Get Used to It: Ep. 31, "Voices of Our Lives: Phill Wilson"

oh [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl your host or hostess well we will be talking about these issues today um get used to it as you know is a show devoted to discussion of issues of interest to the gay and lesbian community and therefore to the entire world and we're happy to have you with us today because we're doing a show that's won in an occasional rather limited series of interviews with with people i love i guess that's the way we would put it but also people i think who've been enormously important to our movement and one of them i'm very pleased to say is going to spend our whole 56 minutes with me today and that's phil wilson phil wilson as i'm sure so many of you know so founder of the black gay and lesbian leadership forum one of the founders of the aids healthcare foundation past aids coordinator for the city of los angeles and the director of policy and planning for aids project los angeles phil welcome well thank you and i have to say that the part of that introduction i like the most is to be considered one of the people that you love well it's a privilege really i mean you know we have wonderful friends in the community it's one of the best things about coming out is that you always imagine all these terrible things will happen to you and then maybe some of them do but no one ever tells you about all the wonderful people you'll need and the wonderful work there is to do and i i assume you've had much sort of the same experience absolutely i mean wonderful things always happen when you tell the truth now when you decide to be yourself well people are always interested i think to to know where the activists in our community where the people that we consider leaders whether we embrace that notion or not as as individuals sort of where how did all this come about so will you tell us a little about where did phil wilson grow up how did this all get started well i'm a midwestern boy i grew up in chicago and was born in cook county hospital which is the public hospital there and first lived in one of the projects on the south side of chicago and when i was about eight or nine my parents bought their first home and we moved to the suburbs interesting enough we moved to the suburbs of chicago in our first home um in the early 60s around the same time that raisin and the sun was playing and the lorraine hansberry story about a black family now moving to their their first home so did the it in one of the issues obviously that will uh is of interest to everybody who talks to you just because we've all sort of grown up in 20th century america i guess is is the issue of race i mean race is such a defining issue as cornell west said race matters right did you grow up in a mostly black community well the projects mostly black and then when you moved was it a change or was it's very interesting you know because first of all i didn't know that we lived in the projects then you know it and it was not mostly black it was all black at that time and when we moved to the suburbs we actually moved to a small bedroom community south of chicago a little town actually that was mostly black it was interesting in that um as a small child i experienced what i would experience in college in reverse that uh when i was in grade school there were you know three or four white kids in my class and everyone else was black we lived on a highway a major thoroughfare in kind of the country was kind of country slash suburbia is kind of before suburbia really became suburbia and across the highway was a trailer park and all the people who lived in the trailer park were white and just about the rest of the town were black and there was very little interaction between the two and it wasn't until i got to high school where i really began to have interactions with white people and had your parents prepared you in some way for what you could expect in the i guess what everyone would call the larger world or the white world well you know i don't know if they prepared me for you know the white world or a larger world i think what they did was to love all of us i have a sister and two brothers and the one thing that my parents paid attention to is the fact that we were always loved that we never had to doubt that we were loved the second thing that they did when we were very very young is to believe in us you know to communicate and indirect and direct ways that anything that we wanted to do that we could do and probably the third thing they did is that they fooled us they led us to believe that the world that we lived in was the real world that it was the larger world and so at the point when we began to kind of encounter and engage in different communities it was not the kind of cultural shock to say that now i'm someplace else i guess at the end of all that they focused on on teaching us a way to be centered to know that no matter what else happened we always had a place to be we always belonged did the civil rights movement affect you in any way or them absolutely you know my parents were part of the 50s migration to the north they both grew up in the south and the segregated south my father in louisiana my mother in mississippi from very very large communities i mean very very large families and so the civil rights movement of the late 50s and the early 60s my parents were young i was born when they were both 20. and so they were still maturing in in that process with this family and so all the promise and all of the hope of the civil rights movement they took and invested in their four young children so you went to high school in the same in the same area and as you progressed through school it was sort of more and more white and i'm assuming when you went to college did you go to college in illinois too i went to college in illinois i went to a township high school which is a funny high school i don't know if they have them in other places but where all of the kids are bussed in it wasn't a matter of race everybody was bust in but what was funny in my high school at that time it was 30 black and 70 percent white almost all