Queer Voices
Queer Voices
Queer Voices 12/18/24: Playwright Isaac Gomez and activist powerhouse Tori Williams
Playwright Isaac Gomez joins us for a captivating exploration of his latest theatrical creation, "The Night Shift Before Christmas," a one-woman holiday comedy that transforms the stage at the Alley Theatre. Inspired by personal experiences in Texas, Isaac crafts a modern rendition of "A Christmas Carol," focusing on Margot, who is working the graveyard shift on Christmas Eve. This heartfelt tribute to Houston invites listeners to engage with themes of resilience and the unseen stories of those who work tirelessly during the holidays.
Our journey continues with a deep dive into the world of playwriting and identity, where we uncover the collaborative process behind a fresh adaptation of a classic tale. Discover how a playwright's upbringing in a border town and life-shaping events, such as the tragic loss of a friend, have influenced her storytelling. She shares her process of weaving narratives that address exploitation and working-class struggles, while also reflecting on the lighter tones of her current project and the contemporary writers who inspire her work.
Finally, we shine a light on the impactful efforts of Tori Williams and the Ryan White Planning Council. Delve into the evolution of HIV care and funding from grassroots efforts to the introduction of life-changing antiretroviral medications. Through an oral history initiative, the episode aims to preserve the powerful narratives of those affected by the AIDS epidemic, with a particular focus on documenting the experiences of transgender individuals. Our discussion emphasizes the critical need for ongoing community support and accessible healthcare, highlighting both the challenges and advancements in combating the HIV epidemic today.
Queer Voices airs in Houston Texas on 90.1FM KPFT and is heard as a podcast here. Queer Voices hopes to entertain as well as illuminate LGBTQ issues in Houston and beyond. Check out our socials at:
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Hello everybody, this is Queer Voices, a podcast version of a broadcast radio show that's been on the air in Houston, texas, for several decades. This week, brett Cullum talks with playwright Isaac Gomez. He wrote the Alley Theatre's holiday show, the Night Shift Before Christmas, which runs until the 29th. This is a spoof of A Christmas Carol.
Speaker 2:I have these childhood memories of being with her at a retail store during graveyard shifts because no one could take care of me helping her at the store, and one of the more chaotic moments was Christmas Eve, and there are so many people in the world who have to work on Christmas.
Speaker 1:Eve. Then Debra Bell has a conversation with Tori Williams, director of the Ryan White Planning Council.
Speaker 3:There are a couple of things that we usually find when we do this survey, and the one is always lack of information. That is our number one problem in the greater Houston area is folks living with HIV just don't always understand what services are available to them.
Speaker 1:Queer Voices starts now.
Speaker 4:I am Brett Pelham, a writer for Broadway World, and I am here today to talk with Isaac Gomez about their upcoming world premiere, the Night Shift Before Christmas. It plays at the Alley Theater, opens on December 5th and plays through December 29th. The summary of the plot is it's about a woman named Margot who works the graveyard shift on Christmas Eve. It's a one-woman, very adult holiday comedy. Isaac wrote this as a love letter to Houston and to all that have worked in fast food or retail during the holidays. So please welcome Isaac to Queer Voices. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker 4:You have a world premiere at the Alley. That is insane. Is this your first play that's being produced on this scale, or are you like an old pro at this kind of thing?
Speaker 2:Or are you like an old pro at this kind of thing? My second production with the Alley, with the Audible Theater at the Minetta Lane, certainly not my first in this scale, but it doesn't mean that it ever gets old, or easy.
Speaker 4:Well, yeah, if you mention things like the Steppenwolf, I'm already kind of going like this yeah, that's amazing, it sounds like you've really kind of penetrated a lot of things and really made an impact on the industry. But how did this show come to you? It mentioned in the summary that it's a love letter, sort of, to Houston. So how did you decide to write this one?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know the alley. One of the most incredible things about the alley theater in Houston, texas, is their commitment and support, not just to new voices and new writers, but writers who have a deep, long history with Texas. And so, as I'm sure you're aware, the Alley has their annual new play festival called Alley All New, which was created by their former director of new play development, liz Frankel, who came to the Alley by way of the Public Theater in New York and she is a visionary in her own right and vein and created this to help include the alley in a larger conversation around new works and writers across the country who are really trying to speak to our current moment. And so, at the time that I got linked up with the alley, they, like many regional theaters around the country, during the holidays produce a Christmas carol for their wider audiences and then, in their more intimate spaces, have typically something a little bit more adults like Santillan Diaries. In that vein, allie and what artistic director Rob Melrose was wanting to curate is what would a modern version of something like a Santa Land Diaries that speaks specifically to the Houston experience, specifically to Texas, specifically for adults, in a fun, funny, warm-hearted, holiday-oriented way, they reached out to a couple of Texas playwrights to loosely pitch some ideas around what they would want to the story they may or may not want to tell.
