Wayne Steward

Q: I know it’s a little far back, but to start, to remember how you first got involved in the organization?

Steward: Yeah, I mean, there are some specifics of it that are going to be a little foggy here.

Q: Oh, of course.

Steward: In my sophomore year Laura, I think under the banner of GHAP, sponsored some sort of meeting that was intended to be about, and this is the part that’s foggy to me, what exactly the topic was. My guess is it had something to do with talking about sex or something like that in that era, or something like that. I can’t remember what the pitch was, other than I can remember it was sort of focused somehow around, it was targeted to gay individuals. And it was designed to be a kind of free flowing forum where people could come together to speak about certain things. And Laura was the person who was facilitating it, which was really my first interaction with GHAP in any way, shape or form. And the discussion was not intended – it lasted a couple of sessions or something and then it was a time limited sort of thing, but it was in the process of that, of course, I became familiar with GHAP more broadly. I’m sure somewhere in the context you’re talking about that she explained sort of what the purpose of GHAP was and what it did. And then from there I got involved in one of the trainings she was doing. So right from that particular forum, it was the way things were timed; one was able to kind of go straight into one of the GHAP counselor trainings, which is what I did. And so that’s actually how I got my start there was through that particular forum that she ran. And I know she was the person leading it. Paul Douglas was there at the time, like he was participating in it, but his health was clearly not very good by that point in time. Like you could tell that he was really quite sick.

Q: And then this was like around ’94, ’95?

Steward: This would’ve been, yes. So I – yes, because I came to Columbia in ’93. So if it was my sophomore year it would be ’94, ’95.

Q: So once you got involved in it, what was it like? Was it still – were they still doing floor raps then? Did you do those?

Steward: Yes. They did do floor raps. And I participated in them at least once. I know we did floor raps; I want to say it was my sophomore year that they did floor raps, and then they stopped because there was some event that occurred. I want to say somebody said something about something, I don’t know, anyway, there was some to do. Like somebody thought they may have outed somebody or something like that. It wasn’t the kind of thing that ultimately proved to be all of that big of a deal, but I think that they were, that was among the reasons why them people were just worried about doing the floor raps from there on out. I don’t think they, by my senior year I don’t recall them happening, but maybe I just didn’t participate. I do know there was at some point some sort of flack that occurred over them, the kind of thing that did ultimately not really amount to very much, but somebody was upset that something was said and maybe they’ve revealed something. It was the kind of thing that would make a dean kind of nervous but in the end didn’t actually transpire into anything that was a particular big deal.

Q: Got it. Got it. All right. So then the other component, of course, was the counseling. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like?

Steward: Well, so the counseling, right. So, of course, I mean, I was trained to become a counselor, and my – I’m trying to remember how the, like when I would’ve actually started it, like on my own really doing the counseling would’ve been somewhere towards the latter part of my sophomore year. And, you know, that of course, quickly becomes like, what quickly there transpired was then I ended up getting hired by Laura to work for her during the summer to help her with some other things as well as to offer kind of some sort of continuity counseling because most of the counselors disappeared for the summer months. And the program itself has to keep running. And then, of course, that was also the summer that Paul Douglas ended up dying. So then Laura was gone for a huge portion of the summer which basically meant that I was sort of it for a period of time until she came back in the fall and then she hired other people onto the project to just kind of get things running. So, I mean, by the time I was in the summer between my sophomore and junior year I was, well, I mean, at one point in time I think I literally was the only person doing GHAP stuff because Paul died and Laura was gone, it was the summer and no one else was around. And, you know, doing, so my experience in the counselor was very unusual for that reason. I mean the counseling itself obviously looked very similar to what other people’s experiences would be, but the whole job that I had got wrapped up into something that was much greater than what most other GHAP counselors would have experienced.

Q: Yeah.

