Eighteenth Issue: Heroines of the AIDS Epidemic
This week I’m going to talk about a serious subject, but I want to talk about people who helped and made it better. If you remember back when I talked about that special school that sheltered Jewish children during the Holocaust; I’m all about individual people making a difference. I want to be more like those people, the people who against all odds, when it’s so easy to just give up, don’t, and keep working hard to make a difference in individual people’s lives.
Brownie Mary was an American medical cannabis activist. Her full name was Mary Jane Rathbun, and she was a volunteer at the San Francisco General Hospital at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She was known for illegally baking and distributing pot brownies to ease the pain of AIDS patients. She helped pass propositions in San Francisco to legalize cannabis for medical use. She was arrested three times, and her appearance as a kindly older woman helped lend publicity and sympathy for her cause. She eventually got permission to legally distribute her brownies to those who needed them.
Mary was born in Chicago in 1922. She was raised in Minneapolis in a Catholic family. She moved out of her parents’ house and worked as a waitress as a teenager, continuing to do so for most of her life. She was always a social activist; she campaigned for the rights of miners to form unions and worked as an activist promoting abortion rights. During World War II she met a man at a USO dance and had a daughter in San Francisco. Her daughter was killed in the early 1970s in a car accident. She didn’t stay with the father.
Mary met another activist called Dennis Peron in 1974 in the Castro District where she worked at IHOP and made extra money selling “magical brownies”. Dennis took some and sold them at his supermarket too. By the 1980s, Mary was baking 50 dozen brownies a day, and eventually the police raided her home. She was 57 years old and she pleaded guilty and got sentenced to 500 hours of community service. She decided to do her community service in helping people who had HIV/AIDS. She finished her hours in just two months, but kept doing community service. As her friend Dennis said, “Mary had lost her only daughter in an auto accident…and now she adopted every kid in San Francisco as her own”.
Mary sold her brownies to mostly gay men. She noticed that when they started getting AIDS, cannabis helped them with the wasting syndrome. People began to donate cannabis to her and Mary began making brownies by the hundreds and giving them to sick people for free. She used her monthly Social Security check to get baking supplies. In 1982, Mary was arrested again, on her way to give cannabis brownies to a friend who had cancer and wanted to get some alleviation from the side effects of chemotherapy. The DA eventually dropped the charges against her.
Mary volunteered every week at the AIDS ward at the San Francisco General Hospital, and got a Volunteer of the Year Award. Her friend Dennis spoke at a meeting of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) about using cannabis to relieve AIDS symptoms in the early 1990s, and he told Mary about it later. She spoke to the group about her experiences and helped work on Proposition P, making San Francisco recommend that California allow people to use cannabis for medical purposes.
Brownie Mary was arrested again in 1992, and the DA tried to prosecute her but she was acquitted of all charges and gained international media coverage. She testified in front of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and they made the arrest of people in possession of or growing medical cannabis their “lowest priority”, declaring August 25th “Brownie Mary Day”.
In September of 1992, Mary joined ACT UP at a protest in DC against medical cannabis policies of the Bush administration. The Carter administration had started the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program in 1976 to allow a small group of people to use cannabis for medical purposes, but the new head of the Public Health Service had terminated this initiative. He also said that people with AIDS who used cannabis “might be less likely to practice safe sexual behavior”. ACT UP demanded he resign, and Mary served brownies at the protest, inviting the head of Public Health Service to “follow me around for two days as I visit my kids in the wards, and then see where he stands on this”.
Mary helped her friend Dennis open the first medical cannabis dispensary in the United States, and she helped pass Proposition 215 that allowed patients to possess and cultivate cannabis for medical use with the recommendation of a physician. In 1997 she was honored as Grand Marshal of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade along with her friend Dennis.