of the and the high school was a very large high school and buses would line up all around the high school interesting enough on one side of the high school where all the buses for the black kids and on the other side of the high school were all the buses for the white kids and so at the beginning of the day you had all these buses converging on this high school and kids entering the buildings from different sides of the building but then kind of emerging into one body and then at the end of the day kind of leaving this kind of strange reality for all of us and going back to our communities which for the most part at that time were you know cultural no monoracial communities i had exactly the same experience i went to dorsey high here in l.a and dorsey lies along between two streets exposition the railroad tracks and rodeo road or rodeo road as we called it and it was like all white families in the apartment project across the street not very well you know well to do working class and then over in the houses that went along you know this side a lot of asian families and then a lot of african-american families on the other side of the school i mean in essence and we all we were one-third one-third and one-third at that particular moment in history and we were as you said you all come together in this school but um my folks wouldn't even let me go visit henry carr who was our class president african-american guy his parents you know we were we just weren't allowed to mix and it was a it was a funny lesson because you would think well why in a sense we you learn that race matters but you don't learn why exactly and i guess the reason is because there is no why absolutely it's just a way to create separation and and i guess hierarchy and you know it was very interesting to me because i was a theater major uh in high school and and speech and debate and so we would go on field trips um to tournaments or theater contests and what have you and of course an overnight experiences where kids had to spend the night in the same room and in the same bed because you know the high school would put four kids in a room with two beds and so often you would find yourself sleeping with someone of a different race like actually i should say if you were black you found yourself an experience because there were not that many black kids uh so you find find that experience and i don't remember any of us thinking about it in any way in particular at least in my family we had never discussed race in that fashion in that fashion of difference which is may have been typical for black families that were engaged in the civil rights movement at that time i don't know and i suspect and this is again my projection i i don't we never had the discussion i suspect for the white families that the white parents never considered the possibility that their children would be in this position so they never engaged in this discussion and so it really wasn't until i got to college where it really dawned on me that there was a reason for me to fear or feel that i was less than because i was black and did you have that experience in college i actually did have that experience in college on on a number of occasions early on in college i um pledged a fraternity and at my university there were only six black students in my freshman class and i got to the university and we were the we were the largest black class in the history of the university and i got to the university and didn't know anything about fraternities hadn't considered a fraternity hadn't thought about it but during freshman orientation are all these parties so i went to the parties just like all the other freshmen and one day i'll never forget this one of the african-american seniors was walking across the quad and she walked up to me and she said no you can't pledge and i said well why not and she said well because blacks don't pledge and i said well watch me and so i went back to my dorm and i asked my roommate well what's pledging [Laughter] and i ended up pledging you know a fraternity and and turned out and i didn't know it was that big of a deal but i was the first african-american to ever pledge in the 200 200 year history of that fraternity and they were panicked because they thought they were going to lose their charter sure but there were 10 of us that were together and we said that we're a package deal now you take all of us or you don't get any of us you know and so they pledged me and i went on to become the president of our pledge class and the president of the fraternity and a member of the national board of directors huh well there's two things in that that i want to explore one the sort of the the question of natural leadership because you often find people who even though their lives have taken them into movement leadership that they were you know the the president of their third grade class or the junior high school president or the president of their fraternity not that they're you know the same thing it's much more important to be president of fraternity but there was something else you said phil that i know people watching um want me to follow up on i often know i can feel it when you said we'd go on these field trips and we would sleep together sleep together immediately of course people say well when are they going to talk about being gay you know is that about being gay so sort of going back in your history or maybe we won't um what about this gayness is this something you also knew about in high school here you are you know sleeping with your classmates literally sleeping i think i was a late bloomer and i think that quite frankly um in that regard um race did matter um in that i knew early on that my parents had high expectations and i understood although they never said it i understood that on some level those expectations were tied to race i also knew that i was different i did not have a clue as to what that meant and never thought about it particularly you know and so in high school the issue around sexuality um was never an issue and quite frankly the issue around sex was not a very big issue for me at least it wasn't until well