Bryan C. Jones interview, 26 July 2023

Abstract

Bryan C. Jones (b. 1960) is a native Clevelander and grew up in the Hough area before attending the University of Cincinnati. Jones discusses transferring to Florida A&M University and Florida State University in the 1980s and coming out as a gay man after becoming active in Atlanta's gay communities in the early 1980s. He discusses the onset of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, receiving an HIV/AIDS diagnosis in the 1980s, and moving back to Cleveland in the 1990s. Jones discusses the intersections of stigma, racism, and homophobia surrounding HIV/AIDs and his ongoing work as a community activist and long-term AIDS survivor/thriver, including his involvement in the Sankofa HIV Initiative, the D.I.R.T Advocacy Movement, Campaign 2 End Aids, and Equal Access Prevention.

Interviewee

Jones, Bryan C. (interviewee)

Interviewer

Habyl, Riley (interviewer)

Project

LGBTQ+ Cleveland

Date

7-28-2023

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

83 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Bryan C. Jones interview, 26 July 2023" (2023). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 701005.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1269

Transcript

Riley Habyl [00:00:00] So, today's date is Wednesday, July 26th, 2023. This is Riley Habyl with the LGBTQ+ Cleveland Voices Oral History Collection. I'm interviewing Bryan C. Jones at his home in Lakewood, Ohio. So, hi Bryan. Thank you very much for speaking with me today.

Bryan C. Jones [00:00:16] Well, thank you for considering me. (laughs)

Riley Habyl [00:00:19] Of course. To begin, could you please state and spell your name for the record?

Bryan C. Jones [00:00:22] My name is Bryan. That's B-r-y-a-n. I kind of say it's like "Liza with the Z, not Lisa with the S," but it's "Bryan with the Y, not Brian with an I." C. Jones. J-o-n-e-s.

Riley Habyl [00:00:35] Fantastic. So, Bryan, where and when were you born?

Bryan C. Jones [00:00:39] I was born in 1960 in Cleveland, Ohio, in what they now call Metro Hospital—which used to be called City Hospital. And I was born at six months, so I was premature. So I've always been ahead of the game, so to speak. Or, either behind the game. (both laugh)

Riley Habyl [00:00:58] Alright. So, did you grow up in the Cleveland, Ohio area?

Bryan C. Jones [00:01:04] Yes, I did. I grew up in the Hough area. I was present during the Hough Riots. I was a young child during the Hough Riots. I remember tanks coming down the streets and, you know, fires and riots and all that stuff that went on.

Riley Habyl [00:01:24] How old were you at the time?

Bryan C. Jones [00:01:25] I was probably six, seven when the riots were going on. Old enough to remember, and young enough to try to forget, but I can't forget that—something as historical as the Hough Riots.

Riley Habyl [00:01:43] When you—. So, as a child, did you learn about that after the fact through, you know, adults around you, or was it—?

Bryan C. Jones [00:01:50] No, I was very much present in the moment. You know, it was—. It was just something—. Just overwhelming seeing businesses on fire, looting in the streets, and the fact that tanks were coming down the street, you know, this, this whole—National Guards, and that kind of stuff. Yeah, so I was very much present in the moment.

Riley Habyl [00:02:17] Did you understand what was happening at the time?

Bryan C. Jones [00:02:21] Kind of sort of, because Martin Luther King [Jr.] passed during that era also, so there were a lot of—I would say, civil rights incidents—taking place around Cleveland. I didn't realize maybe how significant it was going to play a part in our history overall, but in hindsight I can see why.

Riley Habyl [00:02:48] Mhm. What is your current occupation?

Bryan C. Jones [00:02:51] I don't have an occupation. I'm an ac—. Well, I'm an advocate, activist full-time. And when I say full-time, that's a 24/7-365. I guess that's what they say. So I do that full time, but I did—. In my previous life, I did musical theater and I was a concert dancer. And that's what I did prior to my activism and advocacy work.

