Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>> I got involved in *** in the very, very beginning.
>> Phill Wilson is a prominent *** and AIDS activist who has dedicated his life to ending
the epidemic.
>> Our friends were getting sick, and our friends were dying. If you were a person of
conscience, you had to get involved. And so, we got involved in the beginning days because
we felt we needed to know. We felt it was going to be about us.
>> Phill founded the Black AIDS institute, and IN THE LIFE has covered his work over
the years as he has mobilized and educated communities of color.
>> Racism particularly is a player in the ***/AIDS pandemic because race drives so many
things in this country.
>> Black communities were slow to respond to the AIDS epidemic in the beginning, because
the AIDS epidemic was mischaracterized as a white, gay disease.
>> What do you think it will take for us to develop a national aids strategy in this country.
Particularly now we should be talking about the AIDS epidemic in the most impacted population
in the United States. Now, there's no place else where, you know, there's no other population
in the United States that is as impacted with *** than black America.
>> Now Phill is appearing in a new FRONTLINE documentary, Endgame: AIDS in Black America.
>> Around the country in gay communities like San Francisco's Castro District, word spread
about the mysterious killer disease. But on the other side of the bay, in Oakland, it
was a different story.
>> That bridge really is a divider. There are literally two different worlds. When a
black person would go to the door of the white gay clubs in San Francisco back in the 80s
and 90s, we would be asked for 2, 3, 4 pieces of ID before we could get in. We weren't considered
a hotspot. It was San Francisco. Even though we were burning too.
>> All I can say about the difference in the early 80s from San Francisco and Oakland is
that it was science. While in San Francisco they were acting up, literally, and talking
about ***, over in Oakland it was silence and fear.
>> One of the things that is most powerful about this film is that there is powerful
storytelling going on, you know, that we get to tell our story in our words, in our voices
that reflect our reality. And some of those realities are very, very harsh.
>> In the 1980s, Jesse was an A student, a National Guardsman and a model, and he was
hiding.
>> The African-American community and a lot of communities have stigma around being gay.
I had an uncle and I remember being in the car with him, and he pointed to an obviously
gay man and said, "I hate them". And this is my uncle. It was my favorite uncle. And
it crushed me.
>> This film attempts to look at the social determinants of health. It's critically important
because we're not going to end the AIDS epidemic, we're not going to get to the endgame by a
magic bullet or a magic pill. It's not going to get us there. No. We're going to get there
when we begin to figure out how to celebrate, embrace, value all of our lives and how we
make a commitment to design structures and systems that value folks' lives.
>> When asked how close to an endgame we are. Phill had this to say:
>> Particularly in black communities, we are a resilient folk, but we are at a deciding
moment in the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic. We clearly have the tools to end the epidemic.
Now, the question is no longer, "Can we end AIDS?" The question now is "Will we end AIDS?"
Now, will we use these tools expeditiously, efficiently, compassionately. Now, will we
come together? Will each and every one of us do out part? Because when we do our part,
there is nothing that we are not greater than, you know. We were greater than the Middle
Passage. We were greater than slavery. We were greater than Reconstruction. We were
greater than Jim Crow. We were greater than Hurricane Katrina, and together we will be
greater than AIDS.