The Cascade AIDS Project

I first heard about C.A.P. (Cascade AIDS Project) in April of 1984 when I volunteered with the Phoenix Rising Foundation's Phone-A-Thon. It was one of the few times I ever volunteered to make phone calls to solicit funding for an organization. This particular group, Phoenix Rising, was a counseling center dedicated to assisting gay men and lesbians. The efforts of all of the "callers" that evening netted the foundation $1000 in pledges. In 1984, we thought that was pretty damn good.

While volunteering in the Phone-a-thon, I met Bob Hulsey, who was not only a board member of the Phoenix Rising Foundation (and a professional counselor) but also a founding member of the board of directors of the Cascade AIDS Project. CAP had been founded a year earlier in 1983 by a group of incredibly dedicated gay men who very early in the AIDS crisis recognized the need to organize the gay community to fight the scourge of the "gay disease" that was spreading like wildfire.

After the Phoenix Rising phon-a-thon, Bob wrote me and the other volunteers a note letting us all know how much we had raised and thanking us for our efforts. On the bottom of the form letter he added a personal note thanking me for the time and energy I had given to managing the Phoenix Rising Foundation office. He liked my office skills enough that he eventually asked me to join him and his colleagues Reese House, Michael Kleinschmit and a number of others in working with the Cascade AIDS Project. By May of 1984 I was organizing and staffing a CAP booth at Portland's Gay Pride.

In 1984 CAP was a grass roots effort with a completely volunteer group of physicians, educators, and some non-professionals trying mainly to educate the gay community about this new and deadly disease. CAP's goals were four-fold: Education and Community Awareness, Prevention, Referral and Support. Through Education CAP hoped to maintain an awareness of AIDS within the gay community and the community at large via the mass media and through the distribution of informational materials. Prevention was to be accomplished by developing and implementing an agressive risk reduction program in the gay community. Referral meant maintaining resource and referral information that was to be available to anyone concerned about AIDS and Support was to be financial, social, or personal support to people with AIDS.

The initial board of directors of CAP recognized early on that in order to solicit grants for the funds needed to do their work, they had to have non-profit status or be affiliated with an organization that had it. So in 1984 the CAP board of directors approached the board of the Phoenix Rising Foundation, a gay and lesbian mental health/counseling organization with a plan to incorporate CAP as a committee under the Phoenix Rising Foundation umbrella. When the contract was signed between the two organizations, the new organizational model allowed each board to have representatives on the other's. CAP remained under the umbrella of Phoenix Rising for a couple of years until CAP and its mission grew large enough that it made sense for CAP to incorporate itself into an independent non-profit organization.

The founding members of CAP were a dedicated and optimistic group. In hindsight it seems pretty delusional but in the early 80s when the plague was in its infancy, we all were certain that discoverying the cause of the disease was just a matter of time and the cure would follow just as quickly. It wouldn't take long for our optimism to wane especially as we witnessed our own government's unwillingness to fund the needed research and as we buried more and more of our friends and families.

The foresight that these men had in 1983 is remarkable. Few gay men were willing even to admit that the "gay plague" existed. The CAP founders recognized that AIDS was going to kill thousands of their brothers before a cure was found. They pushed "safe sex" as a preventative measure while so many of the gay community not only refused to believe that unprotected sex was the problem, but actively fought any and all campaigns to convince gay men to protect themselves. In 1984 CAP was successful in convincing just a few gay bar owners to allow the organization to distribute "safe sex" pamplets and condoms on their premises. Few bar owners and even fewer bath house owners would return phone calls from the board as we tried different methods of promoting education and community awareness.

The apathy of the gay men's community towards AIDS in the 80s was widespread and pervasive. But it was understandable. The gay community was just beginning to enjoy the fruits of their political and social advances won after so many years of fighting for their rights. Today that apathy has returned and with dire consequences. More and more gay men are becoming infected with the HIV virus. There are some gay men who are choosing to become infected and there are those who no longer believe the disease is a killer and it can be contained and controlled if caught. Luckily organizations like CAP and others are returning to their roots and focusing on the gay community again. Some of the new campaigns aimed towards the gay men's community are controversial but nonetheless important. Gay men lost a whole generation of friends and brothers because we hid our heads in the sand and refused to see the truth. It is happening again and it must be stopped before we lose another generation to this horrible disease.