Gedalia Braverman and Elizabeth Schaffer

00:03 Hi, I'm Elizabeth Shopper. I'm 53 years old. Today is September 8th 2016. I mean the storycorps booth at the San Francisco Public Library, and I'm here with my friend Goo Dolls.

00:15 I'm good Ali Braverman. I am 56 years old today, September 8th 2016. I am with my friend Elizabeth here at the storycorps booth at the San Francisco Public Library.

00:32 Liz

00:34 We've known each other for 21 plus years now and we met at G chip Gaffigan Asian Pacific Alliance Community HIV project which then turned into the living well project and then finally was in the asia-pacific island until is the Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center tell me about what first brought you there and who first first brought you there?

01:09 So I moved to San Francisco in 1990 and it was a very interesting time in San Francisco. It seems that everybody that I'm at in my gym through my work was in some way affected by HIV and AIDS and I made one really great amazing friend who had the same spelling of his last name is mine. But his name was Dan Schaefer and we met because we were working in the same office and our last names were spelled the same way and we would be continually people asking us if we were married that was very humorous to us both because he was just maybe one of the gayest man I've ever known in my whole life and we just thought the whole thing was just such a funny thing and unfortunately, we didn't have a chance to work together very long because he got very sick.

02:06 And his illness and his lack of options of dealing with HIV at the time really affected me. And this was about the time that shortly after this. My daughter was born and I was thinking about going back to work and my employer our employer said full time or no time then I decided if I was going to work I was going to do something more meaningful. So I was connected to the Steve Lou Who was then the executive director of G chip and he hired me even though I knew nothing about nonprofits and finance, but he hired me as the sort of associate supporting director.

02:51 And that was in the beginning of 1993.

02:57 So you arrived at what is Now API Wellness Center almost exactly two years before I did and we only over laughed because I came in in February of 1995 for a few months.

03:15 Remind me to leave API Wellness Center.

03:20 In early 96, I think it was a little longer than that at the time. I think that it was a big that was a big connection between us because we had something very important in common, which that was that we were the only two people that were not Asian Pacific Islander working at the organization before you came out. I was the only person who was not Asian Pacific Islander and until Rachel came, I was the only person it was straight. So I was the only straight person and the only non Asian Pacific Islander

03:58 And then we also shouldn't come that. We're both from the East Coast from the New York area and was Jewish and probably grew up with similar sensibilities around issues of social justice and community service and things like that. I think that we had a lot of commonalities from the beginning because of that as well and I think you probably felt somewhat of an affinity for me as a gay man after having lost Santa and because I remember you telling me about him the very first day that I started to work at 8 at 8 p.m. I never forget that.

04:38 He was pretty special guy and he was just his timing wasn't good because his letter saying that he was accepted into the ACT child came the day after he died.

04:50 I think when I think back to Meijer at API, which war 1995 through 1998 really a full three years so much about surviving was about timing and when you came into the epidemic has a patient and there was a fair amount of luck to it. But I think that for me the agency was very a lot of foresight in terms of the kind of structure that they wanted to create a round Services particularly around medical services that made a very big difference in terms of people's chances of survival and that's sort of where my role came in and out timing for timing for when where when people got infected.

05:50 When they got sick, right but also timing about when they got Services which was really relevant for the Asian Pacific Islander clients that we were working with right. The timing was there's multiple levels on multiple levels some soft. Probably backtracking first talked about what it was that brought me to Regency. So I'm in 1987. I was living in New York and I became a Gratiot Community activist with what was then the pivotal community-based organization called act up the ace coalition to unleash power and very quickly it Rose to become a vital organization with gays and lesbians taking to the streets of New York and off-shoots of the New York Chapter being created around the country when I first started doing Grassroots work.

