We're Not Walking Back

into today's episode one. It is just outright shocking to me that we are existing in a time when half of the population is in occult and doing themselves an extraordinary disservice in the midst of these horrific climate change catastrophes, to deny themselves aid, to deny themselves facts in order to continue to follow Donald Trump, who is leading them

off of a cliff. It was astounding to me that the President of the United States had to get on television to tell people that hurricanes are not man made. It was absolutely unfathomable to believe that the President of the United States would have to say that if you take the seven hundred and fifty dollars worth of BEAMA emergency aid, we're not going to seize your home. The lies are reckless. They deserve litigation and accountability because they

are costing people their lives and their livelihood. And I just don't know when it is ever ever going to stop. This election. Right now, is raizor thin and is going to be decided by a handful of voters in a handful of states, And that to me is terrifying, as I know it is to all of you. It is just not right where we find ourselves where we are, and I am really scared. I'm gonna be honest with you, it is really scary where we find ourselves right now.

And I don't know. I don't know, dear friends, how this election is going to turn out. I don't know if it will go the way that we need it to. But I do know that we are going to need each other more than ever moving forward, regardless of the outcomes, because the people that are working tirelessly to separate us, to divide us, and to create these tents of fear, these silos of fear and disinformation, are never going to stop.

And we have to steel ourselves, fortify ourselves for that truth, and work outside of our fear silos to connect with one another again. Coming up next, I'm very happy to welcome to wok af Daily Craig Bowers, who has been working with APLA Health on their fortieth anniversary of the AIDS Walk in Los Angeles. The theme for this year's AIDS Walk is We're not walking back. And you know, in this conversation, Craig goes into the history and reminding us of where this country was in the eighties when

AIDS was killing tens of thousands of people. I remember the quilts, I remember the protests by act UP, I remember just the devastation, and I remember mostly the indifference of the Reagan administration. To think how far we have come as a country in forty years is really extraordinary. But to think about the generation of queer people that were lost is just enormous, an enormous hole that will

never be refilled. And so this conversation with APLA Healths Craig Bowers was eye opening and a really important reminder that while we continue to forge a path forward, we have to always remember where we came from. So that

conversation with Craig Bowers is coming up next, folks. I am very happy to welcome to f Daily the Chief Marketing and External Affairs Officer of APLA Health, Craig Bauers, who is joining us today to talk about the fortieth anniversary of the AIDS Walk in Los Angeles and their bold theme of we're not walking back. Craig, welcome to you. Talk to us first about APLA Health and then talk to us about this important theme on this very big anniversary.

the general public. So AIDS Project Los Angeles was created as a way to kind of gather and disseminate information to community members that we're facing an epidemic and really there weren't a lot of information or resources available to them.

to protect yourselves. Why do you think that that has changed so much?

this disease was essentially a death sentence. And APLA in its origins, was really about disseminating information but also preparing people for the inevitable realities of the disease. Right, And so to your point, I think that we've made a lot of progress against this disease over the course of over forty years, and so it's not the automatic death sentence that it used to be. In fact, it's a

very treatable and livable condition at this point. So for that, we're extremely thankful and there's a lot of people that did a lot of hard work convincing the federal government that this was a serious problem, a problem to be taken seriously. So in that regard, you know, things have

changed dramatically. That doesn't mean that HIV is not out there, but it basically means that our tools that we have in order to prevent people from getting HIV in the first place and to get people in the medical treatment if they do have the disease has dramatically shifted over the course of greater than forty years.

but particularly for black queer men. And I want to talk about, you know, ask you about the ways in which what does education look like these days, particularly for younger queer folks who don't have the memory, who don't have the deep memory and understanding of the devastation that was caused at the beginning of the crisis in the eighties and the early nineties, that kind of think that it's no big deal like, how do you work to educate so that we don't have spikes that happen inside

of the community.

hasn't been particularly welcoming to LGBTQ plus people either. Right, So, when we talk about the disease state today, unfortunately, because of that medical reality, this disease is more of a black and brown disease, and it's more of a disease that is prevalent in places that have not expanded Medicaid. During the introduction of Obamacare, and with Obamacare, Medicaid became the vehicle to deliver health services to low income people, regardless of if you were single or a male, or

it really expanded who was eligible for Medicaid services. And in the states that have expanded Medicaid, you've really seen a large uptake in these preventative measures to prevent people from getting HIV medically that you haven't really seen in non Medicaid expansion states which are predominant elite states that are known as red states.