Mary suffered from arthritis, colon cancer, and had artificial knees. She consumed half a cannabis brownie in the morning and half in the afternoon to help with her pain, but by 1996 her health was declining. She told Dennis she was considering travelling to Michigan for a physician assisted suicide from Jack Kevorkian, but she ended up dying of a heart attack at age 77 in 1999. 300 people attended a candlelight vigil in her honor. Below is a picture of her with her friend Dennis.
Another woman who was a hero of the AIDS movement was one named Ruth Coker Burks. In 1984, when Ruth was twenty five years old, she went to the University Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas to help look after a friend of hers who had cancer. She ended up spending much of the year in hospitals taking care of her friend, and she noticed a door with a big red bag over it. She saw nurses draw straws to decide who had to go in.
Ruth knew about AIDS which was then called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) because she had a gay cousin in Hawaii and she asked him about the stories of a gay illness once she saw a report on the news about it. (He said not to worry because it was just San Francisco). Ruth snuck into the room and saw a man who had wasted away and weighed less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mom before he passed. When she asked the nurses about it, they said nobody was going to come see him.
She found a phone number for his mother, and she called her, but she hung up on her. She called back, and said, “If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death”. So the mother did not hang up this time. The man’s mother told her that she didn’t care about her son because he was a sinner and he was already dead to her. She didn’t even want to claim his body. Ruth didn’t know what to do. She walked back into the dying man’s room, and he said “Oh momma, I knew you’d come,” and lifted his hand, so Ruth took his hand and said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here.” Ruth stayed with him and held his hand and washed his face and sat there for thirteen hours until he died.
Ruth’s family had a whole cemetery that lay empty. In a family dispute, Ruth’s mother and uncle got into a fight and to make sure that his side of the family would never lie in the same cemetery as the rest of them, her mother bought every single grave space – 262 of them. Ruth said later, “I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery. Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”
Ruth buried the ashes of the man she’d sat with in that cemetery. She couldn’t find any funeral home close to her that would touch the body to cremate it, but finally found one about seventy miles away, and paid for it herself. Ruth ended up burying more than forty people in cookie jars in that cemetery. They were gay men whose families didn’t even want their ashes. Her daughter went with her, and helped her with the digging and saying a prayer. They couldn’t get a priest or a preacher to do that part. Nobody wanted to.
Ruth tried to reach families every time she buried someone, but they would hang up on her or curse at her. Word got around that there was a woman who wasn’t afraid of gay men dying of AIDS. She became their hospice. She paid for everything with donations and out of her own pocket, helping patients get to their doctor’s appointments, get them medicine, and cheer them up when they got depressed. She had an “underground pharmacy” in her house. When a patient died, she would keep all the medicines because then later someone else might be able to use them.
Many of her donations would come from gay clubs in Arkansas, where they would put on a drag show and then donate the proceeds to her. Ruth went to so many funerals, sometimes even three a day. She witnessed so many awful things, like one man whose family insisted he be baptized three days before he died to wash away the sin of being gay, or another man whose family came to his house after he died in plastic suits and gloves to scrub everything he touched with bleach. She would sit with people as they filled out their own death certificates because Ruth didn’t have the information that she would need like their mother’s maiden name and things like that.
Ruth’s favorite person she helped was a man called Billy, who was only around twenty one years old. She went to the mall with him when he quit his job due to his declining health, and she held him as he cried while shoppers walked around them. She was trying to cheer him up and keep her own self from crying when he mentioned that he never had ridden an elephant before. So Ruth and Billy went on an elephant ride. Below is Ruth with a picture of Billy.
Ruth saw a lot of awful things but she saw a lot of wonderful things too. She said, “I watched these men take care of their companions and watch them die. I’ve seen them go in and hold them up in the shower. They would hold them while I washed them. They would carry them back to the bed. We would dry them off and put lotion on them. They did that until the very end, knowing that they were going to be that person before long. Now, you tell me that’s not love and devotion? I don’t know a lot of straight people who would do that.”
