Gerard Ilaria

Q: So I guess, let’s just start, do you happen to remember how you got involved with GHAP to being with?

Ilaria: Yes, I think so. God.

Q: It is the 1980s, it is far back.

Ilaria: It would have been, this is how it would have happened. I was in social work school from 1986 to 1988, when I got back to campus (because I had done my undergrad from 1979 to 1983, so I was away for a little while) I had made the decision that I wanted to do something having to do with AIDS, I called GMHC, a social worker at the time picked up the phone and said, the best thing you can do to help with the AIDS crisis in 1986 is to go back to social work school and get your master’s and do this. So I applied to NYU and Columbia, got into Columbia, came back to Columbia and started social work classes. And I’m pretty sure that it was probably a flier that I saw, and I went to a meeting, and what Laura and Paul, Paul Douglas and Laura Pinsky were doing at the time, was training young folk and we were our kind of first class were all different. We were either undergrads or various masters programs at the time to do floor raps. I would say that was the first, I’m sure you’ve heard this, that was the first activity that we sank our teeth into. And the prevention and data was thin at the time. You know, only a few people were doing it. We watched some videos that maybe CHP was doing, you know, Community Health Project, at the time for where GMHC was doing safer sex forums. We modified it so that we could do it with 18 to 22 year olds in a group setting and we basically went through, and Laura talking through terrific trainings, we went through as a group through training, I want to say on Saturdays, it was for long periods of time. It was a combination of first being knowledgeable about the information so knowing how HIV was transmitted, being able to memorize the scripts, we knew how we were going to do transmission and how to stop transmission, some myths we needed to deal with, basic AIDS 101, this at that point, the progression of HIV to ARC and then AIDS. And then to be able to do the how do you protect yourself section at the end, which of course we also did the condom on the banana thing and the condom demonstration. So, that was the thing we had to accomplish it within approximately thirty minutes, with the help of the RA on the floor, who would knock on everyone’s doors and drag them out and make them assemble and be there. Usually there was a common area, I think, in the hallway, and we had our schedule and we went out in teams of two or three and it was some of the best things I think I ever did. It was amazing to interact with, you know, I mean, I had gone there as an undergraduate and I was there as a grad student at that point, but you only get to know your small circle of friends mostly, and I wasn’t on teams. But suddenly you’re just going out, and I think we focused on, well I think we did all undergraduates, we certainly focused on all the freshmen. The idea was to get to people, to give them the information as soon as possible, since we were obviously living and having sex in New York City in 1986, let’s say. So it was a great time to get HIV, numbers wise. And I think at the time we were telling people that, certainly among gay men, fifty percent of the gay men in New York City were assumed to be HIV positive, so you have a one in two chance of sleeping with somebody who’s positive, so these are the things you can do. So that’s how I remember getting started with it, is going to the trainings, learning, meeting all these new friends and it was very liberating because who doesn’t like to talk about sex in the areas we were kind of all coming from? And also mostly I think, we were terrified. Many of us were gay men, some of us were lesbians, but we were very terrified about our own health, and being sexually active young people in New York City at the time. When we all started, nobody was known to be positive. That changed over time, when some of us decided to test and some of us were positive. But, we certainly did it out of our own self-interest. We did it out of the desire to help others. And we did it because nobody else was doing it. Certainly we didn’t feel and nobody felt in 1986 that certainly the government wasn’t speaking about it, the CDC wasn’t doing enough, the city wasn’t doing enough, the Catholic Church was a big obstacle and Columbia. You know, Laura and Paul and others could speak more to the difficulties of maybe even establishing what we were doing, but again, by the time I got there, which again was 1986, we did have access to the, the networks had been started and we were able to get onto the floors and do what we needed to do. We also were a presence at the gay dances, at Earl Hall I think.

Q: They still do those.

Ilaria: Yes, they do? So we, that’s how I got started, and obviously I got more involved as time went on, because I was training to be a social worker, I was seeing patients in field work settings, so Laura and Paul used me more to do other stuff.

Q: Did you do the counseling at first?