it wasn't until long after college that it really dawned that the whole issue around gayness and sexuality and sexual orientation became a real factor in in my life the notion of difference became a bigger and bigger and bigger part of my life as i got older at the time i suspected or at the time i felt that it was more part of the more connected with the question of of race being black and what was an increasingly a white world for me and in fact that that was true you know um but there was there was something else and in retrospect i certainly have memories of having feelings uh about um other boys or other men in my life and i think that that's certainly contributed as i'm sure is the case with a lot of lesbian and gay people in my being focused on being you know an achiever and what have you how did you i mean how did you come then to the realization that you were gay i mean it's mostly it's not an intellectual experience you just sort of do it and you think oh my god i mean i can't be gay i mean and then you know you are funny um because for me part of it was absolutely intellectual i mean i approached it in a way that i had approached everything in my life up to that point and that was from a very kind of you know let's step back and look at this perspective i was engaged to be married i had lived with a woman for a while my college sweetheart and we were engaged to be married and as the wedding day got closer and closer and closer i got more and more anxious and actually became more and more distant from her and it was very very painful for the two of us because we had been very good friends now i'm very close and that shared all of our secrets and what have you and it was painful that for some reason i no longer could talk to this person and it was frightening because i found myself poised to commit the rest of my life to a person that i couldn't talk to and i didn't understand why i couldn't talk to her and um then as fate would have it or the gods would have it or whatever one day about a month or two before the wedding i heard a radio interview with the publisher of blue boy magazine and this was in 1979 1980 and a light bulb went off in my head and i knew i just knew that that was what was going on with me and so i went to the library and i got these books and i brought them back it was it was it wasn't even a scary experience going to the library to get the books because even at that point although i knew what was going on it was not about me i wasn't embarrassed or anything it's like i want to know about the subjects i went to library and i got i got these books and don clark's book loving someone gay was one of the books and rita mae brown's ruby fruit jungle was another book um uh james baldwin's giovanni room was another book and so i brought these books back and um i told my fiance but we need to read these books because i think i might be gay and i think that we should know about this before we get married you know this poor girl and she said fine so uh we both i'm sure we both thought at the time that um it was just um i don't know what we thought i'm sure she thought that it was just a phase that i needed to find out about and in fact you know she was also a theater major in college now she actually knew all of the gay guys in college i didn't know any of them and she knew them and and so she was actually pretty comfortable at that time it got you know it changed as time went on but shortly after that in fact um i went and i bought a copy of blue boy magazine and um in the magazine there was an ad for a bath house in chicago and i went and i met chris brownlee who became my first lover and that was actually how i came out well not only came out but i mean there's probably a million guys you could have met but you met chris brownlee and um tell us a little about chris because i i would assume phil that this was a life-changing experience i mean understanding that you're gay is a life-changing experience going from a straight life to a gay life i mean you essentially went to a bath house because you have to go find that life i didn't even know what a bath house was mind you i mean actually i called the bath house because i didn't know what it was and uh and of course at that time they advertised themselves in these kind of nebulous kind of health ways uh health club ways and so i called and i said well are the people friendly and you know will there be someone i could talk to and the guy on the phone said well sweetheart you just come on in i'm sure he thought boy really yeah really and um but anyway you know it's funny when i think about meeting chris and i think about the language of the religious right and who talks about and when people talk about god's will you know i'm real clear that my god had a role to play in this and um and my god had a plan uh and and i'm clear that meeting chris brownlee as a part of my coming out experience was a part of that plan tell us a little about chris brownlee at this moment in time and phil wilson at this moment in time because there were some differences here well chris was a communist he was a member of the spartacus league which is a radical socialist organization um and i was a marketing analyst for illinois bell on an executive track as a as a matter of fact and um he owned two pair of pants and two shirts and i remember he would go to the the dry cleaners every day to drop off a pair of pants because he only had two pair of pants and he lived in a commune i own on the other hand lived in a condo in the far south suburbs of chicago with my then fiance and my life life's path at the time was you know kind of the classic you know picket fence house in the suburbs you know kind of path and so we were very very different you know uh i you know had no idea what life had in store with me by getting involved with him okay what did life happen still what happened well you know chris provided the support for me to come out you know publicly i mean i met him and like two days later i went and i told my mother and i told my fiance and i told my sister and my brothers i just told everyone my mother at one point said well you