Speaker 2:And, as I mentioned, grew up in Texas, was born and raised along the US-Mexican border in El Paso, texas Juarez, mexico. I went to school at UT, austin. I have a lot of family in Houston. My mom's worked at Walmart for 26 years. I have these childhood memories of being with her at a retail store during graveyard shifts because no one could take care of me helping her at the store, and one of the more chaotic moments was Christmas Eve. And there are so many people in the world who have to work on Christmas Eve, on Christmas Day, on other holidays around the country. Families may not necessarily have the same experience as those who are given the days off on those days, and so I really wanted to tell a story that could speak from that experience those who are working hard to keep the world running during our holiday season.
Speaker 2:I was really excited and curious about telling a story about a woman who works at a fast food local fast food restaurant, mom and pop burger shop really wanting to give the Houston small town big city vibes that I always love when I'm in the city of Houston wanting to really honor that perspective.
Speaker 2:Obviously, charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is such a great source material, for one of the reasons why it's such a timeless tale is because it requires us to deeply examine our relationship with regret, with grief, with love, with family, and I was very curious about what would modern day woman's version of that narrative look like, and that's where Margot was born. The story of the Night Ship Before Christmas takes us through an incredibly chaotic, robust evening in which she's visited slash possessed by four spirits who are trying to help her work through something quite deep, and throughout her evening in working in this fast food restaurant and being possessed by these spirits, she uncovers deeper meaning behind why she chooses to work at this place on Christmas Eve every year and, in turn, has an incredible transformation in response to that discovery.
Speaker 4:Now, this is a one-woman show, so this actress actually gets possessed by the ghosts, is that right?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes. So from an artistic standpoint, something that really excited me was the ability to give a woman, specifically a Latina woman especially given in the state of Texas how prominent the Mexican and Mexican-American population is an opportunity to have a tour de force performance. And so in the play she's playing multiple characters, I think somewhere around seven or eight. She has to be quite proficient at physical comedy because of the possessions that unfold. There's line dances, there's live music that she sings, there are gorgeous tender moments that are deeply heartfelt and dramatic. It really is a masterclass in watching the actor really take their time in demonstrating the breadth and depth of their instrument.
Speaker 4:Who is the actor in this production?
Speaker 2:Her name is Brianna Reza, and one of the many things I value about Houston and the alley is their commitment to local talent. You know, the alley is one of the more larger regional theaters, not just obviously in the city but in the state and in the country. Of that caliber be a place where local actors can call home in their attempts of expanding their skill set. The alley really is is quite adamant about providing that opportunity, and so over the course of finding and identifying a person in houston who could do this, we stumbled upon a large array of talent, of incredible women who were really ready for this kind of tour de force performance, and Brianna is such a gift to the city of Houston in a way that I hope the city continues to value and appreciate.
Speaker 2:I think she is incredibly talented, very thoughtful, deeply inquisitive, leads with curiosity, is incredibly present and open and really funny and really moving. I think one of her many gifts is her ability to open her heart to us so that we can open our heart to her, and it really gives this character a level of depth and complexity that I'm not sure we always get to experience with Scrooge, you know he's. I think Charles Dickens really wanted to create an archetype of a type of person. I think he has the autonomy and the right to do that, if that is what he chose. I was more interested in exploring a more nuanced version of that, and brianna is an incredible vessel for that kind of work.
Speaker 4:You know, isaac, it's smart, because christmas carol really was about the exploitation of the working class. That was really the point of dickens, yes, in a lot of his work, and and the characters of Tiny Tim and the Cratchits and all that, and so this really is a neat kind of parallel to modern time. Because this would be exactly the scenario that Charles Dickens probably would have to choose to set his story.