Ilaria: Yes. I can’t pin down the chronology but it wasn’t very long before they needed the help in University Counseling Service, and also I think at the time I had gone to the University Counseling Service for my own needs and found that the social workers largely who were there were not particularly gay or gay savvy. They were a little bit out of it. Maybe they had done some analytic training at some point, but they really weren’t so good at it. So the idea was to populate the counseling center with you know, it’s a concept that has become de rigueur in all prevention stuff now with peers. With people who students were more likely to open up to. And we certainly, everyone who was doing counseling at the time was not trained to be a mental health professional, but I think some people gravitated to it more naturally and so pretty early on, beyond the floor rap basic AIDS 101 training, we then started working on more what would a pretest counseling session be like. I’m pretty sure, memory serves, that the post-test counseling was pretty much Laura doing it. Sorry, the post-test positives were definitely Laura doing it. I think the post-test negatives were also the GHAPpers, and I don’t know if that’s changed. So we kind of had to learn in a session, attentive listening, getting across certain medical information, eliciting hopefully truthful answers about behaviors so that was also a great opportunity and a lot of fun and intellectually interesting and we were shock as GHAPpers and we would get together socially or at meetings and just be freaked out by the amount of risk people were putting themselves at. And you would really have two camps, you would have the low to no risk relatively speaking worried well, who could take up an enormous amount of your time when really what you were looking at was mental health or school anxiety or whatever. But then you had other people who were kind of blasé perhaps, but putting themselves at enormous risk, gay men who were having lots of unprotected sex in a variety of settings. And they just either didn’t know, or then you were trying to get at, was there a nihilism? What was it about their behavior, how much was alcohol involved? How much was black out? How much was despair or not expecting to live or the AIDS zeitgeist at the time? So it was, we got to do the counseling as well. You know, I might as well wrap up, the next phases of my involvement was, had to do with two things. One being assisting with the University Health Services to create the track for HIV positive students to get care there, so we had worked it out where we had a nurse practitioner from a community based organization coming up and providing direct care within the environs of the health service. It was, that was always done immediately upon somebody learning they were positive, we could immediately plug them into care, get them tested, do viral load, and start them on the only medicine that was available at the time, as well as administering aerosolized pentamidine to prevent pneumocystis pneumonia if they were too suppressed. So we were running this thing and I was helpful to Paul and Laura in running that service, I had an administrator function for which I may have been paid a small amount, and then beyond that, Laura and I co-led a couple of HIV positive support groups for students. So again, like GHAPpers, the students who were in the group, and it was a weekly support group that met for years, some of which had strong membership throughout their time at Columbia, which could have been four years if they were undergraduates. So again, we had undergraduates who were 18 years old, and we had 30 year old grad students, and everything in between. Most pretty smart, but some more high functioning than others. And we just ran it, ran this HIV support group, which was very huge source of support to the positive students, many of whom, you know we didn’t have effective treatment, many of whom went on to die.

Q: Was AZT around then or was it before?

Ilaria: It was. It was around in 1986, it was just going off of trials, or 1987 I want to say, so it wasn’t around, it was only on trial in 1986, I think in 1987 was when it was then available through insurance. And the only reason I know that, is because while I was at GHAP, and in the middle of my graduate years I was involved with a guy who found out he had AIDS PCP in 1987. So I was both in a relationship with a guy with AIDS, studying to take care of people with AIDS in social work school, and also then doing my work at GHAP at the same time, so I kind of know some of these benchmarks, like when the drugs were available, for him.

Q: And then what did you do after you graduated?

Ilaria: After GHAP and commencement and I actually stayed involved with GHAP after I graduated, because in 1988, I had done two fieldwork placements in Social Work School of Columbia, one was at Roosevelt in their AIDS program, and one was at the New York Hospital at the time. And then when I graduated, I got hired at the New York Hospital, and was the first social worker hired in their newly minted AIDS program. I actually was an intern in 1986, 1986-1987, at New York Hospital and they were still trying to figure it out, at that point it was one or two infectious disease doctors that had a panel of patients, and that’s mostly who we’d see. I was attending meetings even then with volunteers to try to figure out if we could start a center of some sort to coordinate this care. Around the time I graduated, was when the state gave New York hospital their designation as a designated AIDS center. I was the first employee hired, and stayed with them from 1988 to 1999. And became ex-urban, did AIDS from 1999 to 2006 in a rural setting, then moved back to New York and was with them from 2006 to 2010. So I know, I’ve always stayed working in AIDS until very recently. But I stayed with GHAP and Columbia from 1988 to probably, I want to say, to about 1993 or 1994? Because I continued to do the group with Laura, the students group. But that, and helping her a bit with getting infected students, let’s say they wanted to not be at the Health Services any more, but once we get them insurance or Medicaid or something, I’d bring them onto the clinic here at the New York Hospital. So I was also sort of a resource for the GHAP positive student pool, because I was doing that work.