06:50 My focus was on housing and homelessness and we were very small committee. There were multiple committee space on areas of discipline or interest of people has her could be Insurance to could be treatment. It could be prevention could be women's issues or people of color issues and housing committee that I worked in. There was a fabulous young Asian American man named Li Chow is really brilliant and we were all very young at the time. We kiss that Lee was probably no older than 21 22

07:34 But in my mind this just fantastic intellectual mind and really

07:44 Wyze Cam and we became really good friends. And when I decided to move to San Francisco in 1990, he connected me with him some people in the API Community here including Danny you who was also at API the same time that we were and through Danny and other people I met Steve Lou and I I knew Paul Sheena sake so, you know, I already had a circle of people in the community that I was familiar with that's that was my original introduction. And I also moved here in 1990 when the epidemic was very different than what we were beginning to experience in 1995.

08:34 So to go back to your question about what were the timelines and the difference is certainly for those of us like myself who were infected with HIV very early in the epidemic after 1981 when it was first identified not even named and they didn't know what the virus was through 1988. There were no treatments whatsoever. And the mortality rates were high and when people died very quickly within a week or two weeks often people would become ill and hospitalized and died the next day by the time I moved here in 1990. There were a couple of drugs in the offering ezt and TDI.

09:27 And they offered some benefit to a limited number of people and the Hope was that they could extend people's life span long enough for the next better drugs to come along. I continued my work could act up by creating an accept chapter here in San Francisco and focusing then not on housing and homelessness, but on medical issues on health care, but more so around the scientific issues. So when API Wellness Center recruited me, they recruited me based on the medical expertise that I developed around HIV with hopes that I could bring that knowledge to the case workers and really convert Chase work from being standard Social Work Connection people with

10:23 Different shirt Social Services two more medically oriented and so I was brought on to help case workers are in the science and learn how to interface with the client as patients that wrote the grant that funded the treatment advocacy work that you did and one of the ideas that was flooded in the design team about that medical case management model that you're describing was that in theory there. Maybe there might be less stigma about being and services if there was a medical component at the time that was right around the time that the prevention team Henry El Campo Siena Stewart that group was very involved in partnership with age and AIDS project around some of the video and theater work.

11:23 Around 2 stigmatizing homosexuality in the API community. So there were so many Berry. It was so many barriers to treatment obviously in so many barriers to case management language culture all kinds of things and at that time

11:41 There was such a different movement in the non in the other communities that was signal with changing but signal is very stuck in the ABI community. So the Hope was that bringing this medical component my change the way in which the community the patient Community would embrace the service to talk a little bit about what you remember the stigmas being at that time the cultural stigmas in a conversation being about, you know, many of the clients where man who had sex with men but and we're married to women many of the clients were afraid or uncomfortable. I'm not certain. I don't want to put I don't want to prescribe their emotions, but to to talk to their families about their disease and about their sexual practice.

12:41 We didn't have any clients who were contracted to needle exchange of or something. But the majority of the male clients had contracted through sex with other men and but that was something that was a very difficult for the case managers to and to get some clients to talk about. So they this concept was it out. There might not need to be a different way in Vans assertive classic prevention miles. I mean there was very different culture in the organization on the team that was doing the Prevention Services and the team that was doing the Case Management Services. The prevention team was very sex positive and very out about their own practices in their own lives, and it was primarily young men in that group, not exclusively, but primarily and there were more women in

13:41 Case management side and there was a different.

13:46 Quietness, I guess maybe I'm just didn't in contrast of the two teams.

13:52 When I think back to the stigma that that I remember first coming into the agency.

14:03 The sickness very I think from ethnicity ethnicity. So you felt different kinds of tensions maybe in the Filipino Community versus the Chinese community of the Japanese community in some of the stigmas were across cultural and around issues of shame. I shoes of Shame around sexuality or around sex at all. I think some of the stigmas revolved around cultural issues around Western medicine vs Eastern medicine and set of conflict in that in that they couldn't coexist.

14:44 The sigmas were more fascinating and learning them in an ethnic specific way. Where is really crucial to being able to serve clients? I'm particularly when you're dealing with monolingual clients are first-generation clients as well and I take clients, but I really mean in my case. I felt more like they was patients. There are a lot of obstacles for people to

15:16 Begin Confident Care, never mind getting care.