Steward: The counseling itself was, I mean, it was definitely a learning experience. It was rare to have that kind of opportunity as an undergrad to be able to sort of, I don’t know, to be in a role like that, that would have quite that impact on some people, I mean, you know, most people come in for their HIV test counseling and probably a modal experience for testing somebody on a college campus like that, is that they come in, they’re worried, or they really – is it rational that they’re worried as much as they are? Probably not. You know, their risk, they had something that you objectively state was a risk, but the likelihood that their partner was HIV positive was not particularly great. And so, you know, for most of them I think it was something they like they should do, it was a good idea and, you know, you got them through it, and they turned out to be negative, and that was sort of their experience. And then you’d have that, it was a small percentage, but a distinct percentage, of people who you saw who for one reason or another it was a much more significantly impactful experience. You know, the kind of person who really did have to be concerned that they might be HIV infected. Or the person who was in there talking about, you know, their concerns about HIV, but really what they were talking about is the fact that they basically had non-consensual sex, they had been raped or something like that. So you’re trying to redirect this person into, I mean, you do the HIV testing, but you’re also trying to redirect them towards things like the rape crisis center. I mean those were the sorts of sessions that really last with, they’re the ones you really remember because, you know, I mean, they’re the ones that were meaningful to the person receiving the counseling.

Q: Did you ever have to give positive results?

Steward: So the way it worked when I was there, the short answer to that is basically, no, I never directly delivered them. Because the way it was supposed to work was Laura did the results twice a week, like there was a period where you had these results time set up and people came and they met with her to do the results. And then the counselors were really supposed to do the pretest counseling. Now when I was hired to work for her that very first summer part of what I did was I was the person who actually had to take the bloodwork that was stored in the lab at the Columbia Health Center and take it down to the Lower East Side where the test was actually run and at that point I would pick up the amount of the test results and bring them back. When she left to go, when she took a leave of absence after Paul died, what I would do is screen the results, I mean, I could, you know, they’re anonymous results, you just open them up and you look through them to see if the results all contain negatives or if they contain a positive or an indeterminate. And most of the time the results coming back were negative. So for most of that summer, you know, the pile of results that I had sitting in that office were negatives. And in that case I just returned the results because I mean people would come in, and it’s sort of awkward, here they are, sitting here all nervous and you know that there’s no way that the person who is going to come in is going to have anything but negative because the only results you have to return are negatives. I mean you don’t know who any person is until they give you the number, but you could be sure that they weren’t going to be anything but negative. And then I think there was one week during that summer where there was a positive. And what we did was arrange somehow, and I can’t, for the life of me, remember how we did this, but I remember I had arranged for a nurse who worked down in the primary care unit to return the result, so that it wasn’t a 20 year old undergraduate being the person who delivered the news to that individual.

Q: Yeah, of course.

Steward: And then Laura came back and then, you know, she resumed doing the results.

Q: And we still give out all the negative results during in the walk in hours and then she handed out the positive ones, that is the same.

Steward: And, you know, it’s important to remember, of course, that we’re talking about ’94, ’95. So ’95 is when protease inhibitors were introduced, but the effects of protease inhibitors weren’t really appreciated until you get more towards ’96. So at the point that, you know, results were going back when I was first was hired at GHAP, getting a positive result had a very different meaning than it does today. I mean, you know, it was basically like; you now have this disease. And the good chances are you’ll live with it for ten years before you develop AIDS and then you’ll live another five and then you’ll die. So I suspect, and it’s not to say that getting an HIV test result today is a meaningless experience, or somehow not something that’s live changing for people, but it does have very different implications today than it did when I was first working there back in the mid ‘90s.

Q: Yeah. Someone described it to me as knowing that a bus was coming down the street to hit you but you just didn’t know when. And it was knowing whether or not the bus was coming.

Steward: Right. That’s a good analogy.

Q: Yeah. You just mentioned with the advent of the cocktail and protease inhibitors. Were you able to like notice a change in how people reacted? How people approached testing?

