Gay Activist Dan Cusick Memorial Tribute Video #1 of 4 Born in USA

This series of four Genuine G-Shots Tributes was prepared to honor the life and memory of adopted San Francisco's "Angel of the Castro". This is from someone who loved Dan very much: "Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many American consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality." ~~James Baldwin
His loving sister Patti, at May 30th memorial service, talked about asking Dan to come back "home" to So. Cal., he told her that he was "home" here in San Francisco's Castro District, and he was indeed surrounded by a lifetime of love at his beloved Castro Country Club. From Dan's adopted "hometown" paper the Bay Area Reporter::http://www.aegis.org/news/bar/2009/BR090408.html Bay Area Reporter - April 30, 2009 Liz Highleyman, liz@black-rose.com - Dan Cusick, a longtime AIDS activist and advocate for the recovery community, died Thursday, April 23, due to liver failure related to hepatitis C. He was 50. Mr. Cusick, who was on the liver transplant waiting list, died in hospice care at UCSF Parnassus Medical Center in the company of family and friends. "Dan was the 'Angel of Castro Street,'" said fellow activist Matt Sharp. "He saved many, many people and made lives more bearable for the living because it was the right thing to do, not for himself. He's one of those people it's hard to imagine not being among the living and the fighting." One of nine siblings, Mr. Cusick was born in 1959 and raised in Lakewood, California, in Los Angeles County. He graduated from Lakewood High
School and attended Long Beach City College. During his 20s, he worked as a banquet waiter at the Hyatt Hotel and as a bartender at Ripples in Long Beach. Mr. Cusick became clean and sober at age 26, and in 1990-at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic-he moved to San Francisco and immersed himself in activism, including fighting for wider availability and lower prices for medications for people with HIV.Mr. Cusick joined ACT UP/Golden Gate (later renamed Survive AIDS) and volunteered with the
treatment advocacy organization Project Inform, counseling people who called the group's pioneering HIV treatment hotline. Guided by the late Jeff Getty and the late Martin Delaney, Survive AIDS and Project Inform played a key role in making organ transplants accessible to HIV-positive individuals. A long-term AIDS survivor himself, Mr. Cusick developed progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy or PML, an often fatal brain disease that he survived thanks to early access to combination anti-retroviral therapy in the mid-1990s - an experience chronicled in a July 8, 1996 Time magazine article on the new HAART "cocktail" treatment. "Dan's activism was always based on seeking truth and justice," said friend and housemate Victor Valdiviezo. "He was proud of being gay and of his Irish heritage, but he was definitely colorblind and a kindred spirit to so many social justice causes." Mr. Cusick was active in the Long Beach and San Francisco recovery communities, and he is widely remembered for his unfailing encouragement of others. Starting in 2002, he managed the Castro Country Club (now a program of Baker Places Inc.), a clean and sober social space in the heart of the Castro neighborhood that offers an alternative to the bar scene and provides support to individuals seeking a life free of alcohol and drugs. In addition, he was a member of Mayor Gavin Newsom's crystal meth amphetamine task force."For the past six years, Dan managed the Castro Country Club with the qualities of character that he brought to the rest of his life: generosity, thoughtfulness, absolute dedication and commitment, focus, and a resolute hopefulness in people and their possibilities," said Baker Places Executive Director Jonathan Vernick. "Dan was an old-school activist, but it was through his daily work that he showed the way - listening to someone in trouble, offering some tough love mixed with his trademark humor, and in so many other ways," said longtime friend and housemate Terry Beswick, a former assistant editor at the Bay Area Reporter. "Dan truly gave his life for the well-being of the community, and his spirit will live on through countless others." Mr. Cusick, along with the late Hank Wilson, was a driving force in the 1999 write-in mayoral campaign of state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-S.F.))-then a city supervisor - against incumbent Mayor Willie Brown. At the 2008 Castro Street Fair, Mr. Cusick was sainted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. "When you look at the totality of Dan's work, he saved more lives than anyone I know," said Michael Lauro, another longtime community activist. "He had a heart large enough to save the world."

~~~ THIS IS A GENUINE G-SHOT ~~~

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