15:26 Biggest challenge was probably simply getting people to talk.

15:35 I think that because of just so much of the shame-based fear that people were living with verbalizing their fears and their history to another person. Somehow made it more real and I think that prickly when you worked with Refugee communities, like for instance, if you think about you know, the Vietnamese population who were infected with HIV they brought

16:14 Is there experience the whole sense of if you could somehow stay under the radar?

16:26 You could survive a new in. This was true. Also for the Cambodian population disability to stay quiet State unobserved allowed you to somehow survive in Breaking that silence became very risky and I think psychological ways, but once you got people to start seeing you and talking then they could start opening up in other ways to ideas around treatment and around getting assistance of those words. What did you feel were the the biggest obstacles for you to be able to do the kind of work that you were doing in the agency?

17:16 Well, I mean they were obstacles from from me. I want to just talk a little bit about the obstacles for the organization because my role was to to look at the financial and operational construct of the organization. And when I arrive just before you came it was a Barrett. We had a space same place that you worked in which had no was not finished. It had know it had electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. It had no heat it was not painted. It was just a raw horrible space. One of the projects that I did was to get that space renovated in and be able to be used in a more effective way and to have privacy for client visits and that kind of stuff, It was really very wrong when I first came in the piper some money. We got it. We were very successful at getting money.

18:15 Because there was a lot of time to Cassie about the allocation of resources being fair to the number to the communities that were being affected. So there was there was almost a quota system. If you well for the money in a certain way. The bigger challenge was that in the same way that you're speaking about some of the cultural Dynamics around quiet or under-the-radar. There was not always as much of a feeling like we deserved it or we should go for it or we were good enough to get it or we had the right data or we had the right computers or whatever because we were very minimalist and all those things and so a big challenge was that there was a lot of

18:58 Patchwork of where the money came from and this person was paid a little bit on this grant in a little bit on that Grant and it was rather precarious of times and I think that that in many ways the entire infrastructure for the people of color in the in the hole HIV all the HIV organizations was very fragile and that there really wasn't enough emphasis in the early days from the AIDS office and the Department of Public Health about building the capacity of those organizations, ultimately AIDS office contracted in a very significant way with compass point to help support that and I was part of that process of doing that. I remember there was that would be these calls like if you need something you should apply for it because you'll get it because there was money available and one time.

19:58 We didn't apply for something cuz we done like seven projects in a row and I got a call from the capacity Builders and saying we don't have your application. But yeah, we're good. We're we're okay, but that was really the challenge was figuring out what are being willing to prioritize the fact that the organization needed some things to function because we were also hopeful that it would be temporary. I may think there was this whole let's not invest too much in infrastructure and the organization because we're going we're going to beat this thing.

20:37 From my perspective being inactive Golden Gate what we as activists were experiencing around issues of funding for community of color was at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation was this umbrella organization and it was supposed to serve all populations but in reality and in 1990, it was primarily serving gay white men know I'm a gay white man, and I'm kind of the services were available, but they was not a culturally appropriate place for most people with color whether you were African-American or Latino or Asian Pacific Islander and certainly not for women. So the creation of these

21:31 Ethnic specific or minority specific agencies was really critical towards getting people to step in the door as well. And then seek Services consensus that it was critical and it was the right approach. I'm just suggesting that there wasn't really a lot of thought given to what kinds of resources skills and capacities would be needed to run the organization that supposed to be doing a lot of good thinking and there was a tremendous great work done with what kinds of capacities what kinds of skill building was there to be able to have a prevention team that had good theory and good practice but not as much on the on the management and execution size. I think important that was because the history coming out of the act up generation of the 1980s was that people with HIV needed to be at the Forefront in terms of

22:30 Representing themselves and being the representatives of these community-based organizations and to some respect. I agree with that but I even in the 19 late 1980s, I would say to friends that you know HIV is a virus. It's not a credential and so we were often finding that people who had HIV or Aids were being hired into these positions of management that really didn't have the skillset and it felt for many people Politically Incorrect to say that at the time so many the community-based organizations sort of had to flounder until they could find the right mix of management and representation. I mean, I think that Steve really took a big risk, right? He hired a white straight woman to be his partner in building the organization. Yeah, that's that

23:30 Not exactly. That wasn't exactly palatable to all of his peers.

