastructure we have to have," said Wilson in POZ magazine, "I'll probably be dead. But right now I'm doing what I'm doing and living my life as I see it."

He often calls for the black community to accept their gay and lesbian members nearly as often as he calls for the white gay community to accept their black brothers and sisters as equals. "He calls them as he sees them," said Mario Cooper, manager of the 1992 Democratic National Convention. Wilson's work in founding and leading coalition-building organizations "allows him to speak frankly about those racial issues," said Cooper.

"I have lived an unbelievably blessed life. Now people may think that's a bizarre thing to say for someone who's lived almost his entire adult life with either HIV or AIDS. The truth of the matter is that I've lived a life where I've had the privilege of pretending that I can make a difference, and if I can hold onto that illusion, it doesn't get much better than that."

"The price of the ticket for life is to leave the world in a different place than you found it, to leave the world a better place than you found it."