Recognizing PRIDE Month, Honoring the LGBTQI+ Community
Speaker
- Leslie Ewing, Retired Executive Director from the Pacific Center for Human Growth*
- Pacific Center for Human Growth* is the Third Oldest LGBTQIA+ Center in the Nation
Summary
For our special June monthly General Meeting recognizing PRIDE Month, Leslie Ewing shared the history of the LGBTQI+ movement in the Bay Area. Leslie shared her LGBTQI+ and AIDS activism career with us. She currently serves on the board of the National AIDS Memorial.
Leslie’s LGBTQI+ community building started in 1982 when her cartoon strip, “Mid-Dyke Crisis,” ran in The San Francisco Bay Times. She didn’t realize she was an activist then, but one thing just led to another. Her cartoons occasionally touched on other topics besides the intersections of social justice and health movements.
In 1987, she joined other activists as they developed the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt into a national expression of both rage and reconciliation. Committed to this mission, she helped coordinate volunteers for displays of the quilt in Washington D.C. for five consecutive years.
She then stepped back from her role at the Quilt to work for over two years on the national steering committee for the 1993 March on Washington for LGBTQI+ Rights, which drew over 800,000 activists. After the March, during some of the most challenging times of the HIV epidemic, she went on to lead the AIDS Emergency Fund, as its volunteer Board President/Executive Director and later was a founder of the Breast Cancer Emergency Fund.
Then, for over six years, she was the buyer at Under One Roof, helping to raise over 2 million dollars for local AIDS organizations. After that, she joined Lyon-Martin Health Services as the Development Director before stepping up to be the Executive Director at Pacific Center for Human Growth in 2008. Determined to lead Pacific Center to a higher level of accountability, Leslie tripled the number of free mental health support groups and established a policy that all therapy for unsheltered clients be offered at no cost.
We left time at the end for a conversational Q&A and saved a space for other community members who identify as LGBTQI+ to share their personal stories.
