EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a three-part series on LGBTQ history in the Lehigh Valley, during Pride Month. (See Part 1)
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Around 1982, Dr. Jeffrey Jahre started seeing patients in the Lehigh Valley with symptoms that matched a strange new disease reported in San Francisco and New York.
Jahre didn’t realize it at the time, but he was treating the region's first patients with AIDS, before it became a global crisis that has now killed millions of people around the world.
- Many people died of AIDS in the Lehigh Valley, and many organizations formed to help those affected
- The AIDS crisis led to the closure of the Lambda Center, an Allentown-based LGBTQ community center that operated in the 1980s
- The global crisis continues today, disproportionately affecting racial and ethnic minorities and gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men
Jahre said in an interview for World AIDS Day that a larger proportion of the Lehigh Valley population died of AIDS — or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that leads to it — than in most of the country.
An infectious disease specialist and senior vice president of medical and academic affairs at St. Luke's, Jahre said at the height of the epidemic, an entire floor of the hospital became dedicated to caring for HIV and AIDS patients.
“We had literally, at that time, units that were full of AIDS patients, and many of whom would then go on to die, and in some cases in a really very, very dark way,” Jahre said in a previous interview.
“There's nothing worse than being a physician and watching individuals die, particularly young individuals — and obviously, in many of these cases, they were young individuals — and feeling helpless.”
The Lambda Center, the region’s LGBTQ community center at the time, started an AIDS services committee to help manage the growing crisis after it opened in 1984.
But in 1986, that committee broke off into a separate organization called the AIDS Services Center, which ultimately led to the Lambda Center’s closure.
In the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive’s oral history collection, different people’s retellings of why the AIDS Services Center broke off from the Lambda Center conflict with each other.
Mary Foltz, who conducted many of the oral histories in the archives, said the contradictions show the difficulties of finding "truth’"in historic events — as well as the importance of preserving those personal reflections.
What are oral histories?
Oral histories are pre-researched interviews with people who lived through historic events. Typically the interviewers don't strongly guide the conversation — interviewees are encouraged to talk about what they find important.
Foltz spent a year collecting oral histories from LGBTQ elders in the Lehigh Valley in collaboration with the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBTQ Community Center. She attended a summer-long session about how to collect oral histories and the ethics of the field.
“Oral histories add the personal, the emotional, and the individual narrative about what it felt like to live in a particular historical moment."Mary Foltz, an associate professor of English at Lehigh University and collaborating scholar with Bradbury-Sullivan Center
Foltz said she thinks oral histories add a dimension to the archives that organizational records can’t provide.
“Oral histories add the personal, the emotional, and the individual narrative about what it felt like to live in a particular historical moment,” Foltz said.
The end of the Lambda Center
Historians know that in 1985, Ardath Rodale of Emmaus-based publishing company Rodale Inc., known for founding Prevention and Men’s Health magazines, wanted to donate money to help people suffering with AIDS. Her son, David, had died of AIDS that year.
According to the oral history of Rose Craig, the last president of the Lambda Center before it closed, the board agreed it should take the money from Rodale and others and use it to change the Lambda Center into a service center for AIDS.
“We got besieged pretty quickly [by AIDS], and it didn’t take long at all for all of us to agree that that’s what we needed to do,” Craig said.
But Frank Whelan, a member of the board, said in his oral history that it was the terms of Rodale’s donation that caused that change to happen.
Whelan said he and some others wanted the Lambda Center to provide AIDS services while continuing to operate. He said in his oral history that the AIDS Services Center only split off into a separate organization because Rodale refused to give her money to the Lambda Center because it “advocated homosexuality.”
Whelan clarified in an interview that he never heard her say that. But from what he could recall, another board member had a conversation with Rodale, and she said she did not want any of her money to go to supporting “gay causes” or to the Lambda Center.
“I was absolutely infuriated because of what I thought was an attempt by her, whether directly or indirectly, to say, ‘This gay thing that my son was doing was bad,’” Whelan said in the interview.
The Lambda Center still existed for a time after the AIDS Services Center was created, but eventually closed because of lack of interest and resources, Whelan said. The Morning Call published an article in February 1989 about its closure.
Local activist Liz Bradbury came to the Lehigh Valley soon after the AIDS Services Center opened. While she was not there at the time, she does not think Rodale’s donation preferences were the only reason the Lambda Center closed.
“If your friends are sick and dying, the idea of having events that didn’t have to do with HIV and AIDS seems so shallow and unaware,” Bradbury said.