Better drugs, education, and treatment made Ruth’s work obsolete. She moved to Florida for few years, and worked as a White House consultant on AIDS education for the Clinton administration. In 2013 she fought for three foster children who were taken out of school in a nearby town because one of them was HIV-positive. She couldn’t believe that this was still a thing that happened, so many years later.
Ruth wants a monument in the cemetery, where she buried so many people, because she doesn’t want them to be forgotten.
“Someday, I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.”
I read a lot about the AIDS epidemic recently, kind of prompted by the stories of these two women. Maybe you already know all about it, but I wasn’t born yet during most of it, and it isn’t really something taught in schools, at least none of the ones I went to, but I think it’s really important to know. Everyone was dying so much that there aren’t many people out there who can tell the story and make sure that these people are not forgotten. There are a couple of really good movies and documentaries about it, and some Wikipedia articles that I found useful. Here are some:
Marsha P. Johnson is known for leading the Stonewall Riots, but she was also an AIDS activist in her later life, until her untimely death. Peter Staley founded TAG (Treatment Action Group) and is heavily featured in the play and movie, The Normal Heart.
Finally, How to Survive a Plague is probably THE documentary to watch about AIDS. It used to be on Netflix, I don't know if it still is, but I highly recommend it.
Speaking of women who worked to help those affected by AIDS, I was walking home from work a few weeks ago and I noticed a building labelled: The Whitman-Walker Clinic Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center. I looked it up and it turns out that it is a non-profit community health center in with a special expertise in HIV/AIDS healthcare and LGBT healthcare, founded in 1978. It is named for Walt Whitman and Mary Edwards Walker (fascinating people in their own right!).
I was interested in Elizabeth Taylor though, because I knew who she was, and I knew about how she was Rock Hudson’s friend from this article titled ‘Nancy Reagan Turned Down Rock Hudson’s Plea for Help Nine Weeks Before he Died’ (side note: the Reagans were Truly Evil people for their lack of response to the AIDS epidemic - the fact that they let people DIE because they thought they deserved it!! I can't fathom.).
Elizabeth Taylor became an HIV/AIDS activist as the disease began to spread. She raised more than $270 million dollars for the cause at a time when many other celebrities did not even want to be associated with such an issue. She organized and hosted the first AIDS fundraiser, and along with Dr. Michael Gottlieb she founded the National AIDS Research Foundation after her friend Rock Hudson announced he was dying of AIDS. She also started the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, paying all its overhead costs on her own. Even now, 25% of the royalties that are earned from using her image are donated to her foundation. She persuaded President Reagan to acknowledge the disease in a speech in 1987 and criticized President Bush and Clinton for not doing more to combat it.
Anyway, I know this is not a fun topic, but like I said in the start, no matter how bad things get there are people out there helping and that always makes me hopeful. By the way, if you know of any other stories of individual people making a difference in small ways, I'd love to hear about them.
Brownie Mary was an American medical cannabis activist. Her full name was Mary Jane Rathbun, and she was a volunteer at the San Francisco General Hospital at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She was known for illegally baking and distributing pot brownies to ease the pain of AIDS patients. She helped pass propositions in San Francisco to legalize cannabis for medical use. She was arrested three times, and her appearance as a kindly older woman helped lend publicity and sympathy for her cause. She eventually got permission to legally distribute her brownies to those who needed them.
Mary was born in Chicago in 1922. She was raised in Minneapolis in a Catholic family. She moved out of her parents’ house and worked as a waitress as a teenager, continuing to do so for most of her life. She was always a social activist; she campaigned for the rights of miners to form unions and worked as an activist promoting abortion rights. During World War II she met a man at a USO dance and had a daughter in San Francisco. Her daughter was killed in the early 1970s in a car accident. She didn’t stay with the father.
Mary met another activist called Dennis Peron in 1974 in the Castro District where she worked at IHOP and made extra money selling “magical brownies”. Dennis took some and sold them at his supermarket too. By the 1980s, Mary was baking 50 dozen brownies a day, and eventually the police raided her home. She was 57 years old and she pleaded guilty and got sentenced to 500 hours of community service. She decided to do her community service in helping people who had HIV/AIDS. She finished her hours in just two months, but kept doing community service. As her friend Dennis said, “Mary had lost her only daughter in an auto accident…and now she adopted every kid in San Francisco as her own”.