Speaker 4:Yes, yes, I agree, I totally agree, yeah, so I love that you've taken this and made this into Christmas Carol and that you're doing this while the alley is doing it upstairs.
Speaker 2:I know it's really fun. It's fun, it's hilarious, it's great. Yeah, that's happening.
Speaker 4:What a wonderful opportunity to do that. So were you there for the rehearsals. Are you part of that process?
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. Yes, for a world premiere play, it's especially imperative for the writer to be involved, and so, yeah, I've been building this play with my actor, brianna, and with my director, kj Sanchez, who's also an incredible visionary, a great dramaturg, and with Year 267th Alley, who are incredibly thoughtful and thorough in their feedback, and ensuring that the vision of what we anticipate and hope that this will be and continue to be, ideally not just for the alley but for, you know, other regional theaters across the country is maintained. It's been a fun and intentional process.
Speaker 4:Tell me a little bit about you. How did you get into playwriting?
Speaker 2:Oh, you know, as I mentioned, I was born and raised on a border town, border cities. I grew up in a pretty poor working class family and part of town that did not have access to art and whose access to education was quite limited. Teacher introduced me to theater via play, adaptation of a children's book that she wanted us to perform for her fourth graders, and it was then that I was like, oh wow, like this thing, this stories are meaningful to me. It wasn't until she introduced the possibility of this being a viable career path to me. That, even conceptually, was. It just wasn't something I ever thought was an option, and so I'm forever thankful to her for that. At the time, though, I was primarily acting between there all the way through my undergrad in college.
Speaker 2:I've always been a writer. I've kept journals since I was seven. I would write poetry primarily as well, and, again, I never really imagined myself being. It wasn't something I ever thought was like it's odd, because it's like it's. It's not that I there wasn't there's. There was so much unawareness of it being a possibility. It wasn't me saying like, oh, I can't do that. It was me saying like, oh, the people who do that are the people who do that. That just happens to not be me, you know was really the energy at that time, and it wasn't until my freshman year of college when a friend of mine who lived in the same dorm as me he committed suicide. I was having a really hard time processing his very sudden and tragic death. I felt compelled for the very first time to write a play about it. Ut Austin has an incredible graduate playwriting program, and so it was a combination of this tragic event that happened in my life being around graduate students who are living playwrights so not like the dead greats living playwrights writing plays around me as an undergrad actor, living playwrights, writing plays around me as an undergrad actor. That's when it sort of surfaced for me as something I could possibly do, and so I had written my very first play then.
Speaker 2:And then it was, throughout the course of my undergrad, spending a lot of time back home with women who's, you know, unfortunately in not and not just in Juarez but around the world right, we experience and see femicide and feminicide as one of the greatest, I think, catastrophes of our lifetime.
Speaker 2:In Juarez in particular, you know, there's a lot of, I think, cultural awareness, at least more so than before around the missing and murdered women, and Juarez in particular, and so returning back to Juarez as an adult and to spend time with women whose daughters are still missing and who would drive buses to US-owned factories that these women would work at, became a pretty strong pillar for me in wanting to help get their stories out into the world, and I promised that I made to them, and that became the first. My two plays came out of that experience, one called the Way she Spoke and the other called La Ruta, and both of those became my very two first publicly produced plays, and those were in Chicago, and one was at Steppenwolf Theater and one was at a smaller storefront theater that no longer exists. That's amazing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and this definitely sounds like a big departure from that, because this sounds a little bit lighter. Oh, totally.
Speaker 2:For correct. Totally very different, for sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah, a lot of dramatic. Who are some of your favorite playwrights? Do you have some that you look at and go?
Speaker 2:oh, oh, my God, my god, yeah, of course, yes, most of them are living, thank god. Playwrights that have that inspire me and continue to. One of the greats in my mind is brandon jacob jenkins. I think he is so prolific and so profound, incredibly economical and really thoughtful. I think rajiv joseph is another one of our greats. I think he's also quite economical and in in the way he writes, plays big admirer of my friends, works like antonio and madhuri shaker and lauren yee, katori, hall lynn, nottage, marcus Gardley, I mean Amy Berryman is a new player who came into my consciousness over the last year in our writers group and I'm such a huge fan of hers and Craig Galvan, I mean, the list goes on and on.