folks and those that live at the intersections. In terms of younger people, Generation Z and what have you, what does the education for that community look like versus older generations.

of where we were. And so for me, particularly at APLA Health, you know, ten years ago, we weren't a healthcare organization, but with the introduction of Obamacare, we opened up our first what's called a federally qualified health center, and in fact, on October third, we're celebrating our ten year anniversary of that first facility, and now later this fall, we're opening up our eighth healthcare facility here in Los

Angeles County. So to go from zero to nineteen thousand patients over the course of ten years, and the majority of those patients are members of the LGBTQ plus community, it just really demonstrates how far we've come in terms of reaching this audience and trying to address their overall health issues, HIV being obviously a major component of that, but not certainly not all of that, you know, in terms of talking about health, you know.

a way to brace myself for that moment when you you know, to kind of prepare for the discrimination that you could face and like what would you say and how will you respond? But thinking that it is extraordinarily important to provide young people with the skills, with the information that they need so that if they don't have somebody that is not affirming that they know how to respond, that they can go in feeling competent and like resolute in the care that they need.

to have this kind of access? And you know, as we're in the midst of an election season and cycle where things could drastically change for the worse, how does your organization brace itself for the navigating what could be potentially a really precarious and dangerous political landscape.

LGBTQ plus community. I think what's new, particularly to some of the younger people, is that just because necessarily we advance our cause doesn't necessarily mean that there are people working in opposition to that, and certain advances that we have may be taken away. So I think that the meta point is that you always have to remain politically active.

You always have to remain alert, you know. As a part of my responsibilities for the organization, I oversee our government affairs team, and we work at a local, state and national level in order to affect positive governmental outcomes and policies for people living with HIV as well as LGBTQ plus people overall. You know, in the state of California, as an example, you pay no out of pocket expenses for PREP, which is the prophylactic use of HIV medication

to prevent you from getting HIV. That just didn't happen. Many People Organization and other allied organizations put the pressure to bear on the state of California in order to ensure that that's a real thing. So Obamacare made PREP you know, a part of the overall insurance package, but it didn't prevent insurance companies from asking for copays, and some of those copays were quite expensive, you know what

I mean. So even though you weren't paying the full freight of the medication, you were still paying out of pocket. And now in the state of California, essentially you do

not pay out of pocket for PREP. So these are examples of you know, that's just one example of the work that we're consistently doing in order to make sure that people have access to these life saving medical therapies in order to prevent people from becoming HIV and similarly people who are HIV positive, preventing them from being able to pass along the virus to others and remaining undetected.

But there's other people in this conversation. There's trans folks that need to be really at the forefront of this conversation. Black women need to be at the forefront of this conversation, particularly in the eastern seaboards and cities and Red States. So I think there's a broader conversation it needs to takes place. I think there's an intersectional conversation that needs to take place, And I think it fundamentally comes down to what do we want to see as a society.

If one person is sick, are we all sick, you know what I mean? Or are we just saying that I'm good and You've got to fend for yourself. And unfortunately, our healthcare system kind of veers towards the latter, and I think we all need to work together to figure out how we create a system that's more equitable for everyone.

figure out what was going on in our community. It's really hard for people to understand that when this virus first became publicly known, there just really was not a lot of information out there, and that spanned for years, and so there was a tremendous amount of fear, there was a tremendous amount of unknowns, and a lot of

people were dying. So, you know, those first couple of decades of this walk were really sad affairs, but also the first instances of the community coming together, fundraising amongst ourselves and really trying to create greater awareness. Now, forty years later, this event still exists. HIV still exists, but the difference is now is that we have a medical means to end this disease right now. So if everyone who was not HIV positive protected themselves using some of

these new advancements and tools that we have. And if everyone who was HIV positive got to an undetectable level using the medications that we have available, this virus really would have nowhere to go. So when we come together for AIDS WALK today, we come together to remember those that we've lost. I mean, the gay community lost an entire generation, right, I mean, and I don't think people have really processed that. But you know, if you look at gay men of a certain age, there is a

huge hole there that we cannot get back. And I think for us celebrating forty years of progress is hey, look things have changed dramatically, but we still have more to go. We still have more to go to figure out how do we resolve these equity situations in which black and gay Latino men are still the majority of people contracting this virus today, whereas for people who have insurance,

those numbers have gone down dramatically. So this is something that we can solve, but it takes a greater community, greater awareness, responsibility throughout the healthcare profession. It just takes a lot of actors in order to make sure that we kind of close the loop on all of this and in this disease in our lifetime.