Q: I guess, what was it like working with that contingent of students? Because what you outlined is still the same, we do the pretest counseling, and then we give the negative results, and then Laura and Daniel, who’s the current coordinator, work with the positive students, so I guess what was it like working with positive students, particularly, and with your boyfriend at the time, with the medicine being what it was? Because it is so different now.

Ilaria: It is so different! I mean look, what it was like working with those students was exactly what it was like working with the two hundred patients I cared for when I was working during those years as a bedside social worker here at the hospital. And it was like, what it was like with my lover at the time. Which was you know, this insane mix of offering a certain amount of hope, through giving as much information about whatever was coming down the pike, imported, nonimported, illegal, black market, regular. The students, and we, we had to be as smart as [immunologist and NIAID head] Anthony Fauci. It was very much like an ACT UP/TAG approach, and we were also in ACT UP at the time too. So we just made it our business to be able to speak as intelligently as any immunologist, because that was the only hope, knowing as much as everybody did. Or as a few did, the few smart people did. But, the downside or flipside to that, was that the average lifespan from diagnosis to death was two years. So, that’s how long my lover lived after his diagnosis, and it’s how long every one of the patients I met, and I had a rolling sense of about one hundred and forty to two hundred patients back then, a third of them died every year, of my patients. And the students, it was kind of like that. If they were young, they were early enough in their infection, the natural course of the infection hadn’t really taken hold, and even if the medicine wasn’t effective, their T-cells were maybe mid-500s and trending down slowly. But we certainly had students that when they tested and we did their viral load, they had T-cells of 15. So some of them got cancer and died really quickly, some of them just had horrible disfiguring illnesses, and as a support group we supported them. That was visiting them in the hospital, or calling them in between, or celebrating when they were able to make it back to group or whatever. I guess the thing that somewhat different is that it was skewed more to a younger group, than say the forty year olds I was seeing and treating at the hospital. But my lover was 32. So I was used to working with very young people who were facing death and trying to cope with that.

Q: That was still when the CDC was still saying that was “homosexuals from 30 to 40 years old” was the risk group. But some of the files I’ve found, it’s the trend of people who are, like you said, 18 and dealing with being positive.

Ilaria: Well they had no peers. They had no peers, not that there were many peers to see, there was no media or even movies or TV shows where people with AIDS were even depicted at all until later, and when they were depicted it was quite scary and horrible. So we would do things like hook people to whatever was going on in the city so the People With AIDS coalition, treatment news, and have them attend conferences, just so they could meet other people who were positive that weren’t – but you always run the risk, and this is what would happen very routinely, is that an 18 year old, who’s relatively well off, 500 T-cells, you put them in a group and somebody has KS all over their face, and their quite sick, and they’re going in and out of the hospital. There just weren’t enough people to say, alright we’re going to talk all the well 18 year olds and put them in a group together, so you got scared. So you had to just, they were often looking at their future in those groups and it was terrifying for them, and a certain amount of it was healthy denial that allowed them to skate through it, and sometimes that would break through, and sometimes you supported that and sometimes you didn’t when it wasn’t appropriate.

Q; You were talking earlier about the floor raps, did you run into people who had a lot of casual contact fears and things like that? I guess, what were those like? How did people react to that?

Ilaria: The trick with those was always to see if there was somebody kind of goofing around on the floor that was really useful. Because they would be willing to say something really stupid. Not stupid, but something uninformed, which would give permission to other people. Because a lot of times, it depended. On the RA, how he set it up or she set it up, it depended somewhat on the composition of the individuals who were actually 18 year old, 19 year old folks who didn’t have a vocabulary for talking about sex, let alone talking about anal sex or talking about AIDS which was very scary in the media at the time. So I would say it was never, I don’t recall anybody who was belligerent, or who would say things like, “People with AIDS should be put on an island at tattooed and murdered.” That was never said.

Q: There were people saying that though.

