Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook

Section Four

Investigating AIDS and Taking Action

by Rachel Martin

Editor’s note: In 1989, when Rachel Martin wrote this piece, she described The Women’s School as “a small literacy program in West Philadelphia.” The poor and working class black women who came to her reading and writing class ranged in age from 17 to 68 years old.

The first day we began talking about AIDS in my Women’s School class, I sensed an intense feeling in the room. I suggested we stop what we were doing and each write down our fears about AIDS. Some of us were worried about earlier blood transfusions; others about whether our male partners were maintaining pledges of monogamy. As always, no one was required to share their writing, and some didn’t. But for all of us, just letting the pen move and naming our fears seemed to provide a kind of catharsis that allowed us to go on.

We then returned to our initial list of questions, which included:

• What is AIDS?
• How do you get it?
• How do you protect yourself?
• Why are Black and Latino people getting it more than others?
• Why isn’t there a cure?
• If they find a cure, will the government pay or let people die?
• Is it safe to be near someone with AIDS?

Each person decided which of the questions she wanted to investigate. We read articles people brought in from the newspaper, as well as pamphlets I found. It gradually became clear that the lines I’d drawn in my head between personal, political and practical issues were blurred. After learning about self-protection, there came the question of what to do if you’re a heterosexual woman who wants to use a condom, and the man you’re having sex with refuses. While the educational literature available on AIDS today includes many community-oriented brochures and booklets that address the range of issues that come up when AIDS is considered, the literature available at that time concealed the underlying issues. It also left untouched political questions, such as why there is no cure. And many of the pamphlets were full of “medicalese.” We wended our way through dense language and attempted to puzzle out the more difficult medical questions, as well as the political ones. After a few weeks, I made the suggestion that we write our own pamphlet on AIDS – one that would be easier to read and, in addition to giving some basic information, would take on the deeper questions.

The women didn’t have a general perception of themselves as authoritative writers at that time – though I believe they began to in the process of writing the pamphlet. Once I made the suggestion, they jumped on the idea, and we began.

We first decided to organize the pamphlet by stating our initial questions and presenting some of the answers we found. We pulled out all the writings we’d done since we’d started the investigation. In most cases, more than one person had worked on a question. The writers got together and decided how to combine their writings into one, considering the most important things to say and an order for saying them. We looked back at the initial writings about our fears and decided they would set the stage for the question/answer section. And we chose to use letters a few people had written as the cornerstone for “A Special Note to Men.” (These had been written during a discussion about condoms and the fear of talking about them with a male partner.) An in-class writing of mine became “A Note to Sisters.”

I want to add that throughout the process above, there was a recognition of a link between black and gay oppression. This was both overtly expressed in “Why Isn’t There a Cure?” and implied when the women decided to follow the suggestion of one student who said that if we were going to capitalize the word “Black,” we should also capitalize “Gay.” But all was not ideal. African-Americans and gays were written about as though mutually exclusive, and the pamphlet didn’t address lesbian women, due in some measure to my failure to lead an in-depth look at homophobic assumptions.

The board of The Women’s School gave us $100 for paper and copying. We inserted the pamphlet into the 1,100 copies of the Philadelphia Daily News, which Mildred’s son delivered, and took the rest to West Philly pizza parlors, grocery stores, beauty salons, and churches.

We never really learned the impact our words had on the neighbors we reached. Our primary aim had been to explore our own thoughts and questions and to encourage others to do the same. We hope we did that.

Rachel Martin is a teacher, researcher, curriculum developer, and writer.

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