Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative is now in its 20th successful year, and will celebrate that milestone with an anniversary gala this spring.
The party will be held from 7-11 p.m. April 16 at the Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., and will give the agency’s supporters from the past two decades the chance to reconnect and raise funds for the group, as well as pay tribute to GALAEI founder David Acosta, who will be presented with the inaugural David Acosta Leadership Award.
GALAEI launched in June 1989 as the first local HIV/AIDS service organization organized by HIV/AIDS activists, and Acosta noted that it’s — along with Bienestar in Los Angeles — the oldest Latino HIV/AIDS agency in the country that focuses on the LGBT community.
“At that time, there were no programs either locally or nationally that were serving the HIV/AIDS education and prevention needs of Latino gay and bisexual men in Philadelphia and the U.S., not to mention Latin America,” Acosta said.
He served as executive director of GALAEI for its first 10 years and said, in the beginning, the agency worked to establish its presence not just in the local HIV/AIDS and LGBT communities, but also in mainstream Latino populations.
“It was a long, hard struggle for acceptance and inclusion,” Acosta said, adding the organization was eventually “able to articulate a discourse on the impact of HIV/AIDS among Latino gay and bisexual communities in Philadelphia, nationally and internationally, especially in Latin America and within the larger local Latino community and its leadership.”
Acosta said the agency worked closely with local Latino leaders to educate them about the similarities in the challenges LGBT and mainstream Latinos faced, and to impress upon them the need for cooperation.
“Racism, poverty, social and economic justice, crime, violence, education, lack of access to healthcare — all of them impacted us as a community generally, and for Latino LGBTI people it was a bit different, because we experienced the same racism from outside while experiencing homophobia both from within our own Latino community and the larger mainstream culture,” he said.
Once such conversations started, Acosta said GALAEI gradually gained credibility and developed deep ties within the Latino, LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities, which fueled the agency’s progress.
Acosta stepped down in 1999 and Gloria Casarez took over as executive director, a position she held until 2008, when she left to become the city’s director of LGBT affairs.
When she took the reins of GALAEI, Casarez focused on developing and strengthening the agency’s programming, such as its youth program Reaching Adolescents Via Education and the Trans-health Information Project.
At the beginning of this century, GALAEI also worked to build community partnerships, a development Casarez said was motivated by the presidency of George W. Bush, whom she described as “not very friendly to domestic AIDS issues” and during whose two terms, HIV/AIDS groups had limited access to funding.
“One of the reasons we were able to grow our programs despite that was because we were committed to working closely with other HIV/AIDS service organizations,” she said. “It wasn’t an option to go it alone because we were too small. If you have one funder but five organizations competing for all the funding, someone’s going to lose. So we worked to really band together with other organizations for funding, because even though we’d all get less, we’d still be able to reach more people, which we did.”
Casarez noted that GALAEI’s diverse programming — such as its Midnight Cowboy Project, which connects sex workers and other at-risk communities with HIV/AIDS services — exemplify the harm-reduction model that GALAEI has operated under since its inception.
“Instead of focusing on stopping drug use, we’d look at ways of reducing drug-users’ risk for HIV. And this philosophy GALAEI had, and still has, was developing at the same time of the ‘Say No to Drugs’ campaign, so it was kind of contradictory to things that were out there at that time in the beginning, but the activists involved with GALAEI knew that if we had any chance of getting ahead of this epidemic, you can’t condemn people,” she said. “It sounds like a no-brainer now, but in those really unknown throes of the epidemic, it was a really dicey proposition for some people to hear that we should actually go out and reach people where they’re at, but that’s what GALAEI did. We’d go into bars and neighborhoods and distribute condoms and give them access to health services, and were one of the first groups doing outreach at drug corners and drug houses and public-sex parks that were really at the heart of where people were getting infected. You can’t expect that people are going to find our organizations. You have to know where these people are and go out and meet them, literally and figuratively.”
Elicia Gonzales, who has served as executive director of GALAEI since December, said the agency’s commitment to working directly in, not just with, the communities it serves has helped it to better understand and meet their needs.
GALAEI, which employs 13 full-time staffers and two part-timers —all of whom are Latino or African American — serves approximately 7,000 clients annually; of the 30 percent of its clients who are HIV-positive, more than 90 percent are people of color, most frequently Latino and African American.
“It’s kind of a ‘by the people, for the people’ mentality,” Gonzales said. “It has continued to remain a very grassroots organization that is very much connected to the community. There’s this peer-based perspective that affects all levels of the organization — volunteers, staff, management, the board. Everyone who comprises this organization is in some way a member of the populations we serve, which helps bring us more directly into the city.”
Gonzales took the helm of the group from GALAEI board member Tiffany Thompson, who came on as interim executive director several months previously after the resignation of Louis Bonilla, Casarez’s successor, who held the post for about 10 months. Gonzales said that while “it’s no secret that GALAEI has encountered some very significant transitions in the past couple years,” she doesn’t think the staffing changes negatively impacted the agency’s ability to serve the community.
“I think because GALAEI has such a solid reputation, that kind of enabled it to push through some of the rough waters with the support and the belief of a lot of the community members. We have had some transitions and it did cause some bumps, but I don’t think it knocked us down.”
Gonzales said right now she’s still striving to “100-percent stabilize” the organization, but she is interested in seeing GALAEI expand its outreach to such communities as youth, lesbian and transgender individuals, and said she’s committed to working with GALAEI’s former leaders to send the agency in the right direction.
For more information or to purchase tickets for the anniversary party, visit www.galaei.blogspot.com/.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].