know why don't you run an ad in the chicago tribune you know since i was so busy telling people it might be more efficient it's sort of like why don't you take a billboard on sunset boulevard exactly you know a funny story is that you know if we fast forward what 11 12 years from from that time i'm appointed to be the aids coordinator for the city of los angeles and the l.a times covers the story and does now this photograph this big photograph of me kissing dave johnson who is my predecessor and the photograph runs above the fold on the cover of the la times at the time my parents were in las vegas and my mother now gets up you know this that particular morning now goes to pick up the paper and on the cover of the la times there's a picture of her son so uh she called me up and she said well the la times is not the chicago tribune but i guess it will do so you had told everybody in the most convenient way right the most efficient way well i know that um i don't know if you would use these words but it seemed as though chris was the love of your life i mean it was such a match and such i mean you could see the enormous love and and and the the passion that each of you had for each other and that you each had then for the work that seemed to kind of grow out of your relationship um and i i'm interested though there's a kind of divergence in a way chris was of course an aids activist i mean not only he was definitely a community activist and a really a people's freedom activist but you were brought to a kind of a leadership role in terms of the african-american gay and lesbian community which was roundly ignored really in our early organizing or even sort of not so early organizing how did that come about well you know it came about primarily from my need to take all of me with me you know and it really has that's at the core of my work and my life you know getting people to understand that you have to take all of you with you and that your work has to reflect the entirety of your humanity and and that it is dysfunctional it's maladaptive to try to to live in a car a compartmentalized way and quite frankly it's dysfunctional to try to organize or to build a movement that is compartmentalized and so when i came out i found a gay world that was not about me you know and i had no and as i continued my work in you know the black civil rights movement i found that that movement was not speaking to the issues of sexual orientation um and so i needed to find a way and for no other reason because i guess maybe at my core i'm lazy that it's just too much work you know to do this over here and then to do that over there but that i needed to find a way to say this is who i am and i'm the same person wherever i go now whatever i'm doing i'm the same person now i'm a gay man wherever i am i'm a black man wherever i am you know um and i'm not going to leave any of that behind and i'm not going to give away any of my birthright well it's a it's been a difficult kind of insistence though because the the lesbian gay movement has been as we've discussed on earlier shows you know notoriously racist and the african-american movements and the civil rights movement has been notoriously homophobic i mean the black churches always some of them line up to testify against us you know whenever we want to get something so that dichotomy is one that you don't create but because of this compartmentalization you're i know you're struggling with it you went on the march then the million man marched absolutely what was it like for you it was remarkable now on sep the first of september um [Music] npr ran a story and bishop stalin from the mighty temple in washington dc was on npr and he made a very homophobic comment i had already decided that i was going to the march i didn't know if anybody else was going to go i didn't know if any other gay people were going to go but i was going to go and and reverend stallings made this extremely homophobic comment about milk toast so i wrote him a letter and i wrote ben chavis a letter and i decided that i was going to try to get as many gay men to participate in this march as possible partially because it's just important for us to be visible but partially because you know and and i want to i want to regress for a second back to this issue around whether or not the black community is homophobic or whether or not the gay community the gay and lesbian community is racist i think there's some truth to that but i think quite frankly for the mat for the vast majority of leaders in either those movements it's a matter of being overwhelmed and seeing themselves through a narrow lens and i guess i don't have that luxury i can't see myself through that narrow lens of course you know gay and lesbian people grow up in the same kind of racist you know information as straight people grow up and and black people grow up with the same kind of homophobic data that you know um you know white people grow up with so uh i i don't want to minimize you know the reality of your point but i really think that you know black civil rights folks that they that they view [Music] homosexuality as a diversion and i think that gay activists often view race as a diversion that they want to pretend that if we deal with in in their mind's eye what is the central point all the rest will fall into place well for those of us who create the apex or you will or or the connection between the two we understand that you know the other issues are not ancillary issues so going back to the march and why i participate in the march and why it was such a wonderful experience is that i fundamentally know that gay and lesbian liberation cannot happen in a world that is racist because some of us are black and brown and yellow and red and i fundamentally know that the issue of race in america cannot be resolved as long as america is sexist and homophobic because some of us are women and some of us are gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender and so if you are committed to ending racism and if you are committed to ending homophobia that your success is dependent on dismantling now a a legacy of oppression