Speaker 2:I think we're in such we have been over the last 10 years, I think, in such a. The art of playwriting is in, I think, one of the best places it's ever been. The business of theater and playwriting is in one of the worst places it's ever been. So that's an unfortunate contention, because so many playwrights, I think, are unable to sustain themselves, so we have to rely on other forms of of income, which involves other mediums like television and film, myself included, and and then that means, unfortunately, that you know, we're just losing a lot of playwrights to to, because the business is just not sustainable for us.
Speaker 4:So you're doing television and film too. Is there anything notable that you're working on or that you can?
Speaker 2:talk about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I wrote for season six of Narcos, mexico, on Netflix Wow, so you can watch that. I wrote on a television show called the Last Thing you Told Me for Apple TV with Jennifer Gardner. It's an adaptation of a book, a thriller, a summer hit. This show on Paramount Plus called Joe Pickett, which is also based on a series of books, a few shows that haven't aired yet but hopefully will in the next two years. And then, you know, I've sold pilots to FX and MRC Entertainment features to Focus Features. Yeah, that's mostly it.
Speaker 4:Isaac, I didn't even know what I was walking into. You are amazing.
Speaker 2:It's very kind, thank you.
Speaker 4:So thrilled to talk to you because obviously not only is this Allie world premiere but you've obviously done a ton of stuff, but also because we're on queer voices. I wanted to ask you when we set up this interview, you know, caroline told me that your pronouns are they, them. So how did you get to that identity? How did that come into your life? When did you kind of realize that you wanted to be identified as non-binary?
Speaker 2:Well, it's so funny because, like when I look back, some of my earliest, earliest memories around gender expression happened when I was a child and they were really an experimentation with in the when my mom would go to work and I would try on her clothes and her makeup. And I remember, especially because of Mexican women in my life and in my family, I was so enthralled by, I was so enamored. There was something about their ferocity and their fierceness and their character but their demurity and their expression that I really resonated with. I mean, these are some of the nastiest, toughest bitches I've ever known that's still true to this day and also some of the most humble and gracious at once. So, some of the most humble and gracious at once. And it was that complexity and that contention that, subconsciously, has always informed how I identify as it relates to my gender journey. All of that said, there are consequences for what society may call gender deviance, and so those instincts of mine never really had the ability to be nourished or nurtured, and so my relationship with masculinity and femininity over the course of the first 20 or so years of my life, or in a place of constant tension as my life continued to unfold and I surrounded myself more with people who saw things within me that even I didn't couldn't necessarily name. You know one of my best friends and longtime collaborators, incredible actor, several ensemble member, about to be on an incredible show with Nicolas Cage called Spider-Man Noir on Amazon. Her name is Karen Rodriguez and she's one of the most incredibly gifted actors out there and some of my earliest memories are in college, her being like, oh, you know, you should try on, you know, look at my, maybe we should go get your nails done, you know, or I'll put on this little makeup of yours on you, and like little things like that that I'm not even sure she knew at the time how informative that was for me. And so, and I had a cousin who was very similar and a childhood best friend who was also very similar, and so like these, these markers of not just acceptance but curiosity, I think was like a big part of it.
Speaker 2:And then, as gender expansion became more in the cultural consciousness you know around in our sort of zeitgeist around queerness.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, even though its origin story is not this, much of it centers through a predominantly Western and predominantly white lens, you know, like ideas of non-binary when we think of it and, as it relates to an optics or an image of that, there's a very specific image of a person that comes to mind, and so it didn't resonate with me until I'm a direct descendant of the ramuri, which is a mexican indigenous community in northern chihuahua, and as I started to learn more about that ancestry, I learned that there is a third gender marker of my Mexican indigenous ancestry called the Naui, and that's when it all really sunk in for me.
Speaker 2:It was like oh, the language I have been yearning for is actually something that doesn't exist in a Western context, it doesn't exist in an American context, and that happened around my 30th birthday. And so over the last three years, between then and now, the journey has been how do I want to translate that into my legibility in this context, and so my legibility in this context? And so that's how we ended where we are now, and my relationship with my gender expression varies on a day-to-day basis, as is true, with so many who I identify outside, within, beyond the gender binaries, but it's heavily informed by my ancestry and really sinking in with my intuition and how I may or may not feel in a given moment in time.