23:37 I think that this success that he had the door organization had because of it because there was focus on the internal operations as I think that that actually did it wasn't an impediment but meet me at the mall, but at the time I think it was pretty revolutionary glue.

24:02 I don't know what to exactly how to express it, but

24:07 Show me people who work in community-based organizations sort of worried from paycheck to paycheck. Where are your positions going to be there? Were they going to be there in 2 months or 6 months and you gave us the confidence to know that the financial backbone of the organization was strong enough to be able to sustain the work over a long. And that we wouldn't have to settle a closed the doors and that clients such patients would be in complete upheaval, you know kudos to you and of course to Steve Lou Who was in my mind. You know, what a Visionary amazing board. I don't know how much does staff really saw that because that was and really I think that when you take that sits next conclusion

25:04 Steve was convinced. The board was convinced early on that. We had to murder the Asian AIDS project that there was no reason to have two organizations that it was only going to be to the detriment of the community in the long-term, even though it was a painful process for him for all for those of us that were really involved in it. It was complex, but it was and it clearly was the right thing to do because many of the other organizations that were created at the same time are no longer part of solution, right? So so, you know that I think that attention to the organizational practice in addition to to create the the solid footing on which is really good work could be done.

25:56 What are you what do you imagine you would want to say to someone in the API Community 50 years from now about what it felt like to be in the middle of the epidemic and working with the API community in the 1990s.

26:20 It felt surprisingly hopeful.

26:26 And we had a tremendous amount of fun.

26:31 Even though there were some terrible losses and there were many of them and we did more than we did not, you know, we never lost sight of that, but there was a real element of

26:46 Creatively trying to find a different way to solve this problem. I mean really the work that that I mentioned earlier that Ciana and Henry and a couple other people dad around there's no name for this ride that video that they made so it's really groundbreaking stuff. It was not the kind of stuff that people were really talking about and I actually think that when we look at even now which is 20 years later, I believe that there's things that we're seeing now across the board but in the API community that are a function of what of what that was that it was a a starting place for other dialogue that we're having

27:27 You are not there a couple weeks ago about a couple months ago and a couple bunch of us got together and we're going through like all the people that work there and have a lot of people are alive to it's very interesting. So, I don't know what that is. I don't I don't know what that has to do with right sometimes because they hadn't they had access to information and data and treatment that other people didn't that we got that right, but there are so many long-term survivors in this group that work together.

28:01 I find that really amazing.

28:03 I was talking to a friend who was recently diagnosed with cancer and we were talking about her treatment options this election yesterday. And I said her, you know, I completely believe that if there was a retrospective analysis done of the outcome and the overall survival of patients who advocate for themselves on the same treatment versus patients who don't have to pay for themselves that we would see differences and out come some. I think there's something that happens to you spiritually instructed to your morale when you begin to take control of your destiny, even when your destiny feels like it's spinning away from you and I remember

29:01 I remember being in San Francisco coming here in 1990. And when my Asian friends from New York came out to visit because the San Francisco International AIDS conference happened in June of 1990, which was only two and a half months after I moved here. I'm so all of my New York activist friends came out and I was

29:25 Central to a lot of the orchestration of the behind-the-scenes things that were happening to host people for that conference. My Asian friends from New York came to San Francisco inside. Oh my God, the Asian population here is so entitled and I said what what do you mean and title on that? We don't know this entitled but we sort of feel like they're so confident in there. So they own the place and I said, well, yeah, I got can see that and maybe it was a product of the fact that I was such a much larger concentration of the API Community here in New York. And but I also think it was the beginning of

