Gay Men's Health Crisis
Encyclopedia
The Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) is a New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

-based non-profit, volunteer-supported and community-based AIDS service organization
AIDS service organization
AIDS service organizations are community based organizations that provide community support. While their primary function is to provide needed services to individuals with HIV, they also provide support services for their families and friends as well as conduct prevention efforts...

 that has led the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 in the fight against AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...

.

1980s

The organization was founded in January, 1982 after reports began surfacing in San Francisco and New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 that a rare form of cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...

 called Kaposi's Sarcoma
Kaposi's sarcoma
Kaposi's sarcoma is a tumor caused by Human herpesvirus 8 , also known as Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus . It was originally described by Moritz Kaposi , a Hungarian dermatologist practicing at the University of Vienna in 1872. It became more widely known as one of the AIDS defining...

 was affecting young gay men. After the Centers for Disease Control declared the new disease an epidemic
Epidemic
In epidemiology, an epidemic , occurs when new cases of a certain disease, in a given human population, and during a given period, substantially exceed what is expected based on recent experience...

, Gay Men's Health Crisis was created when 80 men gathered in New York writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

 Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer is an American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for Women in Love in 1969, earning...

's apartment to discuss the issue of "gay cancer" and to raise money for research
Research
Research can be defined as the scientific search for knowledge, or as any systematic investigation, to establish novel facts, solve new or existing problems, prove new ideas, or develop new theories, usually using a scientific method...

. GMHC took its name from the fact that the earliest men who fell victim to AIDS during the epidemic's early Eighties were gay
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...

.

The founders were Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer is an American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for Women in Love in 1969, earning...

, Lawrence D. Mass
Lawrence D. Mass
Lawrence D. Mass, M.D. is an American physician and writer. A co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis, he wrote the first press reports on the epidemic that later became known as AIDS. He is the author of numerous publications on HIV, hepatitis C, STDs, gay health, psychiatry and sex research, and...

, Paul Popham
Paul Popham
Paul Graham Popham was an American gay rights activist who served as the president of the Gay Men's Health Crisis from 1981 until 1985. He also helped found and was chairman of the AIDS Action Council, a lobbying organization in Washington...

, Paul Rapoport
Paul Rapoport
Paul Israel Rapoport , an attorney, was a co-founder of both the New York City Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Services Center and Gay Men's Health Crisis...

 and Edmund White
Edmund White
Edmund Valentine White III is an American author and literary critic. He is a member of the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.- Life and work :...

. They organized the formal, tax-exempt entity. At the time it was the largest volunteer AIDS organization in the world. Paul Popham was chosen as the president.

Rodger McFarlane
Rodger McFarlane
Rodger Allen McFarlane was an American gay rights activist who served as the first paid executive director of the Gay Men's Health Crisis and later served in leadership positions with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Bailey House and the Gill Foundation.-Biography:McFarlane was born on February...

 began a crisis counseling hotline that originated on his own home telephone, which ultimately became one of the organization's most effective tools for sharing information about AIDS. He was named as the director of GHMC in 1982, helping create a more formal structure for the nascent organization, which had no funding or offices when he took on the role. GMHC operated out a couple of rooms for offices in a rooming house in Chelsea owned by Mel Cheren of West End Records
West End Records
West End Records is a record label, which is known as one of the most prominent labels in dance music’s history along with Prelude Records, Salsoul Records and Casablanca Records.-History:...

.

Larry Kramer wrote that by the time of McFarlane's death, "the G.M.H.C. is essentially what he started: crisis counseling, legal aid, volunteers, the buddy system, social workers" as part of an organization that serves more than 15,000 people affected by HIV
HIV
Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...

 and AIDS. In an interview with The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

after McFarlane's death in May 2009, Kramer described how "single-handedly Rodger took this struggling ragtag group of really frightened and mostly young men, found us an office and set up all the programs."

Kramer resigned in 1983 to form the more militant ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) as a more political alternative. From that time on his public comments and posture toward GMHC were negative, if not hostile. Kramer's play The Normal Heart
The Normal Heart
The Normal Heart is a largely autobiographical play by Larry Kramer. It focuses on the rise of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City between 1981 and 1984, as seen through the eyes of writer/activist Ned Weeks, the gay Jewish-American founder of a prominent HIV advocacy group...

is a roman à clef
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...

 of his involvement with the organization.