Speaker 4:Well, isaac Gomez, I feel like I could talk to you for like an entire day. We could just like get really deep into all of this. But Night Shift Before Christmas, alley Theatre opens December 5th, goes through the 29th. It is going to be a tour de force performance by Brianna Reza, so I cannot wait to see this one, and I am so thrilled that I got a chance to talk to you, so I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you, the feeling's mutual and everyone get your tickets, because we extended before rehearsals even started. These tickets go really fast for this show, so I highly recommend getting mine sooner than later.
Speaker 4:I was looking and, yeah, it's selling like crazy. So I'm excited for you guys. So I'm definitely lining mine up with Caroline as fast as I possibly can.
Speaker 2:So thank you, I can't wait for you to see it. You're going to have such a ruckus good time. It's really you're going to enjoy yourself thoroughly. Thank you, thanks, brad, appreciate you. Thanks, brad.
Speaker 1:Appreciate you Coming up on Queer Voices, tori Williams, director of the Ryan White Planning Council here in Houston, and this programming note. Queer Voices is distributed as a podcast on Buzzsprout, and Buzzsprout reports that in the past year we have seen hundreds of downloads from Canada, germany, the Netherlands and Singapore, as well as the US. So here's a special shout out to all of our international listeners. This is Glenn from Queer Voices. You're listening to KPFT. That means you're already participating just by listening, but how about doing more?
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Speaker 5:This is Deborah Moncrief-Bell and we're talking with Tori Williams. Tori is the longtime director of the Ryan White Planning Council and is one of the people active in producing the O Project. So first of all, tori, so good to have you with us here on Queer Voices. It's been a long time since we've had a chance to talk, but you're kind of legendary in houston because of your activism. Uh, beyond what you do as your work, uh, including being a founder of heart song, which was the women's chorus, uh starting the pet patrol and the assisters Organization. So, and also you were a Grand Marshal of Houston Bride, so we're just delighted that you were able to join us. But I know where your heart is, and your heart is, in fact, with the Ryan White Planning Council. So explain what that is.
Speaker 3:The Ryan White Planning Council is part of the Ryan White Program and the Ryan White Program is a federal law.
Speaker 3:Back in the 1990s it was very clear that local communities who had hospital districts, like Harris County Hospital District, the financial burden from the cost of AIDS care in the 80s was tremendous.
Speaker 3:And so Congress realized into the local communities so that they could develop HIV care systems and provide support and medication for people living with HIV. And we were among the first group of cities that received money and we got $3 million the first year in 1991 and that was a huge, huge deal because it was the beginning of steady, reliable funding so that agencies like the AIDS foundation didn't have to raid the coke machine to pay the staff. It was a huge deal and we got this money in Houston. But part of getting the money is that the money can only be applied for and received by the county judge. It has to be the elected official who is primarily responsible for health care in the geographic area, and so in our community that is the county judge right now, County Judge Lena Hidalgo, and one of the requirements is that she must appoint a community group called a council, a planning council, that is made up of one-third the people who are living with HIV and using Ryan White services, and my staff and I provide support to that planning council.
Speaker 5:And what type of work do they do? How do they make decisions about allocating the funds to the various programs that serve the community?
Speaker 3:One of the jobs of our staff is to do a needs assessment every three years and we go out in the community and we interview about 600 people and we ask them what services are you using? What services do you need? What services do you need that you can't access because they don't exist? Sometimes they'll identify barriers to care and other times they'll just say there isn't even a barrier. The service just plain doesn't exist. And there are a couple of things that we usually find when we do this survey, and the one is always lack of information. That is our number one problem in the greater houston area is folks living with hiv just don't always understand what services are available to them. And if you are familiar with the Blue Book, the Blue Book is an HIV directory of services for people living with HIV in the 10-county area. People can go on our website and they can pull down the directory. People can go on our website and they can pull down the directory. They can go to any Ryan White-funded agency and ask for a blue book. People in the field know what that is. We're about to release a new blue book, probably in January or February, so if they do that or they can go to our website again and get it.
Speaker 3:So that's what we do, is we collect data.
Speaker 3:So there's the needs assessment.
Speaker 3:Then, based on the needs assessment, we invite all the partners to the table would be HISD and community hospitals and all the local agencies, and together we create a plan to address the needs that are identified in the needs assessment.