Steward: Not really. And part of that has more to do with the fact that I graduated from Columbia in ’97. And a lot of the stuff that the got written on this whole idea of treatment optimism, the idea that gay men really had a very different relationship to HIV with the advent of treatment, a lot of that intellectual movement took place once I had graduated and gone on to graduate school. And so it wasn’t something that, and people were aware and feeling optimistic about the new drugs, but you know, you sort of have to give them a little bit of time for it to sink in. I mean it’s one of these things like, yeah, you know, all of the sudden people started to get better, but you didn’t, to this day, you don’t actually know exactly how many years of life ART gives one, right? Because what you know is you put people on it in the middle ‘90s and in some cases they’re still going, right? So you haven’t kind of hit the outer bound, but basically they were putting people on these drugs and you’re waiting to see are you going to hit the outer bound? So is this going to be something that’s going to be six months? A year? Two years? Ten years? Right? Like each month tells you; you haven’t hit the outer bound. So initially while people were, you know, all of the sudden people are starting to do much better, I think it took a period of time for people to really start to say, oh, this seems to be something that’s sticking, because AZT was something that could make people better, not as dramatically so as the anti retrovirals could, but it did lengthen peoples’ life a little bit, or at least if not that it would lengthen sort of the quality of life they had for a period of time. It just didn’t last very long, like you’d do better and then you wouldn’t. So I think that that lesson meant that people didn’t rush out there on day one of ART and say; oh, you know, everything’s better. The net effect of that to your question is that you didn’t really see a lot of difference. And you certainly, and then furthermore, you have to realize that, of course, that most of the people – well, you probably know this because you do the counseling yourself – but most of the people who come in there don’t live and breathe HIV stuff every day.

Q: Yeah.

Steward: And so, you know, most of them are not people who would be particularly reading up on the nuances of HIV science at the time. So, you know, I don’t think in most cases people were really even aware of the impact of the drugs at the point I was there. It really became more common knowledge as you moved out into subsequent years, after I had left Columbia.

Q: Oh, no, I just kind of wanted to follow up on what the experience was like. A little bit more on like what where people like? Were they quite worried?

Steward: You know, I mean, the kinds of stuff you get then, you could divide it. So the majority of people that a counselor probably saw were heterosexual students who they really objectively didn’t have a lot of risk. You know, they maybe had slept around with somebody else on campus and they were worried because that, you know, it’s interesting, I don’t know exactly what kinds of programs still exist on college campuses today around this stuff. I mean I’m at a university but UCSF is a weird university, right? It’s only a medical school. So there’s an undergraduate campus here. But, you know, that era was one of those, people my age, right, like I was something like five or six when the first AIDS case was discovered. And people my age were little, little kids when they started talking about HIV on the news. And then, of course, there was all the stuff when I was a small child with kids who had HIV, the hemophiliac kids with HIV being run out of schools, and all this stuff that people saw. I was probably about the first cohort that they really pushed through AIDS education in the school system. And so by the time you got to college it was sort of one of these things like a responsible person does this, that and the other to prevent HIV. And it was sort of presented that way. And it wasn’t presented in a way that was particularly nuanced. You know, it’s just like you should use a condom if you have sex with somebody. There was nothing like no one tried to say if the relationship was of this quality or that quality, you just didn’t acknowledge that stuff, right? And presumably for a gay person you’re supposed to use condoms for the rest of your life. For a heterosexual there was some sort of mystery around, you know, somehow it converts from being a casual experience where you’re supposed to use condoms till you’re married and you don’t. But they don’t, I mean, other than saying you should get a test and all that kind of stuff before you do that, there wasn’t really a lot of discussion around the emotional impacts of that or anything like that. I mean it was just kind of like this is what you’re supposed to do. I mean for the time I was in New York, you know, there was a whole campaign that would go on about no glove, no love, for lesbians, right? Like you should be putting a glove on any time you’re with another woman. I mean the kind of stuff that you probably, you don’t see quite that level of language around it anymore. And so I think that the heterosexual students one would say they probably caught up in that a little bit, like they were aware that they had done something that people say isn’t a good idea. They’re worried about it. There’s probably not a deep understanding of what’s the underlying based prevalence of HIV in the set of people that they’re having sex with. They worried, I don’t know that they were panicked, but they worried. And you had a kind of conversation that usually went somewhere along the lines of, you know, I would fall out of my seat if you actually tested positive. I mean it was just not somebody that was likely to be HIV positive. It was a lot about their fears. The other group, of course, that would fit in there would be young gay men, I mean, college aged gay men, or graduate student aged gay men, they typically were the ones that were more complicated, right? Because you’re not talking about somebody who necessarily had sex with an individual on the campus. It’s a lot of the like, you know, yeah, there was a group of gay men on campus and some of them slept together but as a gay person you really pushed kind of off the campus boundaries and down into like the bar scene and everything else. I mean this was all, of course, way before, well, not way, way before, but you know, like I remember laying eyes on for the first time on Netscape when I was at Columbia. I mean you did not have a thriving Internet culture then, right? People didn’t meet one another through the Internet. So, I mean, they went to bars and you met people in the bars. And so now you’re talking about somebody who’s had sex with somebody coming out of the more gay population in New York City where you have a substantial prevalence of HIV. And so these would be individuals who have legitimate worry. Now, that said, there was quite a number of gay men who would come in whose risk behaviors basically looked like they used condoms to have anal sex, if they had it at all, and they’d given a blow job to some guy at some point and like a spec of semen went in the person’s mouth or something like that. And, you know, I mean, the amount of fear that they would have about that was quite disproportionate to what the actual risk would be but very, very difficult to make the person feel like they didn’t have risk because, you know, a person approximately my age as a young gay person that’s what you grew up watching was, you know, people with HIV, or gay – the first time you heard about gay people on the news was through the context of HIV. Or AIDS, or ARC, or whatever the term was at the time. And basically the storyline was you got it and you died. And so trying to rewrite that narrative in your own head is not easy to do. And so you just had a lot of people who had a lot of anxiety around it. And understandably, given what the narrative was, that was prevailing at the time, not to mention the fact, narrative aside, I mean, let’s face it a huge proportion of gay men about ten years older than me died.