Riley Habyl [00:03:22] When did you—. Around what year did you begin your advocacy work?

Bryan C. Jones [00:03:28] Um, kind of indirectly. I was doing advocacy before I knew what advocacy really was. I would say my advocacy started in maybe '85, because I was taking care of friends who were—who had contracted HIV. Or back then it was called GRID, Gay Related Immunodeficiency, or AIDS, and so I was taking care of people, doing that. And I didn't realize that was considered advocacy or activism, because back then taking care of people—. We were preparing people to die, as opposed—. Now we try to prepare people to live. Back then, we could only prepare them to die. And myself, I'm fortunate that I was not one of those people who—. This is going—my 40th year of living with an AIDS diagnosis, so I was diagnosed—. I first got a—. I got tested—. Well, there wasn't a test back then, but I had work done in '83. I didn't find out the diagnosis until '84, so I'm roughly in my—going into my 40th year of living with an AIDS diagnosis.

Riley Habyl [00:04:49] When did you first become aware of HIV and AIDS?

Bryan C. Jones [00:04:53] Well, in the early eighties, I first became aware of it because I—. You know, it was sexual liberation and gay freedom, and I just recently had begun to be open about being a person living—being gay. Or same-gender loving, as I tend to call it. And that was during the time when I first got my sexual freedom. I was living in Atlanta at the time. So I had just realized about my—my gayness. Yeah, so, I had first heard about HIV as being—. They called it the "four Hs", "the junkie flu". You know, it was called so many things other than what it was. So it made a lot of people feel safe—that it was just a gay white man's condition—until we started to look at how it became a battlefield quickly for everybody. (Bryan stirs a cup of coffee)

Riley Habyl [00:05:59] Around year, er—. Around what year did you first come out? Or, I should say—. Around what time in your life did you first start coming to an understanding of your identity?

Bryan C. Jones [00:06:11] I think—. I think—. Well, the way in which I grew up, it was very much taboo to be considered gay, because the only physical things you had, or tangible things that you had—examples of gay people—were what we considered drag queens, or very effeminate men. There were no masculine examples of someone who may—who may be same-gender loving, or—. There just were—. They just didn't exist. And even when they did, you had other people that made them more gayer than what they actually were, you know, just by their mannerisms and behaviors. And growing up in the hood, if you used proper English you were considered gay—just in their eyes—or swishy, or, you know, all these things. So I was very careful during that time—growing up—to embrace my same-gender loving spirit. Also, it was complicated for the fact that I was sexually molested from the age of about three to eight or nine. And we are often taught to not be open about our dirty laundry, or even to have those open, candid conversations. Because had someone had that open, candid conversation and began it—it might have prevented me being molested, sexually assaulted, all that time. But because no one has that conversation, it's called psychodrama. It goes on and on and on, because we're taught to suppress those conversations and not be open about it. So, I don't know. (loud train horn can be heard outside) She toot the horn. (Riley laughs) That's the train tooting—tooting my horn, because it's saying "Right!" about us not having that conversation. So, I think that played a part in me embracing it, too. And in my later years, I'm able to have an open, candid conversation about that and not feel ashamed of it, or—and just have that real conversation. So that kind of changed the way I perceived myself to be, because I was torn. Did me, quote-unquote, have a "coming out"—. Did it have to do with me being open about it, or did it have the fact that it was tainted by me being molested? So, I often deal with that in later years, too. It's a reoccurring conversation that occurs in my head. We'll move on past that. (Bryan laughs and stirs a cup of coffee)

Riley Habyl [00:09:13] Were you out to your family?