Speaker 3:So together we try to respond to what it is the consumers are telling us they need. And then we take all that data and the planning council has committees and one committee designs all the services, another committee attaches the funding to the services and so forth. And so the best way to describe it is, if we were building the Ryan White House, the council would be the architect and they would design how many rooms, where the bathrooms would be. They would also put the budget for the bathroom, the budget for the kitchen, that sort of thing. So they would create a blueprint for the house. But then by federal law we have to turn the blueprint over to the administrative agency and in our area that's, the county health department has a division called the Ryan White Grant Administration and it's their job to take the blueprint and then to actually hire agencies, as has given them to provide the services to the client.
Speaker 5:It's a huge undertaking and I know you've been with the planning council for well over two decades now. What are some of the things that have changed? And I'm so glad that you mentioned the Blue Book because I was going to ask you about it, because I have often used that as a resource for people looking for various services, not just HIV-AIDS related, but because it's a wonderful resource of information, so it's very useful. So in the early days, as we know especially those of us that did things like I did, working with a aid support group and having friends that were infected and dying of AIDS how have things changed from those early days and what part do you see that the Ryan White Planning Council, what part did they have in that?
Speaker 3:In the early days of HIV there was no medication. People were dying within six months of diagnosis. It was difficult to find a doctor who knew anything about in those days we called it AIDS, and it was almost impossible to find a dentist who would care for you. And there were many small efforts to raise money. Efforts to raise money, a lot of our local men's groups, their social groups like Miss Camp America or the Diana's Foundation. They would have big events and they would raise money and they would give them to our handful of AIDS organizations. But it wasn't enough. So when the Ryan White money came along, that provided stable, long-term funding for those agencies. And so the council, as we went along, most of the money in the beginning went to the hospital district because that was sort of the only place someone could go if they didn't have resources. And again, as you know, a lot of people had resources. They had jobs, they had pension plans, they had all these things. But when they got sick with HIV they lost their jobs, they couldn't make their car payments, they lost everything. And so a lot of these patients ended up in the hospital district because they couldn't afford for their own care. They couldn't afford for their own care. So most of the Ryan White money went to the Harris County Hospital District to provide care on an outpatient basis. But then as time went on, about 20 years ago, the councils decided that a lot of folks were uncomfortable. Going into a big government hospital or even an outpatient clinic was very intimidating, particularly people, minority people.
Speaker 3:What we did is we made money available to small Ryan White or small agencies that had the capacity to develop to provide medical care. So Legacy used to be called the Montrose Clinic. That is a perfect example. They started out as a grassroots organization that simply provided testing and treatment for STIs, but as HIV was exploding in Houston, they started doing testing for HIV and then they'd refer them to the hospital district and we went and said, hey, you guys, if we gave you money, would you be interested in offering primary care? So we developed and kind of with our Ryan White money. So we developed and kind of with our Ryan White money, we grew Montrose Clinic, which is now called Legacy Clinic, avenue 360, which used to be Hacks and Bearing, and we grew the St Hope Foundation, which is on the more outskirts of town, and up north they have clinics up north, which is on the more outskirts of town and up north. They have clinics up north. Through the council we were able to grow these small groups and now they're federally qualified health centers, which means they're eligible for more federal money for other programs besides HIV, and they're financially stable, have long-term care.
Speaker 3:And, as the new HIV medications have come along, the good news is that people are doing so much better and they're living normal length of time, but their bodies tend to age 10 years younger than other folks who haven't been on HIV medication for a long time. And so now we're developing some case managers and training them as geriatric HIV case managers and we're funding that project. And that is just now. We're just now training some case managers to do that so that those folks who are long-term survivors they're really miracles, some of those folks and now we're providing them with geriatric care, which in the 80s and 90s nobody ever even considered something like that because it seemed impossible that we would need that. So that's what the council does.
Speaker 3:We watch what's happening in the epidemic. We respond to the trends. We make sure that folks can access medication. Folks can access medication. We make sure that they can access doctor visits, medical care of other types. Oral health is incredibly important to a person living with HIV because an infection in your mouth can be just as life-threatening as any other kind of infection. So, folks who are living with HIV, I really encourage them to go to the dentist for regular checkups and make sure that their teeth are healthy and doing well.