based on a multitude of isms so i went to the march on washington partially as a gay man but i also went to the march in washington primarily as a black man because i know that the issues that are destroying the african-american community require my participation that my community cannot survive unless i'm willing to be one of the foot soldiers and the only way that i can be one of the foot soldiers if i can take all of me with me i cannot be affect an effective foot soldier if i leave part of my resources behind if i leave part of my humanity you know behind i have to bring all of me with me and it's also an aspect of visibility really kind of across the board i mean i i was very taken with when the black gay and lesbian leadership forum first started with the notion that if there's so many things involved it's it's a statement about how many hundreds just here in town uh you know of our community are african-american and and how visibility and really the notion of taking leadership is is so important how did the leadership forum get started well in 1988 i participated in a national aids conference for people of color and was absolutely mortified because that conference you know did not address the issues of sexuality or gay men to any significant degree at a time when clearly i mean for that matter today clearly but at a time when clearly the the overwhelming majority of people with aids that are black or brown or yellow were gay men yeah and so to hold the conference on a's in the minority community and not deal with the issues of homosexuality just blew me away and it dawned on me then and i've been wrestling with it for a while but it became undeniably clear that the only way that at that time black gay men were going to be addressed in the aids environment was for black gays and lesbians to come together and so the leadership forum actually began just out of my desire and others to bring black gays and lesbians together you know to meet each other to talk to each other to to say we're here because primarily we were suffering from not invisibility but isolation you know we were all over the place but alone and i thought well you know [Music] we have to come together we have to talk i don't really care you know what comes out of it but we have to get to know each other and so we did the first conference where everyone said no one would come and black is lesbians are too closeted and you'll never be able to pay for it and you'll never be able to get people to come who can draw now politicians won't come because there's no constituencies and what have you no unfortunately i was too stupid to to know that now i i was not bright enough to know that people wouldn't come or that politicians wouldn't comment and out of my stupidity you know the mayor of los angeles came and then assemblywoman maxine waters came and danny bakewell from the brotherhood crusade came but most importantly 500 black gays and lesbians came it blew us away and we knew that there was a hunger there was a demand for there to be a black and lesbian voice and that for there to be a forum where you know gays and lesbians of african descent could come together so people watching the show want to contact the leadership forum is it based in l.a or does it have a national office well we are headquartered in los angeles but we have offices in los angeles and in washington dc a month ago the organization hired his first executive director and that person is keith wyken who is a harvard trained harvard trained lawyer worked at the white house under the clinton administration has lots of experience with the media vassar undergrad black gay man from st louis and so he and i share our midwestern background and sensibilities very very bright very very passionate committed to the issue very very forceful grounded in in black civil rights so i'm very very excited about that great um phil you've you've talked a little bit about organizing around aids and that was a big part of of course chris's life too and i i want to talk to you if you will a little bit about that um because you were diagnosed a number of years ago i i remember how many years ago well i've been living with hiv for 15 years now and with full-blown aids for three years and i guess if this isn't too stupid a question what's it like for you what does it mean for you well you know it's interesting because i found out that i was hiv positive in 1987. and um i found out that i was positive a few weeks before chris was actually diagnosed with full-blown aids and um i thought at the time i remember thinking you know i'm black and i think that that's okay i don't have any issues with that i'm gay and i think that's okay and now i have hiv now what what does that mean and i guess in the beginning like i said this was a few weeks before we knew that chris had full-blown aids um i i thought i have a lot i want to do and i don't know if i'm going to be able to do it and i suspect that that drives me today that um there is a lot that i want to do and i don't have much time i don't know if i have much time i guess i probably think that i don't have much time to do it as a result of that um i'm in a hurry you know i want you know the isms to go away today i don't have time to ask for permission to live um and that's that's at the core of of how it feels and and and from that a whole bunch of things happen you know from that um a sadness happens you know because i have you know three nephews and three nieces and the oldest one is 15 and the youngest one is five and and i don't think i'm going to be around when they are graduating from high school for example and i would like to see that you know i would like to see us make major strides to kind of deal with some of the isms that we face every day and i don't know if that's going to happen on the other hand i've learned to focus i've learned that there's a part that i have to play and my responsibility is to play that part as forcefully as i can and with as much integrity as i can and with as much honesty as i can and at the end of the day to be satisfied with that tell us about the sleep test well every night i look at my