By Tom Temprano
APRIL 10, 2015 — April 8 marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Ryan White, the teenager whose battle with AIDS dramatically changed perceptions about people living with the disease in the mid-1980s. After his death congress 
passed The Ryan White CARE Act, which since its passage in 1990 has provided billions of dollars in funding for HIV/AIDS related services.
Unfortunately, in recent years the federal government has dramatically reduced the amount of money it provides to San Francisco, leaving our city’s service providers in a serious lurch. Funding cuts be damned, the city family has rallied time and again to backfill these cuts during the budget process keeping things like medical clinics and substance abuse treatment programs for people living with HIV open to the nearly 16,000 San Franciscans living with HIV/AIDS.
Backfilling the cuts are an opportunity for people and groups usually at odds to come together and agree on something. Ideological opposites like Supervisors David Campos and Scott Wiener are always the two major champions of restoring the funds, and during my time on the Harvey Milk Club board, we’ve always collaborated with our regular rivals in the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club to ensure that no funds were cut. In San Francisco’s unique conservative democrat vs progressive democrat political arena restoring cuts to HIV funding is about as “bipartisan” as it gets.
That’s why it came as a big surprise to a number of folks I know in the HIV advocacy community when, in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter, recently appointed District 3 Supervisor Julie Christensen didn’t jump at the chance to lend her support.
When asked if she supported fully backfilling the cuts she responded saying “The easy answer is yes. The more challenging answer is this will be my first budget round, and, um, I am looking at nests of baby birds that are all chirping, all worthy.”
Wow.
My good friend Laura Thomas, who serves on the city’s HIV Prevention Planning Council to described the importance of backfilling the cuts saying, “there are more people living with HIV here in San Francisco than ever before and replacing the missing federal funds are essential for our goal of getting to zero — zero new infections, zero deaths, zero stigma. I can’t imagine why anyone in elected office in San Francisco would compare people living with HIV/AIDS to baby birds demanding to be fed, and I hope she gets an earful from her constituents on that.”
Christensen’s office has since backpedaled, saying they’ll try to ID the necessary funding, but next time she might want to stick to the easy answer.
Another San Francisco media outlet bit the dust this past week as the Bold Italic announced in an abrupt statement thaits days done and the site was closing up shop. Why the blog’s plug might have been pulled by mega media company Gannet has already been covered so I’ll just take a minute to reflect on what I’ll miss.
For me, the Bold Italic’s greatest contribution to San Francisco over the past half decade is that they (gasp) paid local writers to write. One of my heroes Michelle Tea published some UH-MAZING pieces on the site and the loss of this platform for her and many other local writers definitely smarts.
They also did a good job highlighting lots of local small businesses, including mine, which is something that we can never have too much of here in San Francisco. For Christ’s sake they even managed to do a decent neighborhood by neighborhood best burrito roundup! Of course, the loss of the Bold Italic is another hit in a seemingly unending assault on media outlets here in San Francisco over the past several years. In the past couple months alone we’ve seen 7×7 whittle itself down to an online publication, SF Weekly face some serious inner strife and now RIP Bold Italic. Sooooo, have you donated to 48 Hills yet?
For the past six months or so the corner of 26th and South Van Ness, which happens to be the corner that I live on, has seen an increasing number of people with no other place to go camping on the streets after being pushed out of the Tenderloin and Central Market. The people that live in these camps have by and large been friendly and respectful, sometimes saying “hello” more often than some of my neighbors with roofs over their heads.
That’s why I was particularly saddened when I learned that the sea of sirens and lights that flooded my corner on Monday evening were there in response to the stabbing of two campers, Weasel and Cass, and their pit bull. Mission Local did a great job covering the incident, which is rare when crimes are committed against homeless San Franciscans. According to the article, the couple both grew up in the Mission and were forced onto the streets after their home burned down a few years ago.
Fortunately, it sounds like they, and their dog, are going to be alright. What isn’t alright is that fact that in a city with the nation’s second best economy we have people like Weasel and Cass subject to violence as they sleep on the streets in the neighborhood that they were raised in.