Speaker 5:I take a lot of pride in the fact that those institutions got built. That started from grassroots movement, much by the community, built that started from grassroots movement, much by the community and, like you said, the people that were doing the fundraising in the early days, including the drag performers, who still to this day put a lot of effort into raising funds. And we tend to think of the AIDS epidemic as a thing of the past and maybe it is no longer an epidemic here in this country, but it is in fact a concern and something that is ongoing as far as people becoming infected, and that brings us to 1995 and this other thing that you're involved with called the O Project.
Speaker 3:HIV is still an epidemic in the United States and in our community, in our 10-county area, we get between 1,300 to 1,400 new diagnoses every year. Just in our 10-county area and throughout the United States we were getting 40,000 new cases every year, and then there was a great initiative started where the federal government now gives us additional funding just to end the epidemic, and that is it gives us. We've done a. You know, we've found 80 to 85% of folks who are in our area who are living with HIV, but that still leaves thousands more who are living with HIV and they don't know it, or they were diagnosed and they don't want to deal with it. They just don't want to do anything or get in for care for all kinds of reasons. And so we have to find that last 18% of the people in our community who are living with HIV because they're either not using safe sex or because they're not on the medication. Their viral load is still very high and that's where a lot of the new infections are coming from.
Speaker 3:So it's super important that people not think that HIV has gone away or that it's something that can't affect them, because it can and it can. People still get HIV today and I encourage everyone make it a routine part of your health exam to always get an HIV test. If you are sexually active, if you use intravenous drugs, if there's any reason you think you could be exposed to HIV, get tested and talk to them about the new medications called PrEP and people can go on PrEP and it is medication that will make sure that they don't get HIV. They don't convert to HIV if they come in contact with the virus. So that's been a game changer in the HIV community. But we still, with all these new opportunities to treat HIV, we are still getting 1,300 to 1,400 new cases every year.
Speaker 5:Being that I am a senior citizen and I have several friends who are also senior citizens and who are in fact living with HIV, as you said, that geriatric patient which we get all kinds of things regarding aging but when you add on that the issue of HIV and thank goodness most of them have undetectable viral loads, and so that also has been a game changer Back to 1995, you are working on this project called the O Project. It's an oral history project and it's documenting the experiences of people who were infected and diagnosed in pre-1995. What happened in 1995? That changed things?
Speaker 3:1995 that changed things. In 1995, that's when they discovered or developed the retro antiviral medications that were again a huge game changer. They really made a difference. Before that there were a few medications. A lot of my friends were on AZT. They were getting huge, very high doses of these drugs like AZT. I mean the minute any drug was found that might impact HIV the doctors just like overwhelmed their poor bodies with these toxic medications that were important. But now, looking back, we're finding that some of those really old medications before 1995, some of them caused so much damage to the immune system that that may be why some people passed away.
Speaker 3:But when the antiretroviral drugs came along, that was a whole new way of attacking the virus. And since then, since 1995, those medications have become very, very sophisticated and now you can get them packaged into one pill. So you can get three different medications packaged into one pill. Now you can get injectable medications, so you just go in and see your doctor regularly and they give you a shot that keeps you on your medication. You don't have to fool with pills. So now there are so many different ways for people to receive the HIV medication.
Speaker 3:But the reason we started this oral history project is. I work in Harris County. The Ryan White Program lives within Harris County. Ryan White program lives within Harris County and the head of archives at Harris County came to me and said you know, we've got this really wonderful person realized that you know, your program was really unique and different. And even though it was his job every seven years to shred documents in the county, he took all the Ryan White documents and he stored them in boxes and he had a closet in his office and he just kept putting these boxes of old Ryan White records in this closet. And he said he's about to retire, we need to clean out the closet and we need to shrink some of these documents down and separate what. We need to clean out the closet and we need to shrink some of these documents down and separate what we need to keep from what we need to destroy.