Q: It’s something that it continues. It’s still like two thirds of the cases that are diagnosed in the country are men who have sex with men.

Steward: Well, that’s right. Yeah, I mean, it will remain that way. I mean, you know, if I had been something like six to seven years older the chances that I might have, you know, contracted HIV and died from it are just much greater because, you know, there is sort of this, I was – so I was six when it was first found. You know, I mean, of course, it took a number of years for people to really become aware of it, but you know, someone my age basically came into adulthood aware of HIV. And so we’re kind of the first group of gay men coming out with the knowledge that it exists. Right? The ones all older than me came out and learned to be gay in some way and then somewhere along the way discovered HIV. And discovered that they now had it. So I mean it was just a, it had a very particular feel to it because of that particular era of time.

Q: Got it. I don’t know if you’re the person to ask about this, but what was the relationship between GHAP and the Health Service?

Steward: GHAP was, so they now changed everything there, right? Because the Health Service, I mean, the counseling is now over in Lerner Hall I think, right? And that point, right, you still had the Ferris Booth Hall, the Ferris Booth was the inspiration for Ferris Bueller. So the Ferris Booth Hall was there, which was a fraction of the size of Lerner Hall. And Health Service was entirely located in John Jay, right? And you went into John Jay Hall and there’s a staircase right to the left as you come in. And you go up the staircase and on the third floor there’d be a door, I think it was called the third floor, even though it didn’t really feel like the third floor, but that would be the third floor. And there was a door into there that was to the primary care. And then I think you went up another level to get to the counseling service. You had to go up a set of stairs, and I want to say that the women’s health center was on the left and then the counseling and testing service was on the right. And Laura’s office was in the counseling and the testing service, and we would use certain rooms, and there we would book off rooms when counselors weren’t there and that’s where we would place the GHAP counselors to do the test counseling. And then the person would get sent downstairs and they would do, they would get their blood drawn down there. Now there was also apparently some amount of testing they just did do the primary care unit and they just really weren’t coordinated in any way, shape or form. Like we did our thing downstairs and they did their things downstairs, and there is some history behind that undoubtedly Laura could give you more of, right, because Laura created GHAP at a point that no one was really paying attention to it. And then it was this program that existed. And then the university decided it should pay attention, the primary care people decided they should pay attention, but this thing was already running. And so they kind of existed. I’m not sure that everybody in that health service was doing cartwheels over the notion that they had undergraduate students counseling people about HIV. But she had started it and it was really not going to be politically feasible to stop it.

