 Aloha Friday and welcome to Perspectives on Global Justice ThinkTek Hava'i program. This is your host, Beatrice Cantelmo. Today's episode is dedicated to anyone who has been, is or will be impacted by AIDS HIV. As of 2016, 36.7 million people were living with HIV in the world. In 1988, the World Health Organization established the World AIDS Day to provide governments, international AIDS programs, community organizations and individuals with an opportunity to raise awareness and focus attention on AIDS epidemic. This year's campaign theme is right to health, highlighting the need for all 36.7 million people living with HIV to have access to universal health insurance so that they can receive ongoing treatment, follow-up care and also have access to medication without delay. I cannot think of a more special guest to have this afternoon than Scott Foster. Scott is a renaissance man who has dedicated so much energy and time of his life to AIDS awareness in the state of Hava'i and also on the mainland. Scott organized the first World AIDS Day events in the state of Hava'i and for five years he was the volunteer state coordinator and produced A Day Without Art. He also made sure that with the help of some strong allies at the state capitol and the Aloha Tower lights were turned off to highlight attention to World AIDS Day. Scott was also involved with the AIDS Quilt Memorial. He co-founded one of the first state chapters for the organization that manages the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the NAMES Project Foundation. Quilt is displayed in over 1,000 venues annually and it weighs more than 54 tons and it has 45,000 panels dedicated to more than 99,000 people who have lost their lives to this epidemic. On that note, thank you so much for having me here on the program, such an honor. Beatrice, it's my honor. It's a great pleasure to be here. So, here we are, 2017 and World AIDS Day, which for many people who are living with this epidemic, it's every day. We have one day a year to highlight their needs and also do more education in awareness building, not only on the epidemic itself, but also the need that we have to come together to support our brothers and sisters who are afflicted by it and they love the ones as well because we never can stress enough that this is an illness that impacts so many people, not just a person who is directly infected by it. So, to give us our viewers a perspective, what was it like before World AIDS Day, before 1988, what is your recollection, what was happening in Hawaii, what was happening in this country, what was happening with the LGBT community, what was happening with your friends? Wow. Okay. It's a loaded question, isn't it? 1984 was when it first came across my radar. I was living in my home state of Oklahoma. We were very active, we had quite an active LGBT community in Oklahoma because so much had happened nationally. The women's movement, the black civil rights movement, the LGBT community was organizing. We were all under attack and it just all seemed to come together with the social revolution of the late 60s and 70s. And so we were prepared on a political side in Oklahoma to deal with almost anything we thought and then came aid because the community was organized there and I was one of the founders of the first political organization in Oklahoma. Now this is in the 70s. The Anita Bryant campaign, Harvey Milk was assassinated. All those horrible riots were taking place. It was a very tumultuous time. So when AIDS hit, it took us all blindsided us. Long story short, I moved to Los Angeles for two years and 85 I guess it was and that was not a happy place to be because of course AIDS was a terminal diagnosis and quickly there were no drugs. They didn't know how to deal with it. And I just had to get out of Los Angeles. I couldn't be there. A friend of mine suggested I try Honolulu. So I came to Honolulu and only to find out that there was no LGBT organization here to speak of. There was a tiny, tiny little, it was called the Gay Community Center and a handful of people who were grappling with the tsunami of problems that the revelations about AIDS was bringing. So what kind of the highlights back in the day when AIDS came out and what were the things that were being talked about in this community? Well that was the problem. They weren't being talked about. Now there were some, the Life Foundation had been founded a couple of years before I got here and they were doing great work but to their credit they did not promote the fact that it was mostly gay men that had put it together and certainly a lot of women later on but it was never considered a gay organization, a gay organization. So they had the latitude to sort of begin to speak on the issue with more clarity than was being done here. I was able to help amplify that by founding the Hawaii Gay Community News and that's when I began writing seriously about the issue here in Hawaii. Many people are surprised to learn that, I've forgotten his name but the editor of the, I believe it was the, I don't know, the advertiser or the star bulletin. In those days they were separate newspapers. Died of AIDS way back in the day and while that created a sense of urgency it was not talked about much after he did pass. So the gay community news became really the voice of the community about AIDS issues. And you know it's so interesting you're mentioning that as I grew up most of my formative years were spent in Brazil. So in the 80s I was a young teenager and also the same secrecy, the same lack of information and when somebody would die of the disease the stigma was so strong that people would go through great lengths to describe the health complications but never attached the name to the actual diagnosis. And the health complications were myriad. They were dozens of complications and that was part of the problem of course. And so I mean not only people struggle to understand the illness itself but also having to deal with that stigma and when you had someone that was close to you, whether a co-worker, family member, or a friend who was infected with the virus and then developed AIDS, it was even worse. In Brazil for example many family members would completely disown their family members who was actually struggling with HIV AIDS and when I started college in Brazil in 1990, so I was a medical student and on the first year at the University Hospital that I took my classes at, they were going to close the HIV AIDS department because they didn't have funding, we were defunded. And so we had all of these five shifts with quite a terminal and no place to send them to. It was just a straight disease, it was not a