Bryan C. Jones [00:09:16] It's funny—

Riley Habyl [00:09:18] In the eighties, I mean. Like, did—

Bryan C. Jones [00:09:19] I wasn't. I mean, mothers always know. And your family knows, you know. But technically I wasn't out. I didn't become out until I had made the—. I was college educated. I didn't find out that I had an HIV diagnosis, an AIDS diagnosis, until my—going into my senior year of college. And then I didn't. I had a musical theater career. I really wasn't out, per se, or—. It was a given, but we never had that conversation because I did have a beard, so to speak—a girlfriend. So I didn't really become open about my status until I made a conscious decision to go to prison and die. So I went to—. I was college educated. I traveled the world doing theater. And then I also went to prison in Marion, Ohio, because I didn't want my family to have to take care of me during this ugly death of HIV. So I figured I'd just party, get high, go to prison, and die. And nobody—. And they would say that "He had cancer," that kind of thing. But it didn't happen that way. I found myself in prison, with stage four cancer, chained to a prison bed weighing 117 pounds. And I said, "God, that's not funny. I came there to die," and it just didn't happen that way. So when I got out, I started talking about my HIV status. I was open about—. This was the first time I started having conversations about being openly gay, and that kind of thing. I was—. I made it a conscious decision that I was not trying to embrace being politically correct, so my conversations have—since that time have always been candid and straight up, no chaser. And that was in the early nineties. That's when I became open about having conversations about being gay.

Riley Habyl [00:11:21] If we could circle back a little bit in time to when you were in college—. What college did you attend, and from what years did you attend that college?

Bryan C. Jones [00:11:31] Right, I d—. I—. In college, it's weird. I was away from home. I went to Florida A&M. I graduated from Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. I also took dance over at Florida State [University]. It was then that I went away, when I—. I first went to University of Cincinnati, pledged a fraternity, was (unintelligible) down campus, you know. But then when I moved and went to—transferred and went to Florida A&M [University], I started to live more openly gay because I was not under scrutiny of people I went to college with—I mean, went to high school with, and that kind of thing. So I was well aware—away from people that I really knew, so I was able to kind of be a little more open about who I was and how I moved through life. So it was those years of doing that, that—because I did musical theater, I was able to do musical theater and that kind of thing—and so that's when I was first starting to live as a gay man because I had first experienced Atlanta. Atlanta, at that time, was considered like the gay Mecca, and everybody was flocking there. So I finally was able to see masculine gay men who reminded me of myself. And seeing men—. Because in my eyes then, effeminate men—. Gay people were stereotyped as being a certain type. They wore pink, you know, they wore flowing garments, and a little eyeshadow wouldn't help—wouldn't hurt, early on. So, those were my visions of what gay men looked like. And I was like, "Just because I'm gay, do I have to want to be a woman, or perceived as wanting to be a woman?" And so I finally was, for the first time, able to see masculine men. I'm not saying that masculine and men go hand-in-hand or anything like that, but to me, I think we—. Just—. This whole pronoun thing and everything—. I understand people's perspective, but it's just—. It's just become a bit much. It's confusing for me, so I know it has to be confusing for heterosexual people to understand all these pronouns, same-gender non-conforming, and all. You know, I can respect people's positioning, but it's becoming so complicated just to get a pronoun right. You know, I have to think before I open my mouth about whether I'm gonna misgender somebody and—. Back then, it was either you're gay, or you weren't gay, you know? (laughs) It was—. It was very simple, and I think we need to go back to basics. Either you do what you don't. Some will, some won't. Some do, some don't. (Riley laughs) You know, you say tomato [to-may-to], I say tomato [to-mah-to]. Let's just make it simple. So, anyway. It's like being gay has become a whole smorgasbord, like a menu. I mean, you go to a restaurant and you get to choose what you want. It's so many different things and combinations you can make. A bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwich is a bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwich. Being gay should be just that—simple as a bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwich. Add one ingredient, or take one away. So, anyway. (both laugh) Where are we at? Am I still talking about my gayness? (laughs)

Riley Habyl [00:15:06] No worries. We were talking about, um—. So in college, what years did you say that you attended (crosstalk) Florida A&M [University]?