Q: Yeah. It’s interesting, we’re still located on the fourth floor of John Jay. So much of is the same, but I guess the big difference is now we’re located as part of the medical service.

Steward: Okay. Right. And so they integrated those then after I left. I mean I would say that the more awkward thing has to do with the health education program, right? Because you then separately had a program, I think it was called Health Wise. It’s the thing that those were the individuals, for example, who started Go Ask Alice, the website, and I think Go Ask Alice still exists, actually.

Q: Yes, it does.

Steward: But they started this stuff, right? There was a woman over there who interestingly enough, the woman who started it now works as a computer programmer here in San Francisco. I’ve interacted with her on a couple of things. But she, they started it over there, and so you had this, you know, one of the principle duties of a health education program in that era was to educate people about HIV. And so there was this whole component of HIV education that existed outside of it because Laura had started this program and Paul already kind of occupied the territory. But she wasn’t one of the health, she wasn’t somebody in the health education shop, she was somebody in the counseling service shop. And so that was always kind of a, it’s not that it was like a hostile relationship or something, it was just a peculiar one, like as to how you negotiated those boundaries.

Q: Got it. That’s interesting. I know there was also HIV education groups at Lerner for a couple of years. I think like ATE or something.

Steward: And I can’t tell you if that existed or not. Right, Barnard, of course, always has that, that always gets caught up in the strange relationship of the university.

Q: Exactly. It was also something that started after GHAP. And used a lot of GHAP materials when it went in. It was a redundant program, I guess, I’m trying to say.

Steward: The other programs, of course, that you had that were tied in with GHAP were things like Outreach, right? The phone line that used to exist. In fact I think it still does exist. In fact I think if you, at least the last time I checked the number every so often I’ll see a friend or something from Columbia, and we’ll be like; I wonder if that line’s still active? At one point that line still had my voice on it.

Q: Yeah? (Chuckle)

Steward: The voice thing, it was not active during the summer of like ’96 or something, and then the program just sort of fell apart. But the phone line apparently still exists.

Q: That’s so funny. There’s still Nightline. Was that around when you …

Steward: Yes, that was around. I never did Nightline other than I came and trained people on Nightline on talking to people about HIV, at some point, like junior or senior year when I was a little bit more experienced in the program. I came and I did a training for Nightline. I also went and talked to the counselors at the rape crisis center. Like we tried to cross train one another on things. So, right, Nightline existed. And then there was something called Outreach, which was supposed to be aligned specifically for people who wanted to call because they were questioning their sexuality. And it operated like two nights a week or something.

Q: Were you involved in that program at all?

Steward: I was a little bit. Like I actually trained to do Outreach and then I, you know, sat in a room to be on the phone, available on the phone line, for a couple of nights. But then it, like no call of any significance came in while I was there that did not go down as like an experience to like write home about in terms of some sort of major moving thing. Other people would be, it was a very haphazard sort of thing. Most of the time you’d go you’d take your work with you because there was no clue as to whether you were going to get a call. And then every once in a while somebody would get a call that was a doozy. You know, the like; I think I’m gay, I’m going to kill myself. And you’d have to like talk them through that. So if you didn’t happen to be the person there when that came in, you didn’t get that particular, like you didn’t have to deal with that. And the night I was there that didn’t ever transpire. And then I can’t remember exactly, like you usually shut it down for the summer, and then it only operated haphazardly and then it sort of never operated after some point. And so that’s how you end up with them. I would be curious to know if the phone is actually still there. Are you aware that there’s a closet behind the guard’s desk on the second floor of John Jay? Like that’s where the phone was actually stored was within that closet.

Q: That space is actually the storage from for Alice, there’s sort of like stress balls and random office supplies there.

Steward: Interesting. So the phone line actually used to live there. And in fact the phone that we had, and at that point, you know, all campus life centered around your ROLM phone. I don’t even know if they still keep the same phone system there, but right, like, for like announcements to people and everything else. So like we set up a GHAP line as well that was, it actually was physically located on that phone and what you would do is forward it to the office you were going to be using if there was supposed to be an event that people were going to call or something like that. And then the Outreach line also sat on that phone and you’d forward it to wherever you were going to be. And then you’d have to go remember to go down and shut off the forward and it would just you’d have it on that phone. And if people called then they just got the answering service at that point.