Bradbury also said Rodale, who died in 2009 at age 81, continued to donate money to local organizations fighting AIDS for many years and has been awarded for her dedication to the cause.
“People would say things like, ‘Well, we're dying.' But, you know, some of us aren't. Some of us won't. And who's gonna be there to pick up gay rights after that's over?”Frank Whelan, former member of the Lambda Center board
Whelan agreed that that was the sentiment at the time, but he did not understand why there could not be both AIDS services and other LGBTQ activism.
“People would say things like, ‘Well, we're dying,’” Whelan said. “But, you know, some of us aren't. Some of us won't. And who's gonna be there to pick up gay rights after that's over?”
Foltz said she thinks these disagreements and contradictions are what make oral histories an important companion to organizational records in the archives.
“I'm uninterested in erasing contradictions or telling a community member that they're wrong. Because clearly, not everyone did agree,” Foltz said.
“There's not one way to tell that story. In fact, when we do tell it one way, we miss the nuances, the messiness, the feelings that people have working in those organizations... To me it's democratizing, I think it's humanizing, I think it's an incredibly important part of history.”
AIDS Services Center
The AIDS Services Center operated in Bethlehem, according to Rose Craig’s oral history. It provided case management services and funding for medical bills, rent and other needs of people with AIDS.
The center also hosted a hotline for people to call in and ask questions about AIDS. Once epidemiologists figured out how people could prevent AIDS from spreading, the center worked to educate community members on safe practices, Craig said.
“My two teenage kids were like, ‘Mom, can’t you have cookies at the front door and not a bowl of condoms for us and our friends?’” Craig said. “But we were scared to death of how it could spread everywhere.”
Craig became the executive director of the center in the early 1990s. She said around that time, the disease started to hit the region's Latino community hard. She also started to see children get infected.
"When it hit the kids, that was heartbreaking," Craig said. "I remember kids, when we would drop things off — 4 years old, 5 years old, babies. It was a nasty thing."
Fighting AIDS Continuously Together
Also in 1986, a group of concerned owners of Lehigh Valley gay bars and other residents started Fighting AIDS Continuously Together, or FACT, to help people in the Greater Lehigh Valley with HIV and AIDS.
The organization started after local gay bars Candida’s and the Stonewall began to have a prank war, according to Nan Kozul’s oral history.
The bars decided to host a sporting event called the Bar Olympics to settle the prank war. Organizers sold over 400 tickets, and they decided to give the money to people in the Lehigh Valley suffering with AIDS, according to Larry Kleppinger’s oral history.
Later, Kleppinger and others formed FACT and hosted the Bar Olympics as an annual fundraiser.
Allentown resident David Moyer was the Allentown Health Department’s community health specialist at the time. He heard about the organization in 1992, and he started attending its board meetings. He said he was impressed by its work.
“I kept going back to the meetings, and then I was asked if I would like to be on the board,” Moyer said in a previous interview. “So I said, ‘Sure, I can do this for a little bit.’ Well, I've been on the board since 1992.”
FACT has since raised more than $3 million and donated almost all of it to people infected by and affected by HIV or AIDS, Moyer said.
AIDS today
AIDS became less of a crisis in the Lehigh Valley after treatments began to emerge in the 1990s. But HIV and AIDS is still a major public health issue worldwide, and certain groups are disproportionately affected by it.
Approximately 38 million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the U.S., have HIV, according to HIV.gov. About 13 percent of those in the U.S. don't know it and need testing.
HIV continues to have a disproportionate impact on certain populations, particularly racial and ethnic minorities and gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men.
Young women in sub-Saharan Africa are particularly at risk, Dr. Jahre said. In the United States, Black people account for a higher proportion of new HIV diagnoses than other racial groups, according to the CDC.
FACT is still around, raising money for people affected by AIDS in the Greater Lehigh Valley. The organization will host its annual SnowBall in December, Moyer said.
“I made a promise to myself and to the HIV community that as long as I'm alive, as long as the disease is here, I'm still in it,” Moyer said.
But there were plenty of other challenges to overcome.
As the urgency surrounding the AIDS crisis began to fade in the late 1990s, LGBTQ activists began to focus their efforts on other fights — including changing the laws in Allentown to protect the rights of LGBTQ people.
COMING TOMORROW: The fight to amend Allentown’s anti-discrimination ordinance — and what the LGBTQ archives still are missing.
