Margaret McCarthy

Q: How did you first get involved with the organization?

McCarthy: I became involved in the Fall 1986 semester, my first semester of law school. I was interested in being a Women’s Health Advocate, but their meetings conflicted with my class schedule. Ann Williams, who was in charge of that program, suggested I join GHAP instead. Paul Douglas met with me, and approved me joining the group. I was in GHAP until the Spring of 1988.

Q: What type of clients did you see and counsel?

McCarthy: Undergraduate and graduate college students. I didn’t counsel that many students, mainly I did educational work.

Q: Could you describe the educational work you did?

McCarthy: At the time that I was involved, we did workshops in the dormitories, called AIDS 101. We also did education during residence advisor training.

Q: What were the other advocates like?

McCarthy: They were all very interesting people, smart, dedicated. I became friends with a lot of the advocates.

Q: What was the training process like for advocates?

McCarthy: We had a weekend training at the beginning, and then lots of reading. I remember that we had subscriptions to several medical journals. We also had ongoing training at the weekly meetings.

Q: What was it like being a woman in a predominately male organization?

McCarthy: I was used to that, because I was in the first coeducational class at Columbia College. I went to law school directly from college, so the campus environment was more male than female. I had a lot of friends in GHAP, and we socialized outside the group. It wasn’t an issue at all for me in terms of interacting with other group members. It was an issue outside of campus, because if I went out with my gay male friends, there were places where I wasn’t welcome as a woman, like certain gay bars or even a Halloween party of a friend of a GHAP member, I couldn’t go because it was men only.

Q: How did the group evolve over time?

McCarthy: The group was already established when I joined. I would say that in terms of the counseling, it was the same during the time I was in the group. In terms of the education and advocacy focus, it greatly expanded. Laura Pinsky and Paul Douglas were writing their book, which was then published and sold all over, and our dorm education groups became a model that GMHC used for training AIDS peers educators on other campuses. Laura suggested that I join the New York State Department of Health’s Women and AIDS Project, and other members were involved in many community organizations, activist groups and government advisory groups. A lot of the members went on to HIV related careers.

Q: Were you involved in AIDS related issues outside your involvement with GHAP? If so, can you describe that?

McCarthy: GHAP was my first exposure to AIDS related issues. I learned a lot about HIV, treatments, counseling, discrimination and other topics through the GHAP training and required reading, which included medical journal articles. The first outside involvement I had was the New York State Department of Health’s Women and AIDS Project, which I joined in December 1986 or January 1987 at Laura Pinsky’s suggestion.

From there, I went on to focus all my jobs and internships during law school on AIDS. I worked at the New York City Commission on Human Rights’ AIDS Discrimination Unit and Lambda Legal Defense Fund during law school. In my last year of law school, from May 1988 to May 1989, I worked at the New York City Commission on Human Rights’ AIDS Discrimination Unit.

In July 1987, I joined ACT UP New York, and was an active member until the Spring of 1991. I was also a member of the Lavender Hill Mob, a smaller activist organization. I was on several government advisory committees as a member of ACT UP. Then I was a board member for AIDS Treatment Registry, which focused on publishing a registry of all of the AIDS clinical trials in the United States.

I was also involved in the gay community on campus and in New York City.

Through my various AIDS related efforts, I had a lot of friends with AIDS/HIV, some connected with Columbia and some not. When I stopped being in GHAP in end of the Spring 1988 semester, I had just had a good friend, Will McCann, who was a Columbia College graduate die. A lot of my other friends were sick or dying. I was doing so much other AIDS work, and I only had a year of school left. I was spending most of my time doing activist work with ACT UP and was involved in planning the FDA action, and I decided I should leave GHAP.

I just did an interview with the ACT UP oral history project, which is on their website as a video and transcript, that describes what I did during the time period when I was involved with GHAP.

Q: Was there something about AIDS that caused you to focus specifically on it? In the time period you describe, it seems like you had a very strong focus on working on AIDS-related issues, but still differentiate it from the gay community on campus and in New York.

McCarthy: I was involved in other activist issues on campus during my time there, including the Coalition for a Free Southern Africa, and anti-racism work. That led to my interest in GHAP. When I was a GHAP member, I became interested doing more work in the AIDS area, I was interested AIDS because many social issues that I was interested in, racism, blaming others, classism, anti-gay and anti-drug user bias, access to housing and health care, were all presented. I applied for summer internships while in law school that dealt specifically with AIDS issues. When I worked at the Human Rights Commission after my first semester in college, I was angered by the discrimination faced by people with AIDS. That led to me attending my first ACT UP demonstration, at Foley Square in July 1987. After that I joined ACT UP, and all of my other AIDS work followed.

Q: What have you been doing since your time at Columbia? Are there any sorts of connections between your work and your time at GHAP?

McCarthy: I graduated from law school in May 1989. I continued to do activist work with ACT UP was on the board of AIDS Treatment Registry, which I joined that summer. I was loosely involved with the AIDS activist community until I moved out of New York City in August 1994. My then-partner was working at GMHC in the Ombudsman’s Office. So many of our friends outside of work were involved with AIDS activism, worked at an AIDS organization and/or had AIDS/HIV.

After I finished law school, I worked as a public defender at the Legal AID Society, Criminal Defense Division for five years. I was interested in getting a job where I would work on AIDS issues, but I was unsuccessful in that effort. There were very few legal jobs focused on AIDS at that time, and since I was just out of school, I didn’t have the necessary legal experience. A lot of the other jobs required an additional degree, like an M.PH., which I didn’t have. Once I moved to Ithaca, New York in August 1994, I wasn’t involved in AIDS issues as an activist.

I have focused my legal work on social justice issues, which is loosely related to my work at GHAP. I mainly represent indigent people, but I have worked at a variety of government and nonprofit jobs as well. I went back to school and got a Ph.D. in Human Development at Cornell. My graduate work is focused on child abuse and neglect, and its effects across the life course.

Even though I have not been involved in AIDS issues for a long time, I would say that the time I spent in GHAP was a great influence on me. I really enjoyed learning from Laura Pinsky and Paul Douglas. Many of the advocates became friends, and we kept up our friendships when we all lived in New York City. The focus on education, counseling and advocacy in the group is something that I have carried through to all my work since then. The skills that I learned while in GHAP have been invaluable for me.