Bryan C. Jones [00:15:14] Florida A&M [University]. From '81 to '85. So those are my gay academy years, I call it, where I learned that, you know—. You have to learn lines from Joan Crawford movies. And, you know, if you couldn't repeat one of the old black and white movies, a line from one of the movies—you were not gay. Like Gypsy Rose Lee, you know, "Give 'em a glove! Give 'em a glove!", "Dip, Louise, Dip!" You know, "Sing Out Louise!" (both laugh) You know, all these little sayings—catchphrase sayings. I was lucky that I had some great gay people to teach me how to be gay, so to speak. You know, all the little quirky—little history lessons that you learn, and little funny little sayings. You know, some people are like, "Oh, they'll have your gay card if you don't know where "Sing out Louise!" comes from," what movie that comes from [Gypsy]. Or "Zips up the back. No bone!" That was from The Women. So I learned all this gay trivia. And back then, before HIV complicated things, being gay was fun. Not that it's not fun now, but it's so many other things that come into play now. So, I'm just wondering if young gay people have much fun as we did. You know, because there was a time when we could go just dance. You know, just dance your lights out, and just sweat and dance. But do young people really get that now? Do they have that freedom now? I know the House and Ball community and Kiki community are—that they have these balls and stuff. But the balls, some of them seem—. And maybe I may be saying this wrong—. Some of them seem out of desperation, as opposed to out of just the sheer fun of it all. So we should just go out and just dance. We cocktailed all the time, you know? (laughs) From Thursday to Sunday there was a cocktail party, all the time. So, I don't know. I think we met—. We embraced each other out of camaraderie. It wasn't of desperation until well after that HIV and AIDS epidemic started.

Riley Habyl [00:17:35] And this is all when you were still in Florida?

Bryan C. Jones [00:17:38] Yes, because I went to—. I would spend the summers in Atlanta [Georgia], because Tallahassee [Florida] was—. You had to go through Atlanta to get to Ohio, so I never came back home after that. When I left to college, I never really came back home. I spent my summers at wherever I was, or—. I went to Atlanta all the time, and I—. Most of my gay friends I have were from when—my Atlanta days, and some that I went to school with. So, that's where I am.

Riley Habyl [00:18:16] How did you first start meeting other gay people, and what was your foray into the gay community at the time?

Bryan C. Jones [00:18:23] I guess musical theater. Becoming a dancer, taking dance classes, doing theater. I met most of my friends—. They were theater folk. And then when I went to Atlanta I did a whole lot of theater, so most of my friends had theater backgrounds. And many of them have went on to become quite successful actors and actresses and dancers, and that kind of thing. And I probably was well on my way, but life has a way of throwing you a bone, and things make you turn around. Contracting HIV made a difference. Then having neuropathy from taking one of the earlier [HIV] medications kind of st—kind of ended the whole dance thing. So, I did that for a long time, and then it was time to, you know—. How do you say—. "When you—when given lemons, you make lemonade." Well, I had to make lemonade, lemon chicken, a Iemon soufflé, and those things. I had to make—make the lemon make more sense than just lemonade. Because you can be thirsty, but I'm hungry. And so I had to just—. It just—. I just—. The way I got into HIV advocacy and activism—. It just kind of happened, and became important for me to be seen as a person living with HIV who not—. Who didn't just need help, but who could help. And that has been my trajectory—of wanting to put that out there, that we're not just people who need help, we're people who can help and be very instrumental in helping others navigate living—being a person living with HIV, as well as helping the community help others who are—to prevent them from contracting HIV.

Riley Habyl [00:20:26] When were you first aware of your HIV diagnosis?

Bryan C. Jones [00:20:29] My senior year. Going into my senior year of college I got sick, so I went all the way to Atlanta, four and a half hours away, to get treated—to figure out what was wrong with me because I was afraid to do it on campus, or at the school clinic. So I went all the way to Atlanta to find out. It took months to find out what my diagnosis was. And the doctor called me on the phone, and he said, "Mr. Jones, you have GRID, or what we know is AIDS now, and you got about six months to live," and he hung up the phone. So he offered no sense of what I can do, how I can get help. He just said, "You've got about six months to live," and he hung up. So, I didn't know what to do. So for a long time, I—. I didn't know what to do. I waited for my six months marker to come. I was still here, so even though it was 1983, '84, I was partying like it was 1999. And then when about four years went by, five years went by and it had—didn't happen, the hammer didn't drop—I said, "Well, you know, maybe." But people all around me were dying, so it was—. Can we pause this?

