SF Schoolchildren Mark World AIDS Day

When community activist George Kelly recently spoke to the fourth graders at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy about his 32-year struggle living with HIV, he noticed one student getting teary-eyed.

Jada Tucker, 9, had lost her uncle to AIDS. After sharing a hug, Kelly suggested that the girl honor her uncle's memory by writing out his name in chalk on a sidewalk in San Francisco's gay Castro district during a special event held Tuesday, December 1 to commemorate World AIDS Day.

Tucker was one of the first students who agreed to be part of the Inscribe Project, in which students, volunteers, and community residents met on Castro Street to inscribe the names of hundreds of people who had been affected by AIDS. The collaboration between the Castro elementary school, named after the city's first gay supervisor, and a group of long-term HIV survivors, called Honoring Our Experience, saw the names of more than 1,000 people written out along the sidewalks.

Before the 75 students and teachers from the Milk school walked down to Castro Street with their pails of chalk, Jada's mother, Barbara Banks, thanked the organizers for getting the kids involved in the project.

"When my brother was first diagnosed" with HIV, there was so much stigma associated with the diagnosis that it took him 10 years "to even tell us he was HIV-positive," Banks said, noting how "things have changed a lot since then and I think it's wonderful that the subject is out in the open now" so children grow up knowing about the disease.

When Kelly spoke to Jada's class, said Banks, her daughter "was really hit very hard" because she had also known a school volunteer, Tom Ray, who died of AIDS in 2012. And, added Banks, "George's announcement to the class that he too was HIV-positive, really saddened my daughter."

Other Milk students filled the sidewalks with names they brought from lists given to them from friends and family. Wyatt Shaffer, 9, had a list of 14 names to inscribe. At a family Thanksgiving celebration, Shaffer asked all the guests if they would like him to honor people with AIDS they knew.

"I'm really glad I'm able to be part of something" honoring the people whose names he had been given, Shaffer said.
Hero Freemom, left, and Emmajean Brown stop making sidewalk art in order to pin red AIDS awareness ribbons on each other's shirts during a World AIDS Day event held in San Francisco Tuesday, December 1.
Photo: Jane Philomen Cleland

Fourth grade teacher Tom Nishimura, on Castro Street supervising several dozen of his Milk students, said the project "dovetailed perfectly" with the AIDS curriculum taught at the school.

Nishimura, who is gay, invited a group of people living with HIV to speak to his class. The students "were riveted" when they heard the guests' stories, he said. At the same time, Nishimura also told the students that his first partner, James Stokely, had died of AIDS.

"I told them that we were very young, in our twenties, and this was my first love," he said.

Even though his students are only nine or 10 years old, they "really stepped up" and were "very sympathetic" when they heard the story, recalled Nishimura.

Kelly, a longtime volunteer at the Milk school, coordinated the Inscribe event and received assistance in staffing it from the members of Honoring Our Experience, part of the Shanti Project.

"There are so many things I love about this event. One is that it's being created by George, a long-term survivor, as his gift back to the community," HOE founder Greg Cassin told the Bay Area Reporter . "It is poignant that we will honor our loved ones lost to the epidemic right in the Castro, right in our beloved neighborhood...the neighborhood and on the streets that we walked together, celebrated together, and where we have grieved and mourned losses.

"And now it is particularly poignant for long-term survivors to gather in this place that holds so much meaning for us," added Cassin. "That we gather together and call together the entire community - young and old - to honor those we loved and lost, to honor those still in the fight, and also to honor the beauty of our community's response."

Another HOE volunteer, Patti Radigan, who has been HIV positive for 23 years, was impressed with the openness of the Milk school administration in supporting the Inscribe Project.

Radigan, who lived in Suffolk County, New York when her kids were growing up, said she had "lots of difficulty" getting schools there to offer AIDS education. "And I'm talking high schools. To have a middle school be so enlightened, well, I guess that's why I live in San Francisco now."

The project was supported by dozens of individuals and businesses in the Castro, said Kelly, who was named the 2008-2009 volunteer of the year by the San Francisco Unified School District.

"This isn't a fundraiser," he noted, "but our way of giving back."

Donations of materials and services were "plentiful," he said, noting that the Castro/Upper Market Community Benefit District made sure the sidewalks were cleaned. Starbucks paid for lunch for the students and Cliff's Variety bought the chalk and pails.

The Inscribe Project comes 37 years after Kelly first recognized that he had symptoms that may have been HIV-related. His hunch was confirmed in 1984, when a University of Texas school physician told him he had AIDS.

"He said, 'Stay close to home, you're going to die,'" Kelly recalled.

Instead, he dropped out of college, packed his bags and moved to Albuquerque, "so my family didn't have to watch me decline," he said.

After several years of failing health, Kelly researched HIV drug trials and concluded his best chance of survival would be to move to San Francisco. Unable to relocate to California without a job, Kelly, who had been employed by Hilton Hotels for many years, recalled serving Conrad Hilton at a grand opening event. He wrote to the hotel magnate, asking if he could help him with a transfer to San Francisco.

"The phone rang and it was Conrad Hilton. The rest of the story is history," said Kelly, who was prescribed various different HIV cocktails and today takes 18 pills a day.

Over the last three decades Kelly has focused on "getting involved with the community." At first, he was informally helping friends who were ill, but after a stint volunteering with facilitating patient groups, he landed a job with Kaiser Permanente, where he continues to work part-time.

The Inscribe event had been scheduled to end at noon but was still going strong at 3 p.m. when Dr. Elizabeth Harrison, a psychiatrist from Sacramento and founder of the AIDS support group Hand to Hand, stumbled upon the event during a visit to friends in the Castro.

Grabbing some chalk from a pail on the sidewalk, Harrison inscribed the names of two friends who died several decades ago.

"It was wonderful to find an opportunity to remember my dear friends," she said. "I so appreciate the Castro, the only neighborhood I can think of where something like this would happen."