day and and and in my mind's eye i go through all the things that i've done in the day and i ask myself um did you believe in those things did you approach them from a point of integrity and were you committed to doing no harm and if i can answer yes to those questions that i believed in them that i approached them from a point of integrity and that i tried to avoid hurting someone and that i was focused on helping someone then i can sleep and so that's my my sleep test and i try to inject the sleep test during the course of the day so that at the end of the day i in fact have you know affirmative answers well that's just like you feel to be summing up at the end of every day or maybe that's a part of being in a hurry the kind of thing that people do you know decades or at birthdays if they're conscious at all um you know it's funny when you first talk to me about the sleep test the thing that first occurred to me was to to that you would ask yourself if you were fully awake in the world every day because you are so awake and alive too to what's going on and the way you use the word integrity sort of as a sort of a throwaway it's interesting to me that that's the word that people use the most about you and frankly in my experience that people use very sparingly in total um and by i guess you mean by it this this notion of being true to yourself in the fullest possible way well i think that i think that people this is going to be weird that i think people try to be right too much i think it's important to be right but i don't know if you have a mechanism to know that i know i don't have a mechanism to know that so i invest i shouldn't say a little but maybe it's a little but i guess i don't focus on being right you know because i i don't know how to answer that question i can't sleep if that's the test that i was right um and so that's why the integrity becomes important and the other thing that happens is if you focus on being right i suspect you have to spend a lot of time making other people wrong and i've never found that to be useful so that's you know um i don't know i i kind of feel like that's rambling but that's kind of the way i look at these things yeah well it's another aspect though i think of the integration of self that you're talking about i mean there's no reason to single out race as a differentness except to try to say better worse you know different same nothing wrong with that that's fun that's a wonderful thing better worse says ursula k le guin said is those are the killing words you know and same with gender same with sexual orientation same with age you know disability um but it's an interesting thing how all of us who are part of a class that is somehow de clase that somehow you know second class seem to respond differently to it i mean you've been living with hiv and with aids a long time a long time but some people give up some people and i'm not saying they're worse than you are but there is an aspect of work unfinished or you know maybe that guy that got to be the president of his fraternity or whatever there's something that compels the work and i'm interested in that too because that's an aspect of leadership and that's a very special thing especially in a movement what is it that propels you to to take the responsibility you have um you you refer to yourself as lazy i don't think so you know i mean it's just the opposite these the the the titles the the work that you do what is it that compels you to do this work or or or why do you love it well you know my mother said to me that the only reason for living is to make a difference and i don't know i that i mean saying it like that when i said it it feels like a cliche it felt right when she said it um and it certainly has been useful to me it keeps me alive you know if i am not trying to make a difference then why am i committed to living now if i am not willing to be present with all the pain and the joy um why why get up in the morning and i don't know um if we ever know in real time what a difference we make and so the the the test cannot be in knowing that yeah i'm not even sure if the test can be in making the difference yeah because you're either living your life or you're analyzing whether you're making a difference i mean somebody was telling me the other day you know i make a speech it's a wonderful speech people come up to me and they tell me it was so wonderful they were very moved by it but they can never remember what i said and sometimes when i have a really deep conversation i mean someone will say well you talked with phil for a whole hour today what did he say and i won't be able to remember and i'll feel embarrassed because i'll think oh you know my short-term memory is shot or something but this friend said no she had spoken to her therapist about it because she was worried about this problem and her therapist said it's because you're present and when you're present you listen to dr king speaking or you listen to anyone making a statement that moves you in a circumstance where you you come away changed often what's happening is you're hearing what's happening in you too and what you experience is different from recording the words you know and using that up brain cells for that and the same with a deep conversation that if you're living the moment you often aren't analyzing it it's always in retrospect but you know you said to me once you didn't like the world as it now exists that doesn't seem to go with you know the way you live your life well you know we live in a world where um people literally starved to death every night and we literally throw away tons and tons and tons of food every day we live in a world where people who three years ago were neighbors are now murdering each other now in bosnia and herzegovina we live in a world where people you know think it's okay to hate now and to you know be divisive um we live in a world that you know last week someone said to me you're going to participate in the millionaire march now do you think that that's courageous do you think that that's dangerous you know i mean how you know i'm going to spend a day with other black men