Kiyoshi's a great example of somebody who from a really young age knew he was different,
both because he was Asian and because he was queer.
Instead of running away from those feelings and from those perspectives he gained,
he dove in even deeper into them.
He was unashamed of who he was,
and, you know, he believed that the way he lived his life, completely free and open,
was the way that everyone should have the freedom to live their lives.
In your history class, you probably learned about the Civil Rights Movement,
anti-Vietnam War demonstrations
and the gay liberation fight,
but you likely didn't hear about Kiyoshi Kuromiya,
an often overlooked activist who made many contributions to these and other struggles.
Kiyoshi Kuromiya was born in an internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming in 1945.
Internment really, I think, molded his consciousness so that he saw
radical political struggles
as one against all forms of confinement, be it internment, closets or cages.
He, at a very early age, recognized that he was queer actually by reading the Kinsey Reports,
and he also faced criminalization due to queerness and was arrested as a youth
for like cruising in a park by cops who were surveilling the park.
He saw that also as a moment of repression.
He moved to Philadelphia to go to U Penn, and while he was there,
he also began participating in radical activism.
He was in Montgomery, Alabama in 1965 at the kind of end of the Selma to Montgomery March.
He was attacked by police there.
He said he was like the Forest Gump of activism.
So he was in so many different places
and helped to be a part of so many different movements.
He distributed a bunch of flyers actually saying that during the height of the Vietnam War,
when napalm bombing was happening, that a dog would be napalmed.
They never intended to burn a dog,
but hundreds of people turned out to protest the burning of the dog,
and they were met with flyers that said,
'Well you turned out to protest the burning of a dog.
Next time turn out to protest the burning of children.'
Prior to the Gay Liberation 70s, there was a homophile movement,
and he was part of that in Philadelphia,
and then also helped to start the Gay Liberation Front in Philadelphia.
Our fight against homosexual oppression is one with the revolutionary struggles
of all oppressed peoples
for life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
He was intersectional before that that was a word or a thing.
He introduced the Black Panthers to the Gay Liberation Movement.
Because this was a guy who was an activist, and,
you know, the issues of the times were going to be the issues that that he involved himself in.
In the 1980s, Kuromiya learned that he had contracted HIV.
During this time, queer activists, who had watched many loved ones die,
formed organizations like Act Up to draw attention to the AIDS crisis
from politicians, scientists, and drug companies.
I met Kiyoshi in Act Up in the late 1980s.
What he did all along was to try to stay sufficiently aware and up on things
to get the best possible care for himself,
but then he turned that into trying to get the best possible care for other people.
He helped to start a organization called the Critical Path AIDS Project
which ran the first like national hotline for HIV AIDS in the country
and was a kind of early means of using the internet to give information around HIV AIDS.
The first standard of care published by anybody in the United States for treating AIDS
was the Act Up standard of care that Kiyoshi and John Lotts,
another AIDS activist, wrote.
Kiyoshi took care of people with AIDS in Philadelphia when they were very sick.
His house in Center City, Philadelphia was just a meeting ground for anyone who needed help.
So you know, there were homeless gay men passing through there,
there were university professors and pharmaceutical experts.
He always got his care from a network
of health centers that were free if you didn't have any money to pay
or if you didn't have insurance.
He did not feel that he had the right to get something that the poorest people could not get.
In 2000, Kuromiya passed away from complications of AIDS.
But much of his work lives on today.
When Kiyoshi died, we thought that it really was our duty to keep
trying to carry out the work that he had been doing.
We have a long list of educational programs that we do,
one of which is the Critical Path Center, which was named after Kiyoshi's project.
To this day, Act Up shows up at the mayor's house once a week
to fight for housing for people with AIDS, to fight for good health care for people with AIDS,
and the fact that that work goes on is directly
correlated to the teachings that we learned from Kiyoshi.
There was the belief that you could, you know, lift up one, that this will lift up all.
You do learn that through learning about the lives of people who had absorbed that lesson somehow
and who pushed forward and who made change against great odds
and that was Kiyoshi.