Ilaria: I mean there were people saying that, but they weren’t saying it to us in this setting. Probably because of the way we started the floor raps, we’d say “We’re gay, we’re gay students,” we would try to normalize the whole conversation by getting very frank very quickly. There was a lot of mosquito fear, believe it or not, back then. There was a lot of press at the time about the Dade County, Florida had all these outbreaks of infection and people were investigating, including the CDC, was this because of the large amount of mosquitoes. We answered endless questions about mosquitoes, we had to talk about when a mosquito bites you, the blood that comes out of you sits in this part of the mosquito, and then when he bites the next person, it’s not inoculated into the next person. We’d have to draw the distinction between say sharing the works in injectable drug use and what mosquitoes were doing. So there was a lot of mosquito fear as I recall, and a lot of it was, we had to do a lot of, there was the thing that actually bore out to be largely true at the time it was, the prevention message was, “All of you could get infected tomorrow. You’re all at risk. We’re all at risk.” There are no risk groups, that was the big political thing. So that was I think, useful. Because there were people who felt like, “I get drunk at 113th Street, whatever, and have unprotected sex with football players, and they don’t have AIDS, so I’m not going to get AIDS.” So some of it was piercing that idea, partly because they were also having sex with guys they were meeting at clubs or whatever. We were trying to address a general audience, but also particularly addressing the gay men in the audience, who were probably most at risk and we were most worried about. And I imagine you maybe have to do the same thing.

Q: Well we no longer do floor talks at all.

Ilaria: It’s a different –

Q: But it’s interesting what you said about, you meet people who are at very, very minimal risk, no risk at all who are incredibly anxious about it, or people who are at significant risk. We have that same distinction too, but I guess I’d be interested in what you would say the ratio of each to each is, because it’s probably two hundred to one for the people we see.

Ilaria: Right, right, right. I think we certainly in counseling talked to a lot of gay men. Myself included, many of us GHAPpers included at the time, who – I will tell you this, when I joined GHAP, I was not using condoms consistently, not at all. And it probably took me a while to do it, even into my GHAPperness, GHAPness. I can’t exactly tell you why other than partly, I was doing a fair amount of drinking and partying in my 20s and that played into whether or not I was consistent. And of course, there was the whole oral sex versus anal sex thing. And whether or not we would treat them the same, we had a lot of healthy debate about that. It ended up, my own oral sex anxiety led me to do some research that got published in the Lancet and that I presented to international AIDS conferences on presence of HIV in preseminal fluid, which you know about. So kind of the floor raps, and our own needing to tell people the truth, but not having the data because the research wasn’t done, led some of us, certainly led me, to when I got working in a medical center, seek out people who, so I found a urologist and the guy who ran the HIV lab at Memorial Sloane Kettering and me, I created a study where I collected semen and preseminal fluid from infected gay men and ran it through PCR analysis to find out, and there was significant levels of viral load in preseminal fluid, not in semen, which was more the concern about sucking without ejaculation in the mouth. So I don’t know how we got there. How I ended up talking about this particular research. But I guess it’s kind of my, my bench science research claim to fame, preseminal fluid. It’s my only Lancet publication, and you know, that will never happen again.

So how much of it was in high risk people? A lot of the gay people were high risk people, I would say. We were not just having sex with 18 year olds at Columbia, and a lot of the 18 year olds I knew at Columbia ended up getting infected. A lot of people I went to dances with ended up getting sick. But most of us weren’t hooking up on campus, because why would you? When there were hot 28 year olds in every club all over town that you could hook up with, and you were a Columbia chicken. We were really at risk. The ratio’s dropped right, you don’t have as many infected?

Q: Again, it’s just so different. I think I’ve told one person in my time at GHAP that they were at risk, that there was a potential for them positive. Which is amazing. It’s just so different.

Ilaria: It’s so different. I mean, honestly the numbers, the common wisdom was that fifty percent of gay men in New York City were infected. And we were all trying to have sex with hot bartenders out in the world, not awkward 18 year olds on campus. And a bunch of us, I was not infected, but a bunch of my friends were, turned out to be.

Q; And that hasn’t changed really at all, I guess just this paradigm shift of condom use being what is taught and drilled into our heads now.

Ilaria; Which it clearly wasn’t. It was like we were preaching to World War II soldiers about don’t get the clap. We were going to a generation that had never bothered with condoms. I mean look, I was sexual in the 1970s when I was in high school and I can tell you that many of my female friends, many of them, had abortions because condom use was not prevalent in the 1970s and early 1980s. It certainly wasn’t talked about in families or in schools. So that just carried through into the 1980s and the AIDS epidemic.

Q: How did people react when you encouraged them to use condoms? Because from what some of the, not at Columbia, but some of how people reacted to that it seemed to be quite negative.