Riley Habyl [00:22:01] Sure.

Bryan C. Jones [00:22:01] Because it is hot. (recording pauses)

Riley Habyl [00:22:04] (recording resumes) Alright, it's rolling again. So, is HIV something that people around you were talking about?

Bryan C. Jones [00:22:12] No. That was the problem. It was the biggest elephant in the room. I remember back during the—. On the battlefield, and we considered those days to be the battlefield—a friend would open the door, we'd think about the movie Philadelphia, where people would have little spots, these little tiny spots. Which is Kaposi's sarcoma, which is a skin cancer. The reality was, it wasn't just little spots that people had. A friend would open the door, and half of his face would be KS [Kaposi's sarcoma]. And so, that was a lot more shocking than noticing some little purple bruises on somebody. They weren't small in those days, and yet still—. Somebody opens a door and they have this big splotch. Nobody would talk about it. I'm sure when they opened the door, we're standing there with our mouths wide open because we had never seen it up close and personal. And that was my first time coming to grips with saying, "Is this my destiny? Is this what I have to look forward to?", and—. But nobody—. It was the elephant in the room. Nobody made any comments about it. And then when people started to die, you would know that people got—. You know, you would say, "He's sick," or "He went to the hospital,"—those were codes for—. Code words for, you know, "He's got AIDS, and he's gonna die." Just saying that somebody 'got sick' or 'went to the hospital', (Bryan's phone rings) those were code words for 'people were going to die'. Nobody was having these conversations about HIV and AIDS, and that was the sad thing. And so I have become a historian about HIV and AIDS, so to speak, because I (Bryan's phone alarm rings) know that back in the early eighties, the CDC [Center for Disease Control] and these other entities did us a disservice because they didn't talk about Black people's numbers. Nor did they talk about women contracting HIV. Nor did they talk about heterosexual couples. But we now know that early on in the epidemic, by '83 heterosexual couples had contracted HIV. But the CDC didn't mention their numbers. When they talk about—in 1981, when the article was first released in The New York Times—about these 44 or 41 gay men we thought was white, and now know they were white, are having this strange gay cancer. They failed to mention that 88, 86 to 88 Black people had contracted the same gay cancer during that 12 year—that 12-month calendar year. But they didn't mention—. They didn't release our numbers, and by the time they decided to release our numbers—. When the floodgates finally opened, it was too late to start having that conversation because Black people and women were contracting HIV or AIDS back then at an alarming rate. And so, by nobody having that conversation, we weren't able to do preventive measures to prevent—to stop the cont—the spread of HIV.

Riley Habyl [00:25:41] Outside of gay communities and gay spaces, what would you say the general public's perception of HIV, or GRID [Gay Related Immunodeficiency] as it was known at the time, at least in the early eighties—. What would you say that the general perception of the disease was?