30:23 I've got a new kind of identity for Asian Pacific Islander game men at very least and therefore for those of them who are infected with HIV prison MN empowerment that happened that was I think revolutionary number this organization was formed out of a social Alliance gay Asian Pacific Alliance, which is really I mean, they do some chart of work and then they have a n d r o I don't mean that but they are primarily a social organization. They don't Endeavor to be a nonprofit organization and provide services and it was a few really creative and Innovative leaders that said we have to do something about HIV in the API Community because it's it's not really getting the attention. So maybe that is like your friends were saying

31:23 A little bit and title and it could be the concentration and there is more power and they be I committed in there are and some other places in the United States, but I think that we also remember that there were some really revolutionary folks in that group many of whom I'm in addition to putting time and energy into form in the organization gave a lot of money and gave a lot of money to start it and gave a lot of money all along. So there were other people of color organization ID organizations that did not have a particularly strong funding base. I mean certainly AIDS Foundation had a pretty strong funding base of of white game Enemy, of course, we know that but there was not as much

32:11 Pratt was in which capacity? I don't know but there wasn't as much history of giving and the other communities of color but throughout the whole time the goldenglow Gabba guys gave money consistently.

32:27 What are you most proud of when you think back to work at in the black community?

32:36 There's so many things that I'm proud of, you know, I I like to think that what I do a lot of places that I go is that I make sure that most of the money goes to the services and I make things efficient so that that's what can happen and I think it was in a whole lot of that. There was a whole lot of like figuring out what would be effective. What would be a process what would make it work? What would make people happy because they would have access to the benefits they needed or the work practices that they needed a and make them in a bag into spaces was making them work with was pretty fun to I'd say for me, you know coming to a new place being a new mom and then be putting myself in a situation where I was the only person that was white and the only person that was straight. That was pretty sure it was a big is a big deal for me and it it certainly has for the rest.

33:36 My life changed the way I view inclusion and participation and engagement some really I'm really proud of that too.

33:47 What about you? What are you most proud of?

33:50 I think ultimately I'm most proud of feeling like I had a instrumental hand and saving people's lives.

34:03 I love the work that I did with the case workers and I loved pushing them to their limits to learn rudimentary science so that they could talk to their clients as patients and then it could interface with doctors in a way where they felt confident and could really advocating push for different kinds of treatments and that that was amazing rewarding to watch someone go from having 50 T cells which was you know, what the death toll to having 200 tc2000 which meant in a respite from the death toll to having 500 T cells which meant I'm getting to be able to feel like this was a chronic manageable disease even though it wasn't

35:01 Those that felt wonderful, I love that aspect of the work, you know it when I think back to specific client specific patients, you know, we were talking about this yesterday in preparation for today when I came to the agency. I think we had under a hundred clients, and there were very few clients. The clients were identified by number. So if you were number 5 you were V claimed to have sought services at the agency and there were very few clients.

35:47 In numbers under 75 who are alive, but I remember a client number 7 who was a woman probably in her late mid-to-late thirties at the time with two children and she was very sick and I felt that because of my interventions and because of what she was willing to let me to do in terms of advocacy and activism that you know, it could cause her life to be saved and when her children are probably 30 years old now. Welling, you know, and then by the time I left the agency they were probably well over 250 clients elk watching that grows over a three-year period where the community heard about the impact and the word spreading.

36:47 Who came in from to get medical case management was really rewarding occupation 7. Is there anything else you want to add about her or any other patient?

37:06 Owner

37:08 There's so many so many patients who didn't survive who?

37:16 Who are really lovely and I remember how how difficult it was for Steve Lou and propulsion? Yazaki. And for those who were there early on to watch those people die and to hold their hands and they really held their hands and that process and

37:40 There are a lot of sad memories. It was a very heavy time. But by the time I left I was glad to be able to leave knowing that people were on the course towards survival.

37:53 What about you? How what final thoughts do you want to share?

37:57 I think that's a really good place to leave it. I think it's a perfect place. Oh, you know, what is a really good place to leave it. We've had 21 years of friendship. Your daughter is my goddaughter and we travel on vacation together and you are one of the most instrumental people in my children's lives now, and that's probably the greatest gift that the agency gave me. Thank you.