Speaker 3:And so I got together with her and Sarah and another friend and I went through everything and she said you know I can do some oral histories with people because as part of my job as the county archivist I'm allowed to do that. Would you make a list for me of people who should be interviewed? And when I made that list I very quickly thought, oh my gosh, there are all these other people who were caregivers and especially medical providers, medical and social service providers for people in the 80s and early 90s. They were reaching the age, like myself, where we were going to retire within 10 years, like myself, where we were going to retire within 10 years, and so I quickly realized that any opportunity to capture their knowledge base was going to be gone in 10 years or it would be harder to capture. So I talked to Sarah, the head of archives, and I said, sarah, together I would like to do an oral history project outside of Harris County where we would get friends and people who would interview people and the whole sort of. The theme of it is documenting Houston's response to AIDS. And so we're interviewing people who were old enough in the 80s and mid-90s and early 90s. I'm sorry that they remember what happened. Either they had a family member or we're interviewing doctors, politicians, clergy members, all United Way people, people at the agencies who started many of these grassroots organizations, so we can capture what it was like in the 80s, up until 1995. And we're working in partnership with Rice University. So it's a collection of 100 interviews and they are going to be kept forever at Rice University, where people can either go online on Rice's website. We've interviewed about 77 people so far. We're in the final home stretch and we're about to interview 17 more people.
Speaker 3:I'd like to give a little pitch for what we need, and what we really need are some transgender, either women or men, who were, say, 18 years of age or older in the 1980s through 95, who can talk to us about the experiences of the transgender community in the early days of the epidemic.
Speaker 3:That community was hit early and hard and so so many of them passed away that it is difficult to find someone in that age group who is either a long-term survivor or was fortunate enough that they never were exposed to HIV and they're still alive today and can talk to us about how did social service agencies treat them when they came in with HIV. Did social service agencies treat them when they came in with HIV? How did they support themselves? It's hard enough for a person who's transgender to get a job. What about someone who's living with HIV who is trying to get a job? Their challenges are all of our challenges times 100. Their challenges are all of our challenges times 100. Yes, send me an email and give me your phone number and I'll call you back.
Speaker 5:In the early days, of course, it was the homosexual male community that was hardest hit by HIV and AIDS, and I think a lot of people still think that that is who needs to be worried about it.
Speaker 3:But what's the reality, tori? Well, the reality is 50 percent of people living with HIV today are still men who have sex with men. That is still in our community a huge number of people. But the numbers among women is on the rise. And when you look at different ethnic groups, it is in our community. It has always been mostly African Americans who've been impacted by HIV. But very recently there has been a bump in the emergency room with stage 3, stage 4 HIV, which means they've had the disease for a long time, they've had no treatment, no medication and they're in the very, very late stages of HIV disease. So all groups have different reasons why they're having should be concerned about HIV. But you know young black men in our community. Men who have sex with men who are young and black is just, it's through the roof, and now we're starting to see again more and more Hispanics. So that's the reality today and we just are about to publish an epidemiological report.
Speaker 3:You can also leave a message on my personal e-mail address, which is also the O Project email address. Tell me you want to know what the numbers are like and I'll send you a copy. It's like a 12-page report with a lot of graphs and charts and it's a very interesting, helpful thing to see. And I'll tell you, the people who get in and use services that are funded by Ryan White. They do better medically because they get their medicine. Those who stay adherent to their medicine, they do really, really well. But Ryan White serves only half of the 33,000 people living with HIV in our 10-county area. We serve 15,000 people. Those folks are dependent on Ryan White for their care and that's what the planning council does.
Speaker 5:There is information online about the O Project. In fact, some of the stories are shared. They're archived by Rice University. How can people access that information?
Speaker 3:Let me give you that information and then let me give you the Ryan White website and that way, folks can explore either or both of those things. So if you want to go in and read any of the transcripts from the people we've interviewed, it is tiny, t-i-n-y U-R-L dot com, and then it's forward slash O. That's O, as in orange H, as in history, project Houston. So again, that's tinyurlcom. Forward slash O Project Houston. That's how you can get the interviews. And if you're interested in becoming a Ryan White member, we need your application right away, because we're right now interviewing people for membership for 2025. You need to fill out an application and get it into us right away, and that is wwwrwpc, which stands for Ryan White Planningouncilhoustonorg.
Speaker 5:I read some of those stories, including your own commentary, which brought up a lot of memories for me and is very emotional. So I do advise people to be prepared Sometimes. I think it's good for us to be reminded for so many reasons. It gives you a chance to remember people, it gives you a chance to grieve. It's important work. I'm so glad that it's being documented and I really appreciate all that you've done in the community. This is Deborah Moncrief-Bell. We've been talking with Tori Williams of the Ryan White Planning Council and the O Project, and you're listening to Queer Voices.
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Speaker 1:For Queer Voices. I'm Glenn Holt, Thank you.