straight disease. That was the big misconception from day one that it was a gay disease. And that's a later on a lot more of that when it's got built on but you really see the stigma and that really impacted me very strongly because it took the love and the care of the students and staff members to actually keep that department functioning like we would bring food, we would bring linens, we would actually donate our time to be there with people their last months of their lives because they didn't have a place to go. We felt it was important that they would provide a place like Maracocaba also dignity and to me it was a very powerful experience. But I think of people who were not in a vulnerable, who do not remember how this started, how different it is nowadays. We had no role models, no gay role models. When Liberace died, he had denied that he had AIDS till the end. Rock Hudson denied he had AIDS till the very end and I don't think either one of them ever stepped up and said I have AIDS, be careful. When Magic Johnson came out positive that was when the game changed because he of course was loved and famous because of his basketball skills and for him to come out positive it changed the whole game. All of a sudden people realized oh this isn't a gay disease or maybe Magic Johnson's gay. Well, it doesn't really matter but it did, it allowed me to after ten years to step away from it. In fact I wrote in the newspaper if the straight community doesn't get it now they never will, I'm done with it and I had to get back to my life because I had given literally ten years of full decade of my life to raising the awareness. So here in Hawaii when you moved here you found that new calling out of need really because there was not much of a foundation to really support local people and people who adopted Hawaii as home also. So what was it like the very first years of World AIDS Day for Hawaii because I think it's very important to think from a local perspective. Did people embrace it? By then the world had changed and AIDS was much better understood and again we had the Life Foundation. Hawaii had done some rather amazing things. There was the Governor's Committee on AIDS under Governor John Ahe. Which was rather special, that was unusual that a governor was taking the lead and out of that came and I was very pleased to be involved in passing the needle exchange program, the Hawaii needle exchange program and working with several of the people that I went on through the years working with World AIDS Day for example. Pam Lickty was one of those great people, there were several others and so from that hooey of people when World AIDS Day was announced initially I was still writing for the publishing the gay community news so I had the mechanism to promote it and by then we had the media relationships who were talking about it so it was easy to do because we had those leaders in place. Turning the lights out on the Capitol and the Loha Tower, I didn't have to do that, I just called and I'll think of the ladies name in a minute and she worked in government and she arranged that, someone else, we met once or twice on it, a day without art was another part of that and we had many art galleries throughout all of Hawaii who either took pictures out of frames and left the frame and put in the banner a day without art or draped black material a day without art just to imagine, try to force people to imagine that all of the great entertainers and artists who AIDS was taking, Alvin Ailey, the great founder of the great Alvin Ailey Dancers, their magnificent black dance troupe that still goes on today, he died, so many of the artists and dancers and singers and Broadway stars were dying, Rudolph Nuriow. So by then it was easy to publicize and it took off. I did it for five years and we built it from just a small commemoration to what it, it was a real event and the news covered it and all of that stuff. It was easy because we had come through all the rest of it and set up the groundwork for it and now World AIDS Day for me, I will be going and as I told you you're going to join me tonight at 6.30, 6.30 at St. Andrews Cathedral is the annual World AIDS Day commemoration and it's a day that I really look forward to because I will see a lot of those people that have been involved all along and but the cathedral fills up with people there to remember their loved ones, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts. So there's a spiritual coming together there that takes place on no other time or place for me because it's a day of remembrance and certainly a day to honor all of those people who contributed to what it is today which is education. We're going to take a quick break. I'm going to the game and it's going to be great early arriving for a little tailgate. I usually drink but won't be drinking today because I'm the designated driver and that's okay. It's nice to be the guy that keeps his friends in line, keeps them from drinking too much so we can have a great time. A little responsibility can go a long way because it's all about having fun on game day. I'm the guy you want to be, I'm the guy, say good money, I'm the guy with the H2O and I'm the guy that says let's go. Welcome back to Perspectives on Global Justice Think Tech Hawaii program. This is your host, Pieteris Gantamo and we are back with Scott Posta. So Scott we had a very beautiful assembly of pictures that we're going to show to our viewers and I would like if you could give us a historical background of what these quilts were like and how they got started and your role to not only have one of the first chapters in the nation to assemble and display these quilts and also helping with the very fast exhibiting in Washington D.C. So Rob, can we see the fast picture? Look at that, how marvelous. That's of course on the mall that the quilt was covered completely from the capital building to the street that separates the mall from the beginning of the Lincoln Memorial. It was to see that that day and I was there the quilt was been displayed I believe four times in Washington I was there for three of the four presentations. For it to grow to that just in a few years, five years maybe was astounding and of course we had a display here in Hawaii too. We were the first state in the nation to actually display the quilt and it was at the Blaisdale exhibition hall and an amazing experience just being involved in it. I first heard about the quilt when Cleve Jones from San Francisco. Now Cleve Jones was a close ally and Harvey Milk staff. So when Harvey was killed that was long before the AIDS epidemic, pandemic. Cleve had tried to memorialize some of his friends who