Mary sold her brownies to mostly gay men. She noticed that when they started getting AIDS, cannabis helped them with the wasting syndrome. People began to donate cannabis to her and Mary began making brownies by the hundreds and giving them to sick people for free. She used her monthly Social Security check to get baking supplies. In 1982, Mary was arrested again, on her way to give cannabis brownies to a friend who had cancer and wanted to get some alleviation from the side effects of chemotherapy. The DA eventually dropped the charges against her.
Mary volunteered every week at the AIDS ward at the San Francisco General Hospital, and got a Volunteer of the Year Award. Her friend Dennis spoke at a meeting of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) about using cannabis to relieve AIDS symptoms in the early 1990s, and he told Mary about it later. She spoke to the group about her experiences and helped work on Proposition P, making San Francisco recommend that California allow people to use cannabis for medical purposes.
Brownie Mary was arrested again in 1992, and the DA tried to prosecute her but she was acquitted of all charges and gained international media coverage. She testified in front of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and they made the arrest of people in possession of or growing medical cannabis their “lowest priority”, declaring August 25th “Brownie Mary Day”.
In September of 1992, Mary joined ACT UP at a protest in DC against medical cannabis policies of the Bush administration. The Carter administration had started the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program in 1976 to allow a small group of people to use cannabis for medical purposes, but the new head of the Public Health Service had terminated this initiative. He also said that people with AIDS who used cannabis “might be less likely to practice safe sexual behavior”. ACT UP demanded he resign, and Mary served brownies at the protest, inviting the head of Public Health Service to “follow me around for two days as I visit my kids in the wards, and then see where he stands on this”.
Mary helped her friend Dennis open the first medical cannabis dispensary in the United States, and she helped pass Proposition 215 that allowed patients to possess and cultivate cannabis for medical use with the recommendation of a physician. In 1997 she was honored as Grand Marshal of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade along with her friend Dennis.
Mary suffered from arthritis, colon cancer, and had artificial knees. She consumed half a cannabis brownie in the morning and half in the afternoon to help with her pain, but by 1996 her health was declining. She told Dennis she was considering travelling to Michigan for a physician assisted suicide from Jack Kevorkian, but she ended up dying of a heart attack at age 77 in 1999. 300 people attended a candlelight vigil in her honor. Below is a picture of her with her friend Dennis.
Ruth knew about AIDS which was then called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) because she had a gay cousin in Hawaii and she asked him about the stories of a gay illness once she saw a report on the news about it. (He said not to worry because it was just San Francisco). Ruth snuck into the room and saw a man who had wasted away and weighed less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mom before he passed. When she asked the nurses about it, they said nobody was going to come see him.
She found a phone number for his mother, and she called her, but she hung up on her. She called back, and said, “If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death”. So the mother did not hang up this time. The man’s mother told her that she didn’t care about her son because he was a sinner and he was already dead to her. She didn’t even want to claim his body. Ruth didn’t know what to do. She walked back into the dying man’s room, and he said “Oh momma, I knew you’d come,” and lifted his hand, so Ruth took his hand and said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here.” Ruth stayed with him and held his hand and washed his face and sat there for thirteen hours until he died.
Ruth’s family had a whole cemetery that lay empty. In a family dispute, Ruth’s mother and uncle got into a fight and to make sure that his side of the family would never lie in the same cemetery as the rest of them, her mother bought every single grave space – 262 of them. Ruth said later, “I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery. Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”
Ruth buried the ashes of the man she’d sat with in that cemetery. She couldn’t find any funeral home close to her that would touch the body to cremate it, but finally found one about seventy miles away, and paid for it herself. Ruth ended up burying more than forty people in cookie jars in that cemetery. They were gay men whose families didn’t even want their ashes. Her daughter went with her, and helped her with the digging and saying a prayer. They couldn’t get a priest or a preacher to do that part. Nobody wanted to.