Bryan C. Jones [00:26:01] Well, I—. As now, we've come a long way with medication and things, but I think stigma is still as heavy as it is now, as it was—as it was then. It just looks different, and we now know that—. People still think of—think of it as being a gay man's disease. They also consider a lot of sex shaming in there. That you did something nasty, or something freaky, to contract HIV. "You got what you deserved." "It's God's punishment." All those things, and those little narratives, still exist today. But we now know that Black folks and people of color—. Which are two different things, Black folks and people of color—because they're just two different things, but we try to combine all that together. We now know that social and structural disparities is what keeps HIV present. It has nothing to do with—so much with behaviors and substance abuse use, as it has to do with systemic and structural disparities that exist. Like equal access to care. Understanding our health care system. Lack of housing, lack of knowledge, lack of food. All these things contribute to the growth and spread of HIV. And it has nothing to do so much with what a lifestyle is, and what people's behaviors are, as to what's already in place that's causing the spread of HIV. So people's perceptions back then was really—. You know, people—. If you coughed, now they say—(laughs). People used to cough to cover a fart, now you fart to cover the cough (both laugh) because the cough is like a major sign. You know, you're in a room and you start coughing, everybody looks at you sideways just because of a cough—because of HIV and AIDS, because of COVID-19, all these other things that exist. So we're constantly—. Stigma and where it exists—. There's stigma in everything, first of all, and I'm so tired of hearing that it's the stigma that keeps HIV alive. There's stigma in being too short, too tall, too light, too dark, too educated, too unedu—too undereducated. It's stigma in everything, so we can't keep blaming it on stigma as much as we can blame it on miseducation, and we can blame it on systemic and structural disparities that keep HIV alive. So the conversation and what it looks like—. It's just as bad now as it was then. You know, people still have these perceptions when you say—. Except now, people are more open in saying there's no shame in being a person living with HIV, because we are living with HIV. I'm not a person who's HIV positive. I'm a person living with HIV, because I'm more than just my status. And so we're starting to—having those kind of conversations, and looking at HIV in a positive light, all puns intended (Riley laughs), and understanding that it's nothing negative about it, or nothing—. There's no shame in being a person with HIV.

Riley Habyl [00:29:24] So, what do you think has contributed to that shift?

Bryan C. Jones [00:29:29] I think people stepping up, taking up space. How many people like myself, who have embraced the fact that—. Well, for me, what made a change in my life is—. I stopped letting other people's shit be my shit. And what I mean by that is—. I have an HIV diagnosis. If you can't deal with it, that's your shit. But it's about my life, and my quality of life, and my have—living a healthier life. Because before then, it was about self-destructing, because I didn't even—. There was a time when I didn't have self-esteem, can you believe that? (laughs) Me not having self-esteem, it's just like, wow. (both laugh) But HIV had beat me up so much, and I had beat myself up so much, that when the—. Taking back my power, taking back my life—. Because I was doing what I call the 'Anne Frank syndrome'. I was hiding somewhere, waiting for somebody to open a door and say "Found you!" You know, and the way it happened was—. Somebody close to me started telling people my status, so people would come to me and say, "Well, you know—." I was very popular in high school and that kind of thing, so people always want to try to have a one-up on you. And it was like, this is their moment to confront him about having HIV or AIDS. "Well, you know, such-and-such told me—." "Yes, I have HIV. Have you been tested?" I would stop them cold, and I would leave them with their mouth hanging open again, so I started to embrace that. And just being a person living with HIV—. I started to see positive examples of people living with HIV, so that whole changed for me. I started to do more advocacy work, I started to do more national work, and since that time I've started—. I've done international work when it comes to HIV and AIDS, and now I have an organization called the Sankofa HIV Initiative, and we do healing weekends for people living with HIV. So, I've been doing that. And under the banner of the Sankofa HIV Initiative is my D.I.R.T. Advocacy Movement. And D.I.R.T. is an acronym for Direct, Inspiring, Reachable, and Teachable. It's a conversation for Black people that look like us, who live like us, talk like us. It's a prevention model that doesn't recreate the wheel. We—. We go and educate people at the places where they're doing their work, they're working—already working on the intersections of HIV and AIDS, meaning places like food pantries, places that give away clothing, places that help provide housing, and certain literacy programs. We have HIV conversations in those places, because we got to understand that HIV is not first on some people's list, it's not second, it's not third, it's not fourth. It's food, clothing, housing, all these other things are important before we can have a conversation about HIV and AIDS. So we've got to feed people mentally before we can start—I mean, physically—before we start feeding them mentally. If a person is hungry, you've got to feed the physical body before we can start having these conversations that affect the mental, and eventually the physical. So we've got to provide for people not just for HIV and AIDS, to stop teaching—treating HIV and AIDS as this 'one man on this island' conversation. Audre Lorde says, "There no single-issue fights because people don't live single-issue lives," and this is true. We—. There's more to us than trying to navigate HIV, or even a health care system, so I think we've got to look into holistically having these conversations. Putting HIV into comprehensive health care instead of just getting tested, and that kind of thing.