that's all it was under what context can that be courageous and dangerous and that's okay you know i don't like that world i don't think that that's i don't think that that's right you know and um and yes there are times when i think and and and probably a lot of times actually that i think you know leaving that world is not a bad thing that's not a bad thing and i guess the contradiction is knowing that that's the world that we live in i guess i think that there is a problem with a person who does not want to change that world and so i'm present every day because in my arrogance or whatever i think that as long as i'm here maybe i can contribute to changing that world but that doesn't mean that i like that world well i think that those things are contiguous i mean i agree with you that often the most important work that we engage in is compelled by our distaste for the world the way it is but it isn't the same as hating the people in it so that you need to run away from them or you want to uh you know be a hermit or i mean movement in and of itself is very different from any other kind of work it's about changing the world in which people live for often people who don't seem to have the same uh wherewithal they're they're they're honest they're just trying to survive you know they don't have whatever privilege you and i have accrued to to do that work so using that privilege to do it whatever that privilege is sometimes it's a matter of health i mean i think i am not hiv affected i look essentially toward a long life many many of my friends don't that's a that's an experience i don't share so i need to commit myself you know to 90 years of this work to make this the world better and as you've said often you think your work is more is compacted it makes you in a hurry as our friend ruth slaughter has said you know makes you in a hurry to do it but it is it is also wonderful work did you have a a really positive experience at the march i mean i listened to the speeches and i thought this is wonderful i suppose i should find something wrong with this but this is wonderful it was remarkable and and and it was so funny you know all of the the i guess the tuesday morning quarterbacks yeah um we're talking about the march resistant the march was that now i was on the mall you know and the tuesday morning quarterbacks were talking about the speeches they were talking about what happened from the stage well the vast majority of the people could not hear what the speeches were or see what was going on in the stage because there weren't enough monitors and the sound system wasn't very good and it was magical you know my point is that it wasn't about louis farrakhan it wasn't about any of the people from the speeches what it was about is that for the first time i would say for all of us in fact for the first time in in the history of this country that many black men got together you know to affirm each other you know the heart and the soul and the spirit of monday and washington was not about the leaders it was about the people it was about the grassroots it was about you know the barbershop folks it was about the neighborhood folks it was about the black boys it was about the fathers and the sons and the uncles and the nephews it was about black men saying we are here we are present and we count we matter you know and we can affirm each other for that you know and we don't need an outside culture and we don't even need no leaders to tell us that didn't it sound kind of familiar no absolutely i all that stuff every time queers get together to have a march they say the leaders are all fighting it's not organized the stage isn't up yet um there were only 250 000 people there never mind that they said there were a million right da da da da the next day it never talks about or very rarely about the most important thing that happens on a march which is what happens to the people who went and what they take home with them and you know people you know are debating about whether or not you know louis farrakhan became more powerful at the end of the march or whether or not the success of the march no uh the credit of the successful month should be given to louis farrakhan you know and quite frankly from the men i talked to you know um the media who said that it couldn't be done deserves some of the credit you know newt gingrich deserves some of the credit now the fact that we have a congress that has you know signed a contract on america and has decided that america should not have any commitment to equal access no deserves from the credit the fact that that people are being bombarded every day now by negative things now i think that people said enough you know and that i need to find safety you know and i need to reach out you know to my brothers and and find some sanctuary there now that's what created the success of that event so you have a big birthday coming up i do yeah what does it mean to you well i'm going to be 40 years old soon um i didn't think i was going to ever be 40. um on my 35th birthday i threw a big party because i thought that my that was going to be my last what are they called demarcation birthdays the fives and and the tens um and now i'm going to be 40. i've you know been living with hiv disease for 15 years now it's weird i say it a lot i guess [Laughter] but i think i'm very very lucky you know i'm i'm going to be 40 and for the most part i have lived a life that has been full of love i have a family that has always been supportive i have been fortunate with great friends i have been lucky enough to spend my life doing work that i feel strongly about and passionate about and i believe that i've made a difference and i guess when you're that lucky you have to give something back there's a price for that and and i guess i just try to pay my dues well you've definitely paid your dues phil wilson and come to the end of our time i can't believe it went so fast and i am very very very very happy that we got to have this talk and i'm happy that you got to listen to it and watch thanks very much for being with us thank you you go out and do some good work today bye-bye [Music] you