Ilaria: It’s hard for me to actually remember, of course I’ve had that conversation a million times in my professional life, and it’s hard to remember what the students of Columbia said versus what everybody else said. But I would imagine what they said was it was an erection killer, it’s too tight, I can’t stay hard, I don’t like the way it feels, it deadens the sensation. Even if, I’ve had people tell me, even if, as bottoms, as receptive partners, they can’t stand the idea of a condom being on a penis because they can just tell. They have to have it raw, that kind of thing. Which I, from my own research, I’ve never really understood that. But people were resistant. It was not part of the, it was a radical idea that we were telling them to do this. And there were a lot of political debates all through the 1980s about raw sex and this is just another way of treading on people’s sexual liberties, blah blah. And I would tell them stories about young men in the ICU. I was just like, ok, well let me introduce you to somebody who won’t be alive tomorrow, and we can talk all you want about philosophy or whatever. I was just much more practical and didn’t have a lot of tolerance for the people’s philosophies, on me raining on their parades because I was doing so much clinical work with dying people.

Q: Which makes sense. Was that still, this is specific, but were bathhouses still a thing then?

Ilaria: Yes, definitely. I don’t know that GHAP, we didn’t go into bathhouses per se. GMHC and other places had regular posts set up there. But I got to believe, I know that some of the students we were working with, certainly the infected students, and others, would go to bathhouses. But backrooms were actually very popular. So you didn’t have to go to a bathhouse, you could just go to the trendiest club at the time, and many of them had what were called backrooms. Now you sometimes hear them called darkrooms, or I don’t know, whatever. But they were called backrooms, when we were playing and counseling. And that was often the place where unprotected sex could and did happen. Because it was often an “end of the night” two am, three am, you were pretty buzzed, you didn’t want to go home alone, you went to the backroom. And if you’re behind the wall at the end of it all it’s hard to know if you’re backing up on something whether it’s got a condom or not on it, because it’s very dark. [laughs] Hence the ambience created in the back room. So it was definitely part of the, what we had to talk about.

Q: And that’s something that really has changed. With the bathhouse closures and—It’s a remnant of AIDS, it’s just not fashionable or really common, I think there’s a couple.

Ilaria: But what about private sex parties and hotel rooms?

Q: Circuit parties are definitely still prevalent. So that’s definitely a thing. Circuit parties are not really in fashion among Columbia students, I guess I would characterize it as this, it’s looked down as trashy in some way, of we’re better than that.

Ilaria: But Grindr I’m sure is popular.

Q: Oh, Grindr is ubiquitous. So there is that but it’s just very accepted to meet someone at a bar and go home with them. And I’d say that’s the predominant mode.

Ilaria: Moreso than using crystal meth and spending entire weekends in hotel rooms that someone had set up. You don’t hear about that so much.

Q: You hear about it, but it seems more rare. And I guess, the sadder thing is that I don’t really hear about that through GHAP, I hear about it anecdotally through friends and hope that they go to GHAP to get tested.

Ilaria: Later on, as an outgrowth of GHAP, one of the people I came up through GHAP with was a guy named David Klotz who currently works in New York City. At the time he was running prevention at GMHC, so GHAPpers graduated, as you can imagine, and many of us went into these fields. Margaret McCarthy went into law school and did law project stuff around HIV.

Q: Is that Margaret McCarthy?

Ilaria: Yes. David [Klotz] went to work for GMHC then the department of Health. A bunch of us did, if you give me a minute.

Q: That’s David Winters?

Ilaria: David Klotz. David Winters went on to do amazing things at GMHC and then WHO and still I think is out there. David Klotz is still working in the field, but I’m not sure if he’s in a different part of the department of Health. David and I did a study with a substance abuse/addiction psychiatrist here at Cornell where we interviewed 774 gay men in club and party settings about their sexual and drug taking practices, and correlated or associated the amount of substance use, alcohol, through at the time X, CMA, ketamine, Special K, all that stuff, the party drugs were very prominent and we correlated all of that, but also crack and heroin, with their risky sexual, risky behavior, and found strong association between number of drugs used, amount of drugs used, and also setting. So we went to, we didn’t go to bathhouses for that, or did we? Maybe there was a bathhouse in there, because David was working at GMHC at the time and had access. But we stood around in bars. We went to Earl Hall, we went to pride parades, we went to the Roxy, we went to various clubs and things and collected all this data. We had surveys from 774 gay men. It was all a numbers game, the more things, so if I use one drug and go to bars only my risk is here, but if I use five drugs and also go to sex parties, my risk is out here. It wasn’t counterintuitive the way it worked out, but there really was a correlation between just the number of ways and time you put yourself at risk. And I think that’s pretty much stayed the same.