Riley Habyl [00:33:28] So, where did the idea for D.I.R.T. [Direct, Inspiring, Reachable, and Teachable] Advocacy come from?

Bryan C. Jones [00:33:34] Well, I—. I was a part of an organization called C2EA—Campaign 2 End AIDS, and we would do these summits in different cities. So I campaigned to have this summit in—Campaign 2 End AIDS national advocacy leadership summit in Ohio. So I brought 80 advocates in from around the country to come to Cleveland, and I told them that, "Oh, we're going to go into Garden Valley when we're here." And they was like, "Oh no, we don't—. We don't come into cities and do prevention. We may come and talk about it." I said, "Well, when you come to Cleveland, you're going to do prevention, because how do we expect communities to know how to do prevention if we can't come in and be an example to them on how to do outreach and prevention efforts?" So I fought them tooth and nail about going into Garden Valley. And so when they came to Cleveland, we went into Garden Valley—people passed out condoms, had conversations with people in the community. And the people came back when we went to do our debriefing and told those people—that I'd fought tooth and nail—that this was so successful. Many of those advocates that came here had never done advocacy outside of a classroom. They had never really been in the community. They had maybe been—. Maybe educated college campuses, had conversations, meetings with those other people who may have been in certain aspects of business—but they had never actually been in the hood, or in the community, and actually had these conversations with the people whom were most impacted by HIV and AIDS. So they came and had this conversation. They expressed to the people that this was the greatest experience they ever had, so I realized then—. So I started to use by—. It was a lady named Jan Ridgeway who ran—who ran Garden Valley Neighborhood House, which was a settlement house, but they had a big food pantry there. And so I started going into Garden Valley, passing out condoms and having educational conversations, because I realized that the food pantry there—. People would start lining up at 7:30 in the morning, and they didn't start passing out food until 11 [a.m.], so you kind of had a captive audience of people there. So I started having these HIV and AIDS conversations, inviting people in, especially during the cold months—giving them coffee and donuts—and started having these open and candid conversations about HIV and AIDS. And I believe in being very candid about my conversation, and it was—. So now, I tell people my pronoun is MF [motherfucker], you know, because they say, "Oh, here comes that motherfucker." You know, "I'll be glad when that motherfucker leaves the room, because he is causing too much disturbance." They looked at advo—. When did advocacy and activism become frowned upon? You know, when did it become this negative thing? When advocating—. If it wasn't for advocacy and activism, like Act Up, we wouldn't be where we are today in terms of the medication and those kinds of positive things that have impacted HIV and AIDS. So I knew that it was important to have open and candid conversations with our community, and conversations that sounded like us, looked like us, and lived like us. So that's how the D.I.R.T. [Direct, Inspiring, Reachable, and Teachable] Advocacy Movement came about—having these kinds of conversations. I just feel so drow—. I don't know why I'm feeling so drowsy. (laughs) This coffee is not working, but—. Yeah, so having those kinds of conversations was important. So that's how the D.I.R.T. Advocacy Movement came about, and I have pushed this model and have educated people in other cities such as Chicago, Florida, other states. So that's where we are with what I do, you know. So, I don't know.

Riley Habyl [00:37:49] Around what year did—. Around what year was D.I.R.T. [Advocacy Movement] conceived in?

Bryan C. Jones [00:37:56] Like 19—. 2013, I want to say. 2012-'13. I'm also responsible for mobilizing Ohio around modernizing our HIV criminalization laws, because I first—. When I first started going to conferences—in maybe 2008-2009—I went and there was a place called the Center for HIV

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.