Q: Got it. Got it. The only anonymous program really was there was an online chat for like gay students, or people questioning their sexuality, I don’t think they had a positive response and I know it shut down like about two months later.

Steward: Right. Yeah, I mean, it’s one of those things, the problem with them is they’re hard to staff because they’re really hit or miss. I mean in a good sense, like it means that people aren’t sitting there like pondering their own death or something all the time. But you just, it was too, like Nightline to me always, it makes more sense as a concept if you’re going to have an emergency kind of like response line because you just open it up to a variety of problems. And you just, there just tends to be, like you can count, and that’s a good thing, but you can kind of count on there being a certain number of problems that are going to occur with some regularity on that campus. Sometimes it will be somebody stressed about their sexual orientation. Sometimes it will be somebody stressed about a sexual experience they’ve just had. Sometimes it’s probably just somebody who’s like has a depression problem, like homesickness or something. But it just is. Like they just occur with regularity. And I think Outreach suffered from the fact that it was, when you specified that it has to be specifically related to questioning your sexual orientation that cuts out some of the problems that people have. And then the other thing is that it operated at like 8 o’clock at night. And Nightline operates at something like 2 a.m. And I think you just get more of it at 2 a.m.

Q: You mentioned being an undergrad. Did people react to you being as young as you were? Right now I’m an undergraduate, and I’m 20 as well actually, and we see almost all grad students here as the population. And I guess I’m asking how people reacted to that, if at all?

Steward: I suppose that there were some people who you could, I’m trying to remember how this, sometimes yes, like momentarily, but you know, once you get, you sit down and you kind of go through it. There’s a reaction to your physical look, because I looked 20, at least that would be my assumption on that. I mean I guess it would be better to ask somebody else what they thought I looked like, but I’m not somebody who – for a lot of my life I usually either looked my age or younger, I’m not somebody who tends to look older. So whatever that effect was visually would presumably have been like it would be there for people. But my experience with it is that once you start talking, like that is much more about how you present yourself interpersonally that effects how people then respond to you. And so you just sort of have to break that down. And if you can be, you know, you had the bigger point of having to explain, yes, I’m a student here, but everything we talk about isn’t going to go outside of this room and that sort of thing to lay any concerns about that. And then you’d ask them to start talking and it would just go from there. And I feel like whatever the dynamic was, by ten minutes into the conversation, you were sort of beyond it.

Q: Exactly. Yeah. I would really agree. I mean I’ve had a couple of people, especially when I was younger and doing it who kind of reacted weirdly, but it’s one of those things that once you get them talking it really doesn’t matter. So it’s nice to hear that’s been the experience for a while.

Steward: Oh, yeah, I mean, you know, I think people just, you know, you’re basically in the authority position as the person doing the counseling. And I think they just kind of have to, people just take it as it is. It’s a strange moment because it does sort of invert the normal power dynamics that you would see in most interactions, but you just go with it. Grad students in particular should be used to seeing this because, you know, in graduate school, people come into graduate school at all different ages. And what determines your kind of relation, your placement in the pecking order, has far more to do with the number of years of graduate school you completed. So you can have somebody who entered graduated school at 21 or 22 who would be, you know, five years in and be 26. And then you’d have a 32 year old who starts the program. Well, the 26 year old is the more senior student. So, you know, I mean, you’re kind of used to being in an environment where the age thing gets tossed up a little bit. The weirder ones, I think even more so, had to do with the undergrads because you often ended up like knowing the person in some way through some other context, like they were in a class with you, or you know, I don’t know, you know, like somehow you knew each other socially or things like that. And so you’d have to – those, I feel like, for different reasons could be awkward for them, because you really had to let them know that they weren’t at risk of you blabbing stuff all over the place.

Q: Yeah. Yeah. You hit the nail on the head, as an undergrad, especially as a gay male undergrad, and a lot of gay male undergrads come in, it’s a tightknit circle sometimes.

Steward: Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Q: The other thing I wanted to ask you, you have had some of your professional work related to HIV/AIDS. Am I remembering that right? I would love, if you don’t mind, if you could talk about that a little bit.