Q: Can you remember if at Columbia those kind of drugs were popular at all?

Ilaria: Yes. People definitely, you know, Studio 54 reopened when I was at Columbia during that period. So you go to class, and gay guys would be covered in glitter in class because they had been out all night at Studio 54, or Rio, do you know Rio? I would say, speed, black beauties—

Q: Black beauties?

Ilaria: It’s an amphetamine. I only mention it because the Scissor Sisters reference it in a current song they’re singing, but it’s an amphetamine. Certainly when I was going to the Saint, MDMA, which is a predecessor to ecstasy, but then ecstasy, and special K, would fall into K-holes, lose track of time, lose sensation so they’d have lots of receptive anal sex and not really be aware of, they would just be at a place and pass out in a k-hole, and wake up some hours later. So yes, that was definitely part of the zeitgeist when we were doing counseling on AIDS.

Q: It’s just again—

Ilaria: It’s not what you’re hearing.

Q: The amphetamine all the current Columbia students use is Adderall. To study.

Ilaria: Not to be out all night. Yes, I’ve been reading a lot about Adderall. I left before crystal meth really took off, I mean, we certainly had it in populations I treated later on, but in those earlier years when I was still connected to my work at Columbia, crystal meth hadn’t yet really come along.

Q: Before I stop the recording, is there anything else you wanted to say for that?

Ilaria: Gosh. Yes, I’d like to say this. I owe everything to GHAP, no really! So this is the funny thing about AIDS as a phenomenon, certainly for that time period, and I’ve been having these conversations recently, because there have been a few documentaries come out, so it’s kind of shaken us all out of the woodwork. We’ve managed to get together in places and chat about this. There’s another really great documentary that came out of San Francisco.

Q: “We Were Here?”

Ilaria: Loved it. Just loved it. I saw a screening of that, which I loved. “We Were Here,” “How to Survive a Plague,” even the Vito Russo, “Vito” the new, which I just saw a couple weekends ago, wonderful. So I just met a guy who’s a professor who did his dissertation on ACT UP as a way, and compared it to Foucault, in terms of friendships that happened among gay men specifically, anyway, it’s a little dense, I’m kind of trying to read through it now. It’s basically his dissertation in a book. His name is Tom Roach. But the thing about that time, and about GHAP is, the story I didn’t tell, which was pre-GHAP, was I was working in fashion retailing in Saks Fifth Avenue, in buying and after I finished Columbia, because it was 1983 and there were no recruiters coming to campus, and the only ones who were coming were Bloomingdales and Saks. So I worked for three years at Saks, and what was happening was Perry Ellis died, Willie Smith died, and these designers were dying, these gay male designers and the response from the fashion industry was, long before the fashion industry got with it was, just buy women designers, don’t buy gay male designers, the fashion industry it was just going to get decimated. It was this homophobic horrible response at the time that I couldn’t tolerate. And that’s why I went back to graduate school. Otherwise, I never would have, I was a psych undergrad but I just couldn’t figure out how I was going to make this work. But that’s what brought me back. Why am I saying this? Oh, because the fear at the time and the community that ended up being forged out of the fear and lack of governmental response and out of the discrimination and the insanity of your friends and acquaintances dying really, it was really life changing not just for people who were infected in that period, whose lives were cut short very quickly, but for people who needed a way to respond to it. So GHAP for me was a way to respond to it. Coincidentally, I was already making commitments to helping out in this way, but it deepened and, it just gave me a million opportunities to get smarter and become an expert about AIDS at a time when it was good for me and good for my patients and clients. We just had a beautiful, lovely camaraderie among us, I mean I really do love those people still, and periodically I get Facebook friended by someone I haven’t talked to in twenty years. I’m always excited to see what they’re doing, and they’re usually doing social justice stuff, so there was a certain person drawn to it. But I just love that Laura has kept it going, and I just love that it still exists, even though it’s a different time and the activities you’re doing are probably somewhat different and maybe the urgency is somewhat different. But I just love that it was there, and that Paul and Laura were smart enough to make it happen, and I just think it’s amazing that it’s still going on and I’m just, I feel very proud that I am part of its history, I guess.

Q: That’s a great note to end on. [laughs]