had died of AIDS with cardboard pieces of cardboard that they put up on a wall and it occurred to him the quilt project came from that and so then the quilt project began maybe a year, 18 months later several of us heard about it in Hawaii. We thought how great it would be to bring it here. The neat part about it was it didn't cost us any money because I had forgotten which airline volunteered to have their stewards bring the quilt over from San Francisco in duffel bags. So every airline employee, forgive me for not remembering the airline, but that's how the quilt got here and back and at that time it filled the Blaisdale hall. It's not a small hall. Well not the arena, the building between the theater and the round part. It was filled and of course we didn't know whether people were going to come or not. You always worry about that. So what was it like? Did people come and respond? That was the great memory for me was seeing over 10,000 people came. We just had it there for a day really. And there were, I guess what's most memorable it wasn't, of course there were gay people there, but it was mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts and young couples with children and strollers. They all came. I couldn't even begin to tell you how thrilling that was and I remember just standing back thinking, oof, thank goodness they're coming. So the quilt worked its magic in Hawaii as it's done everywhere it's been displayed. And it is pure magic, just seeing it. And of course a lot of, we also made quilts here for people and during that exhibition I think we added 40 quilts, could be wrong, but 40 quilts here and then throughout the next few years I've forgotten how many. My close friend, the late Tommy Aguilar, we made a quilt for Tommy. Tommy was an original member of a chorus line, the Broadway cast of a chorus line and Tommy died of AIDS, another artist we lost here. A lot of love went into the making of that quilt and left dying stories and tears. There was one that stands out and I've forgotten his name but the director of the Hawaii Children's Youth Theater had died of AIDS and his staff and volunteers called me and said, is there time to do it? We had like two days and we jumped on that and between his staff and his people and what they brought to it we had a beautiful quilt for them that joined the national quilt. And I think they like to see how this project has started with the loving care of one person who lost loved ones grow to the point where I think it's the largest folk art project in the world to this day and it keeps being added on. So on the one hand it's amazing that we have such a powerful way to honor our loved ones who died of AIDS. On the other hand it also is such a brutal reminder of how much work we have to do still not only to come of education and awareness and prevention and hopefully eradication of this illness. I hope to see the quilt come back here on a World AIDS Day. Not all of it. There was a composer, John Corgliano, who wrote The Ghosts of Versailles. Do you remember that opera? It was one of the first new operas to be produced at the Metropolitan Opera. The Ghosts of Versailles, he wrote a symphony dedicated to the quilt. The Corgliano Symphony number, I want to say one, I think it was. And we had the second premiere of that symphony here with the Honolulu Symphony and we brought parts of the quilt over for that. Now I look forward and I'm going to try to encourage the Life Foundation maybe next year to do a little more. It's the volunteer organization with funding problems. I'm trying to raise money to do their work. But I hope to somehow help them get a budget to either do the Corgliano Symphony again or at least bring part of the quilt back. Well maybe part of the idea is to see if we can get the symphony and donate the seats, not only to the Life Foundation. We actually lost a lot of funding to do their work in these upcoming years, especially this year. Well, all these things can be done. It just takes volunteers and time to re-energize it a little bit. It's such like you have a good invitation and one volunteer. And hopefully we can get to many others. We'll meet some people tonight. And tonight is December 1, by the way, for anyone watching this after the broadcast. And this event is tonight, December 1, 2017, at the St. Andrews Cathedral at 630. And let's reiterate that if you have any relationship with anything we've been discussing, try a tent tonight. Absolutely. And even if you don't, you know, for the name of care and compassion and humanness, you know, I think one of the things that distinguishes us from any other species on the planet is that we have this innate ability, but maximized, you know, to showcase and to mobilize in amazing ways to make things happen, to go from a place of utter suffering to a place of healing and transformation. And so that is part, you know, of what we can set as an intention right here today. And let's see if the next year on World AIDS Day we can have the symphony and part of the quilt and community a little bit more, you know, engaged in this process. So, Robert, before we end our program, do you mind showing a few more pictures of this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful project? That was a postcard. It's so powerful. And that's my favorite. That gives a scale. Yes, we'll keep it there. I can't believe how quick, you know, our program is coming to an end. So I want to thank you again for all that you have done and continue to do and will be doing, you know, to advance awareness and education and healing in our community with regards to not only AIDS, but also to our LGBT community. And I'll just turn the mic back to you. Would you like to share a few more words of wisdom with us and with anyone who is watching? Who is watching us? I think the reason I stay at least peripherally involved is simply because education's got to continue. The numbers are still growing. People being reinfected are infected by the virus that shouldn't be. It's just no reason for anyone to get AIDS now. So the education part of it, and again, if you've got a few bucks left and can support the Life Foundation, they do great work in age education. And I would encourage anyone that has the time or money to volunteer and contribute and support the work of the Life Foundation. And Paul Grossbeck is one of our unsung heroes. He's retiring now. He's been with the Life Foundation for many years. And he will be receiving an honor tonight, by the way. Paul Grossbeck, thank you. Well, that concludes the end of our program for today. And thank you so much for watching us. And I hope to see you back next Friday. Until then, we hope.