Steward: So my major in undergrad was in psychology, but it was in cognitive psychology. I mean actually Columbia’s Psych Department on the main campus doesn’t even have clinical stuff in there. So it was this kind of odd split experience when I was an undergrad. Because I would go over to this counseling center where you’re surrounded by psychologists, all of whom who were like; oh, yeah, graduate school, you have to go and study statistics and do all this horrible stuff and research. Then I’d go over to the Psych Department and be doing research with all these people who were like, oh, clinicians, yeah, you don’t want to become a clinician, you want to do research. And I mean that’s just the way it was. And so when I applied to graduate school I sort of applied to a variety of different things. I wasn’t particularly focused in one area of psychology. I sort of split them according to, I wasn’t really sure what it was I wanted to do, and I split them according to kind of who seemed like the most interesting person at each of the places I was applying. And so with one of them I applied and I said, you know, you study as guys, it turns out the guy who like actually invented – well, I don’t know if invented is the right word – but he’s the one who first used the term emotional intelligence, and then the author, Dan Goldman, asked if he could use that term in a book and took it and ran. But this guy was the one, he was a psychologist who’s actually studying emotional intelligence in the context of like research psychology. And I wrote to him and I was like; oh, well, you know, I’ve been doing HIV stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you can apply it in this way or that way, and probably something that would be embarrassing if I read it back today. And then, you know, a couple of months later he called me and he’s like, are you aware that we’re forming an AIDS center here? And I was like, no. He’s like, are you aware that I’m going to be the co-director of it? I was like no. He’s like, well, yeah, I am. So we really need a graduate student who studies HIV. That’s how I got it. It’s like, oh, yeah, no research at all. Total serendipity. So when I went to graduate school, I mean, I majored in psychology, but I still did HIV stuff. I mean the actual stuff I ended up working on there had much more to do with how you frame things in order to pitch messages to people, a kind of psychological topic, but I was always sort of centered in health psychology stuff, and particularly around HIV, and then connected with the HIV center at the university and everything else. And then when I finished up and I graduated then I applied for the post-doctoral program at UCSF specializing in AIDS prevention research. I came here for that which included doing a master’s in public health over at Berkeley just to connect it to it. And then stayed on here doing a variety of stuff around HIV prevention, HIV policy, and increasingly stuff related to how you sort of get people to move through the care environment and get the care they need which is a reflection of kind of how HIV itself has changed. And, you know, I’ve gone to be a professor here. The division that I’m in, right, I’m in the Department of Medicine, it’s technically the Division of Prevention Science, but the bulk of the Division of Prevention Science is the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies. So I pretty much have done HIV work in some way, shape or form since I first met Laura.

Q: Wow. That’s really incredible. It’s been really interesting how many people who through GHAP end up going into HIV/AIDS as their work. And I’m sure it’s a function of being involved, but it’s just really interesting.

Steward: It’s probably also, truth be told, a function of how the money was moving at that point too. I mean I don’t want to minimize that including my own experience, but, I mean, the reality was that funding streams for HIV increased a lot at a period of time. And it meant that there were post doc opportunities. And then medical schools, I think, were more interested in it. And things like, I mean, it was something I mean, it was just an important disease that people were responding to. It would be interesting to see over say the next 10 to 20 years how that looks because HIV is, it’s still a very important disease but the sort of special case-ness of it has been decreasing, I mean, in some of the cases that because the disease is better managed now. In some cases it undoubtedly has to do with the fact that there’s a set of people in this country who are not particularly comfortable with a disease that principally effects gay men and drug users. But it would just be interesting to see. I mean I don’t think there’s anybody who you would likely talk to who would say, oh, I went into to it because the money streams were moving that way. But I mean I studied social psychology. You study about how the sort of social situation effects people’s thinking. It’s another factor in there. I mean I think most people who did it were actually dedicated to doing it, but there are these other factors that are also actually involved.

Q: Got it. Yeah. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about? I covered pretty much everything I wanted to, but I just wanted to make sure you did.

Steward: I think so. I mean that’s the bulk of it. I mean after that first summer then, of course, I continued working with Laura.