Many of her donations would come from gay clubs in Arkansas, where they would put on a drag show and then donate the proceeds to her. Ruth went to so many funerals, sometimes even three a day. She witnessed so many awful things, like one man whose family insisted he be baptized three days before he died to wash away the sin of being gay, or another man whose family came to his house after he died in plastic suits and gloves to scrub everything he touched with bleach. She would sit with people as they filled out their own death certificates because Ruth didn’t have the information that she would need like their mother’s maiden name and things like that.
Ruth’s favorite person she helped was a man called Billy, who was only around twenty one years old. She went to the mall with him when he quit his job due to his declining health, and she held him as he cried while shoppers walked around them. She was trying to cheer him up and keep her own self from crying when he mentioned that he never had ridden an elephant before. So Ruth and Billy went on an elephant ride. Below is Ruth with a picture of Billy.
Better drugs, education, and treatment made Ruth’s work obsolete. She moved to Florida for few years, and worked as a White House consultant on AIDS education for the Clinton administration. In 2013 she fought for three foster children who were taken out of school in a nearby town because one of them was HIV-positive. She couldn’t believe that this was still a thing that happened, so many years later.
Ruth wants a monument in the cemetery, where she buried so many people, because she doesn’t want them to be forgotten.
“Someday, I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.”
I read a lot about the AIDS epidemic recently, kind of prompted by the stories of these two women. Maybe you already know all about it, but I wasn’t born yet during most of it, and it isn’t really something taught in schools, at least none of the ones I went to, but I think it’s really important to know. Everyone was dying so much that there aren’t many people out there who can tell the story and make sure that these people are not forgotten. There are a couple of really good movies and documentaries about it, and some Wikipedia articles that I found useful. Here are some:
Marsha P. Johnson is known for leading the Stonewall Riots, but she was also an AIDS activist in her later life, until her untimely death. Peter Staley founded TAG (Treatment Action Group) and is heavily featured in the play and movie, The Normal Heart.
Finally, How to Survive a Plague is probably THE documentary to watch about AIDS. It used to be on Netflix, I don't know if it still is, but I highly recommend it.
Speaking of women who worked to help those affected by AIDS, I was walking home from work a few weeks ago and I noticed a building labelled: The Whitman-Walker Clinic Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center. I looked it up and it turns out that it is a non-profit community health center in with a special expertise in HIV/AIDS healthcare and LGBT healthcare, founded in 1978. It is named for Walt Whitman and Mary Edwards Walker (fascinating people in their own right!).
I was interested in Elizabeth Taylor though, because I knew who she was, and I knew about how she was Rock Hudson’s friend from this article titled ‘Nancy Reagan Turned Down Rock Hudson’s Plea for Help Nine Weeks Before he Died’ (side note: the Reagans were Truly Evil people for their lack of response to the AIDS epidemic - the fact that they let people DIE because they thought they deserved it!! I can't fathom.).
Elizabeth Taylor became an HIV/AIDS activist as the disease began to spread. She raised more than $270 million dollars for the cause at a time when many other celebrities did not even want to be associated with such an issue. She organized and hosted the first AIDS fundraiser, and along with Dr. Michael Gottlieb she founded the National AIDS Research Foundation after her friend Rock Hudson announced he was dying of AIDS. She also started the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, paying all its overhead costs on her own. Even now, 25% of the royalties that are earned from using her image are donated to her foundation. She persuaded President Reagan to acknowledge the disease in a speech in 1987 and criticized President Bush and Clinton for not doing more to combat it.
Anyway, I know this is not a fun topic, but like I said in the start, no matter how bad things get there are people out there helping and that always makes me hopeful. By the way, if you know of any other stories of individual people making a difference in small ways, I'd love to hear about them.
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