By 1984, the Centers for Disease Control had requested GMHC's assistance in planning public conferences on AIDS. That same year, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus
HIV
Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...

 was discovered by the French Dr. Luc Montagnier
Luc Montagnier
Luc Antoine Montagnier is a French virologist and joint recipient with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus...

. Within two years, GMHC was assisting heterosexual men and women, hemophiliacs, intravenous drug users, and children.

Gay Men's Health Crisis received extensive coverage in Randy Shilts
Randy Shilts
Randy Shilts was a pioneering gay American journalist and author. He worked as a freelance reporter for both The Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as for San Francisco Bay Area television stations....

' 1987 book And the Band Played On
And the Band Played On
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is a nonfiction book written by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts, published in 1987...

. The book described the progress of the pandemic
Pandemic
A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic...

 blaming the government, especially the Reagan administration
Reagan Administration
The United States presidency of Ronald Reagan, also known as the Reagan administration, was a Republican administration headed by Ronald Reagan from January 20, 1981, to January 20, 1989....

 and Secretary of Health
United States Secretary of Health and Human Services
The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services is the head of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, concerned with health matters. The Secretary is a member of the President's Cabinet...

 Margaret Heckler
Margaret Heckler
Margaret Mary Heckler is a Republican politician from Massachusetts who served in the United States House of Representatives for eight terms, from 1967 until 1983 and was later the Secretary of Health and Human Services and Ambassador to Ireland under President Ronald Reagan...

, for failing to respond. It praised GMHC for its work. Shilts was a gay man who later died of AIDS.

1990s

In 1997 the organization moved into its present headquarters in the nine-story Tisch Building at 119 West 24th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood. The building underwent a $12.5 Million renovation. It is named for Preston Robert Tisch
Preston Robert Tisch
Preston Robert "Bob" Tisch was the chairman, and, with his brother Laurence, part owner of the Loews Corporation. Tisch was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in 1926. On August 16, 1986, he was appointed Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service, serving until February 1988...

 and Joan Tisch
Joan Tisch
Joan Tisch is heir to the Tisch family fortune and is listed on the 2007 Forbes 400 list as the 78th richest American, with a net worth of approximately $4.2 billion dollars....

. The couple donated $3.5 million for the project and Joan is on the GMHC Board of Directors.

In the 1990s a fundraising event on the Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...

 beach at Fire Island Pines, New York
Fire Island Pines, New York
Fire Island Pines is a hamlet in the Town of Brookhaven, Suffolk County, New York, United States...

 evolved into a major Circuit Party
Circuit party
A circuit party is a large dance event, extending through a night and into the following day, almost always with a number of affiliated events in the days leading up to and following the main event...

 and developed a reputation for being connected with unsafe sex and recreational drug use
Recreational drug use
Recreational drug use is the use of a drug, usually psychoactive, with the intention of creating or enhancing recreational experience. Such use is controversial, however, often being considered to be also drug abuse, and it is often illegal...

. GMHC pulled the plug after the 1998 fundraiser after one man died on Fire Island of an overdose of the drug gamma hydroxy butyrate (GHB) the evening before the party and 21 revelers were arrested for drug possession.

2000s

It has received multiple grants from the Carnegie Corporation, an organization that has supported more than 550 New York City arts and social service institutions since its inception in 2002, and which was made possible through a donation by New York City mayor
Mayor
In many countries, a Mayor is the highest ranking officer in the municipal government of a town or a large urban city....

 Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg is the current Mayor of New York City. With a net worth of $19.5 billion in 2011, he is also the 12th-richest person in the United States...

 (along with 406 other arts and social service institutions).

Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) has moved to a new and expanded home consisting of 165000 square feet (15,329 m²) of redesigned and renovated space at 446 West 33rd Street in Manhattan. GMHC is expanding its wide range of services for nearly 11,000 New Yorkers affected by HIV/AIDS. These services include health and nutrition education, legal, housing and mental health support, vocational training and case management. With a new state-of-the-art kitchen and larger dining room, hot meals will be served to more clients. The Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...

Food Pantry Program will increase its capacity to provide grocery bags and nutrition counseling to more people in need.

The new location will enable GMHC to expand its services to meet the growing and complex needs of people affected by HIV/AIDS. In this 30th year of the epidemic, HIV continues to rise at alarming rates-locally and nationally-particularly among women, African Americans, Latinos and men who have sex with men.

The HIV prevention and testing programs are being expanded in the new GMHC Center for HIV Prevention at 224 West 29th Street in NYC which will include a new youth leadership-development program. The new Center for HIV Prevention is scheduled to open May 31.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK