ANDREW LUSH:

Okay, just positioning the windows. Great.

ANDREW LUSH:

Okay. You're all set. I'm going to turn my camera and mic off.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Thanks Andrew. So Wakefield, thank you so much for making yourself available. And could we start by having you state and spell your name as you would like it to be attached to this interview?

WAKEFIELD:

Certainly I'm Wakefield, W A K E F I E L D.

MASON FUNK:

Great, thank you. And can you state the date of your birth and where you were born?

WAKEFIELD:

I was born in Chicago, Illinois on September 12th, 1952.

MASON FUNK:

Okay, awesome. We always like to just start essentially a little bit at the beginning,

MASON FUNK:

and it's always interesting to hear a little bit about people's families of origin, who else was in the family? What the overall, say, environment or atmosphere in the family household was and what was valued? What were the values, either stated or unstated, that kind of predominated in your family household?

WAKEFIELD:

Certainly, when I arrived, I was the first born in my family. My parents lived on the second floor of a building that had a Jewish family on the first floor, on a block that was known as an Italian block. We were the outlying building on the block. Over the years. My mother always said that because I was born six blocks from Wrigley field in Boystown, that that's why I was gay. None of the rest of her children were gay.

WAKEFIELD:

But there were actually six of us total. My siblings came along. I had another brother, 12 months, 12 days, 12 hours later. And then there was a 10 year hiatus before the rest of the kids came along. Really fun family. But I was also confused when I got to college because my family took summer vacations. My family did lots of things the TV did,

WAKEFIELD:

and I didn't realize other families didn't do that. Yeah. For example, when I was in high school, my father drove to Montreal for the world's fair, because I had told him that my high school band had a great time there. So we headed off into Canada and we actually met a family. We were driving down the highway, there was another black family going back towards the United States.

WAKEFIELD:

And I don't remember exactly where it was, but all of a sudden my father slammed the brakes and turned around and we said, "Where are you going?" He says, "We're having lunch with them." We went back, we had lunch with them. We were four boys and two girls. They were four girls and two boys. And our families became close friends. None of us married, we are still acquainted. But that was '67. And we've been in each other's lives ever since

MASON FUNK:

You say none of you married, in other words, none of you married.

WAKEFIELD:

Exactly. Yeah. None of us married each other, although the ages were pretty much separated and in a way it could have happened.

MASON FUNK:

That's funny. Interesting. Well, just out of curiosity, was there ever a spark of romance between any of the two family members?

WAKEFIELD:

Not that I ever noticed, no. None at all. And I think some of that is the

WAKEFIELD:

kind of ongoing denial that most people have, "I've known you all my life. Why would I be romantically interested in you?" Romance is something very different.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. That's a sweet story. Is that emblematic? The fact that your father did that, was that a typical dad thing to do?

WAKEFIELD:

It may have been a typical dad thing for my dad, but I think it was more about

WAKEFIELD:

the state of America as we knew it in the sixties. We hadn't seen black people in a couple of days, and so feeling alone in this "foreign world of Canada". We needed to do something and no one thought it's that unusual. It turned out, I don't know if I've shared this, and that is that they had also turned around, so we didn't have very far to go to meet, to have a picnic.

WAKEFIELD:

Yeah, they were from Gary, Indiana and around the same time the Michael Jackson or the Jackson Five evolved. And so we would go there to hear more and learn more about the Jackson five because they actually went to school with some of the relatives of them.

MASON FUNK:

That's very cool. That's very cool. We have an interview subject who currently lives here in LA,

MASON FUNK:

whose family came North, a black woman whose family came North, from the South to Gary, Indiana. I think a lot of black folks moved from down South up there and settled there, and Chicago as well. Were your folks, did they come up from the South?

WAKEFIELD:

My father was from Arkansas. He actually grew up on a cotton farm in Arkansas.

WAKEFIELD:

And one of the big challenges was my relationship with my grandfather who owned that farm. He was mean because he grew up, he was the son of people who were born as slaves, and the way he treated people was the way he had seen people treated. He actually had 13 kids because it was his goal to make sure that he had enough people to work his farm.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Wow. And you mentioned in passing, I'm going to jump right to this, your grandfather. You mentioned in your prep interview that you had a grandfather who was murdered. Was that that grandfather?

WAKEFIELD:

It was that grandfather. Years later, he refused to sell his farm to the sheriff in the County where they were, and he was accidentally run over by the Sheriff's deputy,

WAKEFIELD:

it's the story we were told as a family. So my family held onto that land for years and years and years because there was no way we were going to let that incident be the way that they were able to take over.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Wow. How old were you when that happened?

WAKEFIELD:

I was a teenager. I don't remember. I don't remember exactly

MASON FUNK:

When you say it was framed as an accident. Was that a framing that everybody bought into?

WAKEFIELD:

I don't think my father and his siblings bought into that framing at all, and therefore, as the children and grandchildren, we didn't buy into it. It was pretty unusual though, to be able to fight back that kind of incident, especially from afar, from as far away as Chicago.

WAKEFIELD:

There was one sister that still lived in Arkansas and she was in the process of moving, at that time, to Atlanta. So there was really no way there were any of us that could have taken over the farm.

MASON FUNK:

But you managed, as a family, to hold onto the land for a good long while afterwards.

WAKEFIELD:

For sure.

MASON FUNK:

Our lives are so different, but what does that story mean to you today?

WAKEFIELD:

Well, it's a challenge because when I think about today, actually, for me, today is a challenging day to do an interview for a historic archive or for historic reckoning, because as I think of the world we live in today,

WAKEFIELD:

it's been a monumental week. I spent my career working on HIV vaccines. I left because my coworkers pivoted to work on COVID vaccines. So to have the first COVID vaccine delivered yesterday to have a couple of my friends this morning, in Los Angeles, enter into a new COVID vaccine study

WAKEFIELD:

said clearly to me having vaccines that we can distribute is not the end of the COVID pandemic, but here we are in a pandemic where more people have died than died in world war two. And we still haven't found a way to memorialize the people that we've lost in just a few short months. Now, as somebody who's been through a lot of grief and loss,

WAKEFIELD:

I found myself today thinking about the AIDS Memorial quilt, and thinking about the importance of that symbol of the quilts that we made of the ways that we used that as a protest in Washington. But also as the ways we used it to find some closure to the relationships that we had, it's hard. So when you ask what it means today, I'm in a world

WAKEFIELD:

where there's tremendous grief and loss. And I wish for all of the families that have lost someone to the COVID disease, that they find something like the Memorial quilt that allows people to cross barriers, allows people to say, "That's my son, so I'm going to make this quilt with his partner. That was my nephew. That was my cousin. I'm going to do something

WAKEFIELD:

that feels like contrary action, because it's the right thing for me to do to process my grief." It's a hard day. I'll stop talking before we spend the rest of our time in tears.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, yeah. Last year. Okay. Well, thank you for that. I value the opportunity to talk to you as a researcher, as an HIV/AIDS researcher,

MASON FUNK:

as a medical researcher and expert, in this time of COVID during this very momentous

[inaudible] is quite serendipitous and quite moving. Given everything that we've all experienced as a country, and your mention of the quilt is very powerful, heightening against, once again the huge value that that quilt had for our community, and for the world, because it humanized what was otherwise a horrible disease.

MASON FUNK:

Let's zoom back to, no pun intended, your childhood.

WAKEFIELD:

Okay.

MASON FUNK:

One of the things you said to Ray was that as a young man, your goal was to be a teacher but that never could have happened. Can you talk about that and explain why?

WAKEFIELD:

Well, it certainly was my goal as a young man to become a teacher, and in many ways, I want to credit the movie,

WAKEFIELD:

The Thorn birds, because there was this beautiful actor, and I had a high school chemistry teacher who looked like him, who came to my home when I broke my hip. And that convinced me that this teaching profession must be good. I actually went to university with multiple majors with a goal of becoming a teacher. And you don't do student teaching until your last hours at the university.

WAKEFIELD:

It was challenging to have the goal of becoming a teacher during the years where I was still coming out to myself and to others where I was realizing who I was as a gay man, because what was true is that if you were at a gay bar and they had a raid on a gay bar, the local papers would always publish the names of everyone that was arrested. The assumption was you're a pedophile

WAKEFIELD:

and that you wouldn't have been in that gay bar unless you were doing something that was totally abhorrent. I struggled with my desire to be a teacher, but I also knew that that's what I really wanted. I got a teaching degree. I spent the time student teaching and I actually began my post

WAKEFIELD:

baccalaureate career as a teacher. But I was the only black teacher in a school where I didn't have the support of the administration, and I didn't have the support of my department head. I always wondered, was this because I was young or was it because I was black? There were 250 black students in the school. Every single time one of them became a discipline challenge,

WAKEFIELD:

they were sent to my classroom, rather than sent to the Dean's office because I was supposed to "fix the problem". But I had a lot of fun teaching. My first big challenge happened the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I brought a card table in and had my kids paying attention to nonverbal cues as people were playing cards.

WAKEFIELD:

Found that that was a reasonable lesson plan with my department head, but during the fourth hour, the principal came in, and what I've always called his Jesus in the temple moment, and said, "You have to stop this gambling immediately. We have rules in this school against gambling." There was no gambling going on, my kids were learning. That was the beginning of a challenge with me in that teaching administration.

WAKEFIELD:

In the spring, I had a similar experience when my spring play was Peter Pan. I picked Peter Pan because there are lots of pirates, lots of Lost Boys and lots of engines. But at the end of the story, in the play, the Darling family, which is a white family, and I cast all white people, adopts all the Lost Boys.

WAKEFIELD:

I was called before the school board and they couldn't get a meeting before the last night of the production. They wanted me to come in, but they wouldn't tell me why I was being summoned before the school board. We start the meeting and they call me up front and they say, "We want to know why you're promoting interracial adoption." I said, "What?"

WAKEFIELD:

"Why did you pick a play that promotes interracial adoption?" I didn't have any idea what they were talking about at first, and then I realized that they felt that somehow or another, I was going against the social norm and doing something that was a civil rights action. All I was doing was trying to be a good teacher and have a lot of kids have a really wonderful theater experience, which they did.

WAKEFIELD:

It was enough to convince me that I was not going to return for another year of teaching and I didn't.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Where was this?

WAKEFIELD:

The suburbs of Chicago, the near suburbs.

MASON FUNK:

I will actually ask you, give me this in a full ... I need to this statement a little bit early on, just give me a little bit of a full statement. I got my first teaching job in ...

WAKEFIELD:

Right. I got my first teaching job in the suburbs of Chicago,

WAKEFIELD:

actually very close to the city limits. And I was really surprised at the responses that were there, in that school district, to my teaching style.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. After one year you realized this just wasn't gonna work out.

WAKEFIELD:

I realized after one year that this wasn't going to work out.

WAKEFIELD:

It was a time when lots of industries were trying to recruit black managers and I had worked part-time for Sears. Sears offered me a job as a management trainee, and they had a very special program for management trainees. There were 26 of us, about half of us being people of color. I entered that program and had my introduction to Waterloo, Iowa, beautiful Waterloo,

WAKEFIELD:

Iowa at the hands of Sears robot. But also worked in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin for a while. Found a lot of management skills, but ended up missing Chicago throughout my time at university, in my time working for Sears in various cities, I still always identified as a Chicagoan, and I was really happy to get back to Chicago.

MASON FUNK:

And what took you back there?

WAKEFIELD:

My sense of racism, once again -- I've lived this strange life. I went back to Chicago because I felt that the management that I was working for in Clarksville, Indiana, Southern Indiana, was a racist management. I was not promoted. There were two people in the store that had exactly the same job title.

WAKEFIELD:

I was making $8,000 a year as a management trainee, the other person was making $22,000 a year. Neither of which sounds like a lot of money today, but there was a big disparity in what we were making. When I had my annual review, I asked the store manager what I could do, what would make a difference? And he said, "Well, you're just a management trainee, we can't possibly promote you or give you more money,

WAKEFIELD:

because it would ruin your upward mobility." So I upwardly mobilized myself back to Chicago and found happiness, looking for work and living back with my parents.

MASON FUNK:

Can you explain what he meant when he said it was going to hurt your upward mobility? That doesn't make any sense to me.

WAKEFIELD:

I think that what he meant was that if they promoted me later ...

MASON FUNK:

Pause one second. I hear a siren and it seems to be gone. Carry on.

WAKEFIELD:

Okay. In thinking about what he might've meant by upward mobility, the challenge is I can only attribute motive. But my sense, when I got home that night, was that he felt he had to keep me at a low enough salary that they could continue to promote me

WAKEFIELD:

without paying me for the work that I was doing. That person who had the competing salary had only worked for the company two years more than I had. So I didn't think that he was having anything to do with longevity, but it was clear to me he was white and I was not. This continued to affect my sense of what it's like to work as a black man in America.

MASON FUNK:

One of the things that we really value about OUTWORDS is that we're able to capture so many stories about its social history, including the history of race relations and black lives in America over the past half century. And so you're giving us one of those great illustrations and I appreciate you being willing to share.

WAKEFIELD:

Well, I moved back to Chicago, moved in with my parents, but that didn't last very long because my mother was not very happy with the amount of nights I was spending away. She would have been less happy if she'd known I was spending them in gay bars. I met a man and we fell in love. As we fell in love, we decided to live together. It didn't take long.

WAKEFIELD:

We both wanted out of our parents' homes, so we found a place and moved in together.

MASON FUNK:

Now, let me ask you, in your prep interview, you talked about the coming out. I don't know if it was with this gentleman or another that you brought home. Is that this gentleman you're referring to, that you live with, or was it a later one?

WAKEFIELD:

Well, let me tell you a little bit about my coming out story. The first man I ever lived with was someone, who from all outward appearances, might considered openly gay. But we never talked about that. I remember at one point, my dad came to visit and he said, I noticed you guys have separate bedrooms, but it doesn't seem like your friend sleeps in his bedroom very often.

WAKEFIELD:

We had a picture in the top drawer in that bedroom, for each of us to put up if either of our families visited, but we, of course, slept in the master bed. And my dad said your roommate, he's sort of, and I said, yes. And he said, "He doesn't make you do anything you don't want to do. Does he?" And I said, "Oh, never."

WAKEFIELD:

And that was a full extent of our coming out conversation at that point. Several years later, I really believe that for me as an individual, it took me six or seven years to get comfortable with my own sexuality. And I believe that often it takes a family another six or seven years from the time they hear about someone's sexuality to get comfortable with their relative and realize who they are.

WAKEFIELD:

In this particular case, the two of us were years down the road, I had left that relationship and was in a new relationship. In my new relationship, my partner and I had adopted three children that he had by a previous marriage. And we didn't actually adopt them because in Illinois, gay adoption was not legal.

WAKEFIELD:

We worked with an attorney and a judge, and he adopted them and the five of us lived together. We went to Christmas one year at my parents' house, and then following year Thanksgiving, we went to Thanksgiving at my uncle's house. As I said, my father comes from a big family and it was a challenging day because every time I walked in the room,

WAKEFIELD:

the conversation stopped. Finally, I asked what was going on, and was able to say to my partner, I said, "I think we need to go." We took the kids home. I drove back to my parents' house, which was about a half hour drive. And told my father that your brother told me that I'm welcome at family gatherings,

WAKEFIELD:

but my friend and those children are not. I said, "Well, then I'm not." Said that to his brother, but I told my dad, why? I said, "I'm a gay man. This is my partner." I drove back to my partner and I said to him, "I just broke up with the first man I ever loved." He had this look of horror on his face, because he thought that meant that he and I were breaking up.

WAKEFIELD:

But I realized I loved my dad. And he was heartbroken at that moment. We worked for a couple of years on our relationship and I sought outside help and a therapist, who suggested that with my family, my parents, that we meet for lunch because lunch has a finite time frame, and you can always say, "I have to get back to work." After one of these lunches, my dad, my mom

WAKEFIELD:

and I were sitting in the car in front of my workplace, and my mother, in a typical rage, said, "We're never going to accept your family. We just can't." My dad turned, and he had a tear in his eye. I hadn't seen a tear to his eyes since his father had been accidentally run over by this sheriff. He said, "Honey, we may not be able to agree.

WAKEFIELD:

That's my son, and he's always going to be my son." And so I only saw tears in his eyes twice in his entire lifetime. Even when my mother passed away, he told me it was my job to keep him from shedding tears. Which was not a job that I wanted, but since I was the oldest, I accepted it. But it was significant to me that this man loved me enough

WAKEFIELD:

to go against his own set of values and embrace my life. And I would say that that's also a challenge that he knew that as he was saying that there were members of his group of friends, there were members of the leaders of his church who would tell him that he was wrong,

WAKEFIELD:

that he couldn't possibly do that. It was a big moment of sacrifice for him, but it also became a place where we were able to bond, and the beginning, actually, of many, many ways that he supported me as an individual. It seems like I would like to, at this point, just share a little bit about why I go by Wakefield.

WAKEFIELD:

My dad was supportive, but it was always a challenge. I remember one year, on new year's day, I get this call and he says, "Boy, have you seen the paper?" I said, "No."

WAKEFIELD:

He said, "Pick one up on your way out here." He had a big new year's day open house, usually 50 to a hundred people every year passed through his home. I drove out to his house and I realized I didn't pick up the paper. I backtrack a couple of blocks, picked up the paper and it said, "What gay activist, Steve Wakefield says about HIV." And I thought, what a headline.

WAKEFIELD:

I took the paper and rolled it over and handed it to him. And he said, I've been waiting to see this all day. My coworkers have been calling. He was Steve Wakefield and I was Steve Wakefield. He took the paper, shared it with all of his guests, told me how proud he was of the work that I was doing. And it was a wonderful day until in that cold of January, in a Chicago winter,

WAKEFIELD:

he ran out as I was leaving, he ran out into the driveway and said, "Boy, you know how you go by Wakefield all the time? Would you mind doing that every place?" And that was his way of saying he didn't want to be known as a gay activist any longer, but it was fine with me. And I've gone by Wakefield ever since.

MASON FUNK:

Huh. That's amazing. You're painting such a great, amazing portrait of your dad.

WAKEFIELD:

I painted him an amazing portrait of my dad because many of my values, most of my values came from that family life. I really appreciate that you are giving me an opportunity to talk about that. I was taught as a child that, "That's what parents do". I wasn't taught by, "And that's what citizens do."

WAKEFIELD:

I wasn't taught by anybody giving me a specific lesson. My mother was always an election judge, my dad was the president of the library association, my mother was the president of the PTA. I remember once, at dinner, my mother said, "Oh my God, can any of my children join anything without being the leader?" And we had a family moment

WAKEFIELD:

where my siblings and I ran to get the world book encyclopedia, and started looking up leadership and screaming, "So what does leader mean to you?" "Do you know anybody around here that's been a leader?" And we made fun of our parents for about 15 minutes because they had always been civic leaders. They had always brought their values, whether it was the institution of the church,

WAKEFIELD:

or the school or anything else, to the work and the lives that they lived in community. And it's been a challenge for me because it makes it hard for me today to say no. When people call about making sure the cities we live in are great places to live.

MASON FUNK:

What do you think, it may seem obvious, but what was behind your parents ...

MASON FUNK:

The point is they made to join this board, lead this organization, what was motivating them? And in turn, what, maybe for you ... Well, let's stick with them for now. What was motivating that, why did they choose to be leaders, to lead this organization, to run this organization, why?

WAKEFIELD:

I wish I could say that. I think my parents chose to be leaders. I think my parents saw that it was important as citizens of the world to live a life where you show up for your neighbors. Whether that means dropping a sack of groceries on their doorstep or being in a leadership position that's official and elected and selected by colleagues was important to them.

WAKEFIELD:

And that was a value they taught us. One holiday season, a family in the neighborhood had a fire. No lives were lost, but they're home was lost. But one of the most useful things for me in forming my own values was my parents said that each of us was going to be able to get a gift for a kid in that family.

WAKEFIELD:

We needed to pick the kid and we needed to pick the gift. He said, "That might mean you won't get as many things this year as you want." But they passed on their value for other people in the community to their children, just by example.

MASON FUNK:

Well, great. We could go on, however, 45 minutes have gone past and we do have a lot of other ground to cover.

[inaudible] begin hopscotching a little bit

WAKEFIELD:

Before you do, before you do, Andrew may see that something has popped up on the screen and he may want to get rid of that.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, Andrew.

WAKEFIELD:

Thank you.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. That's the easiest edit we'll ever have to do. Let me look over my list of questions.

MASON FUNK:

Your big move into the world of healthcare and research was that you moved, I had this in my notes, from chemical engineering. Somehow, you made your way into chemical engineering. We don't necessarily need to spend time on that, unless you think it's really important, because we have a lot of other ground to cover. You went to work at someplace called Howard Brown health center.

MASON FUNK:

What, I guess, I want to kind of go at here is what drew you into the field of HIV/AIDS research and care and services. How did that enter your life? Yeah. How did that come into your professional life?

WAKEFIELD:

One of the exciting things for me is that the career where I was able to marry my vocation and my avocation happened through accidental, wonderful, serendipitous circumstances. At one point in my life, I decided I was tired of meeting gay men at gay bars, because they weren't really interested in relationships

WAKEFIELD:

and their values weren't always the same as mine. So I volunteered at an underground clinic that was in the storefront in Chicago, where people received STD services, in conjunction with epidemiology done by the city of Chicago, in a room that was divided by sheets on clotheslines, and there were volunteer docs.

WAKEFIELD:

And at that point in history, about 20% of the gay men on the street, who were gay identified, were known to have hepatitis B and there was work happening for hepatitis B vaccine. The great news about that vaccine as it was about 15 years from the time they identified what caused it to the time we had a hepatitis B vaccine,

WAKEFIELD:

and we thought that was really fast. I was a volunteer at that clinic, and at one point my friend said, "Wakefield, you should get on the board." I said, "Why?" They said, "We don't have any representative on the board of directors." I said, "But, but, but" They said, "No, you'll be fine. You're a leader. You do it. It'll be okay." I joined the board

WAKEFIELD:

as a person whose total medical experience was a volunteer phlebotomist. I'd been on the board for a short time, and the next thing I realized was that we found ourselves in the beginning of the current and existing HIV/AIDS crisis. I remember our social worker coming to a board meeting and asking us to find a way to give her $2,000,

WAKEFIELD:

just $2,000 for a short term project we were going to call the AIDS action project. We, as a board, said, "We've got to do this. We don't know where we're going to get the money. We may have to raise the money. We're going to get this money." At the same time, the medical director of the organization put in an application to NIH for a grant

WAKEFIELD:

to start a long-term natural history study. Well, it turned out that NIH gave grants to five universities and one community-based organization, ours. I could tell a very long version of the next couple of months, but one of the things that really helped was, as the board chair,

WAKEFIELD:

I was given a check for $10,000 to take down and sign on a new property we were going to move to, in order to open up a clinic. I made the mistake of reading the lease on the way to the signing. Having worked in manufacturing and managed warehouses for years, I said, "We're not signing this lease." I tried to negotiate with the property owner, and he said,

WAKEFIELD:

"What do you mean I'd have to put in bathrooms for any tenant?" I came back, I tore up the check in front of him, came back and told the board, this was not going to work. A few weeks later, much to my challenge, I was asked if I would come to work full time at Howard Brown, and help us make this transition to working in HIV. We still had a really wonderful director

WAKEFIELD:

who continued to direct the organization. I became the deputy and helped make that transition.

MASON FUNK:

Give me a sense of how old you were, just contextualized. Just say something like, "This all happened when I was around X years old."

WAKEFIELD:

Well, I mean, I'd have to figure that out. That would've been '86? I was born in '52.

MASON FUNK:

In your mid thirties.

WAKEFIELD:

In my mid thirties. I was 34. Here I was at 34 years of age, once again, changing careers because of the circumstances in my life. I, like everyone else in the community, was living through the early days of the HIV epidemic. I was losing friends. We were trying to figure out how to do Memorial services and asking ourselves,

WAKEFIELD:

"Can you really wear a full leather outfit to a Memorial service at a church?" And saying, "Of course you can," because the person that just passed away would want nothing else. I ended up working at Howard Brown and learning from a community of doctors and scientists, how to respond to the HIV epidemic. Unfortunately,

WAKEFIELD:

during that time, for me, my then partner was also living with HIV and I had to manage his health. And one of the most painful stories in my life was going to the hospital one night with him, where we had to pay cash to the ambulance because they didn't want to take anybody with HIV unless they had enough extra money to sanitize the ambulance after carrying him to the hospital.

WAKEFIELD:

We get to the hospital and I fill out the forms, and the young lady behind the desk said to me, out of her own fear, as I went to hand her the pen back, "If you have what he has, just drop that in the garbage can, I don't want to touch it." It was hurtful. It was painful. That was the beginning of a great deal of pain and loss,

WAKEFIELD:

as my partner didn't live long. And I found myself, even though I had gone to Howard Brown and helped them pivot from a storefront clinic to a medical center that could actually do research, I couldn't work there any longer. I left, 1987, October. I decided I needed to leave, and I left. I didn't do anything for a while,

WAKEFIELD:

because the depression was just too great. Fortunately, I was able to get back on my feet and there was an organization called Test Positive Aware Network, which did support groups for people living with HIV and their families, and they were looking for a director. I knew how to be a director, and by Jove they were gonna hire me. Interviewed and was very happy to be able to lead that organization for five years.

WAKEFIELD:

We were in Chicago. The real information about HIV/AIDS was in New York and San Francisco. Most of the docs who were responding and responding well were themselves young gay men who were interested in doing what they could for their community, whether they were infectious disease docs or not. I knew that we needed that same information in Chicago,

WAKEFIELD:

and more importantly, black people needed that information, but I couldn't lead with that. I needed to lead with the fact that we needed to come together as a community. And I was able to work with a really wonderful group of people at Test Positive Aware Network, where our slogan was, "Committed to living". It was a fabulous five years until it wasn't a fabulous five years.

WAKEFIELD:

That, for me, wasn't because of anything that happened in the organization, but I found myself meeting individuals and having to process grief and loss far too quickly. The phone would ring in the middle of the afternoon, and they would say that one of our members had passed away. It was my job to go put something on the bulletin board

WAKEFIELD:

and go right back to managing a contract or figuring out a lease or doing something that directors do. Because of that grief and loss, I needed to go do something different. It was interesting during that time frame at Test Positive Aware, there was a group called Act Up Chicago. People know about Act Up New York

WAKEFIELD:

and people know about Act Up Golden Gate and Act Up San Francisco, but they don't know about Act Up Chicago. Act Up Chicago had their headquarters in my Test Positive Aware organization's office. There were some days when they would say to me, you're the director, you're on the board of health for the city of Chicago, you just stay in your office, we're going to bring you lunch. They would let me go for restroom breaks, but other than that, I was to stay in my office.

WAKEFIELD:

I remember one delightful evening. We were introducing a new head of the department of health, and she happened to be a nun. I knew they were planning some sort of action at the public event introducing her. And I begged them, I said, "Please give me just a half hour, give me a half hour."

WAKEFIELD:

Because it was my job as a member of the board of health to introduce her to the community. We got a half hour, meeting started at 8. 8:31, the demonstration broke out. And I recognized all kinds of artifacts from my office that they had gathered to make sure they had an effective demonstration, but it was a great life to live.

WAKEFIELD:

What's really important, I think, to continue is that that work at Test Positive Aware affected me to the point where I was back to that grief and loss that had caused me to leave Howard Brown. I reached a point where I said, "I just can't." I resigned and went to do something easy. I told my friends,

WAKEFIELD:

I said, "I have to go do something where it's different." So, I went to work on homeless and runaway youth. I went to work for a wonderful organization called The Night Ministry -- that was supported by 200 churches in 25 synagogues in the city of Chicago -- that did street outreach and provided shelters for homeless youth, emergency shelters and domestic violence shelters. At the end of the first week,

WAKEFIELD:

my best friend Denise called, she said, "So, how was the new job?" And I said, "It was great. Nobody died." She said, "Nobody died? That's the criteria for a great week?" I said, "It is now." It really was. It was what I needed at the time to sustain and to keep going. During that time frame, I was able to volunteer and protest at the same time at NIH.

WAKEFIELD:

We were fortunate to have individuals who were hanging people like Tony Fuci and the man who I worked for the last 20 years in effigy, outside of the NIH offices, you know, Dr. Larry Corey. I was pleased to see all of that happening, but at the same time,

WAKEFIELD:

I knew from the early HIV protest that we needed to have street people and table people. So I made sure I was one of the table people. I would go in and sit at the NIH tables. I would show up at meetings. I learned how to read the federal register and find out when they were having the next scientific meeting. And we kept saying to them, you must have community folks on the committees.

WAKEFIELD:

And I became that community guy that was willing to be on the prevention side. There are a lot of great people on the treatment side. I even ended up on the treatment side on one of the protocol teams. And my hats off to the scientist who led that protocol team, because when it came time to publish the successful results, they called me for my credentials. I said, my credentials are as a school teacher.

WAKEFIELD:

They said, "You're part of the protocol team. We're going to publish, and you're going to be on the publication with us." And that started us down a path where, for all of the publications, the community folks who were involved in HIV research were recognized fully as part of the protocol teams and able to sit at the table as full members and participate.

WAKEFIELD:

Now, I wasn't the only one, but those other people on the other protocol teams, we had our side meetings, we had our side phone calls, and we went to scientific meetings. Part of the fun of those scientific meetings was you didn't have to have an invitation, they were public meetings and public gatherings. And you didn't have to have a lot of money. If one person had a hotel room,

WAKEFIELD:

six people had a hotel room. That was the way we were doing the work that we were doing at the time. It was great to be involved in research that way.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Let me get my bearings. You mentioned a minute ago, the person you worked for for 20 years. Is that the organization you retired from as well?

WAKEFIELD:

It is. Just to sort of give context, I worked for The Night Ministry for five years and realized that they were getting 80% of my energy, but my heart was back in HIV work. And I had made myself a promise that if The Night Ministries budget ever exceeded 20% HIV work, I would leave the organization.

WAKEFIELD:

One year, we passed the budget and I announced at the end of the budget vote that I would be resigning. They said, "What?" I said, "It's a promise I made to myself." They said, "You can't." I said, "Well, we just passed a budget that's 21% HIV work, and that's where my heart is." A few months later, I left that. I was fortunate to take six months off, and it was a wonderful six months,

WAKEFIELD:

in 1999. During that six months, I went to South Africa, I met the wonderful couple, Quarraisha and Salim Kareem, who now head the CAPRISA center in South Africa. At that time they were in Johannesburg. I said, "What can I do? I can't just come out here and hang out with you guys every day." They said, "Well, we need community surveys."

WAKEFIELD:

I said, "Sure." So I spent two months doing street interrupt surveys and getting information about what people thought about their research. They were committed to community engagement in their research. And I was committed to making sure South Africans spoke for themselves, not some American who did their street interrupt survey. And we became great partners in that.

MASON FUNK:

That clearly informed, in some way, the next 20 years. Well, it came out of your past and informed your future, but where did you go at the end of those six months in terms of this 20 year engagement?

WAKEFIELD:

I went to South Africa, but I came home at the end of September.

WAKEFIELD:

On October 1st, I got a call from a friend who worked for a pharmaceutical company, and she said, "Are you ready to talk about a job?" I said, "Am I what?" She said, "You told me not to bother you for three months after you left The Night Ministry, and it's three months." I said, "It's Friday afternoon." She said, "You didn't say anything about what day of the week." I said, "Call me back Monday."

WAKEFIELD:

I spent the weekend scrambling, trying to figure out what I might want to do next. That same day that she called, the Fred Hutch cancer center in Seattle, under the guidance of Dr. Larry Corey was awarded doing HIV vaccine research. I was a vaccine advocate. I believed in vaccines from my work in doing hepatitis B vaccine work and wanted to see a vaccine

WAKEFIELD:

that would work in my lifetime. So I called Dr. Corey's office, they didn't take my call. I sent an email, no response. I got friends who are scientists to send them letters, no response. I went to a meeting Dr. Corey was hosting in Washington, DC in October, late October, about world science and global research,

WAKEFIELD:

including Africa. He had been awarded nine US sites and one South African site. I went to the meeting and sat on the front row. The first scientist that got up was from Uganda. And he said, "Before I do my talk today, I just want to thank Wakefield. He came to Uganda three times

WAKEFIELD:

to help us sort out the ethics around HIV vaccine research." I thought, Ooh, nice, Dr. Corey's going to hear this. The second person that got up was Salim Karim from South Africa, and he said, "I would thank Wakefield too, but you're going to see ..." he had 10 slides, my picture was in three of his slides. There was a reception after that meeting

WAKEFIELD:

and Dr. Corey said, "I guess I should talk to you." I thought, you should talk to me. I ended up coming to Seattle in January of 2000 to do community work around HIV vaccine research and community engagement work. Thought I would stay three to five years. I'd never been at a job more than five years before.

WAKEFIELD:

20 years later, I retired from that jobm, and I still love it. One of my biggest challenges in retirement is the HIV epidemic isn't over. We have biomedical interventions, we have all of the tools we need. We don't yet have the political will. We don't yet have the resources that we need to

[inaudible] in the epidemic.

WAKEFIELD:

I'm worried, that we won't be able to convince the leadership of the incoming federal government or the next couple of administrations to continue to put the resources, but more importantly, to continue to take what we've learned. The joy of having a COVID vaccine

WAKEFIELD:

is it was based on a platform of years and years of HIV vaccine research. They were able to take what we learned, take young, new scientists and create this vaccine in just a few short months. That won't work for HIV because COVID is a disease in which lots of people have cleared the disease naturally. We can compare what a vaccine teaches you to

WAKEFIELD:

what natural clearance is. We've got ways to go in HIV, but more importantly for me, in HIV, we've got ways to go to get the medical interventions we have today in the hands of Black, Brown, poor people, women, and folks who have differential access to healthcare in order to end the HIV epidemic. It's not going to happen just because someone realizes there's a need for the work.

WAKEFIELD:

It's going to happen because there's leadership that believes in the work

MASON FUNK:

That is such an important topic to delve into. But I think it might be good just to take a minute or two here to just breathe and shake it out. Because I feel like we're walking right to the edge of like a really, really big topic. I don't know if you want to stand up and stretch. If you want to run to the restroom,

MASON FUNK:

I might go refill my water bottle. From one of our corporate sponsors, they're in Seattle, Microsoft. Andrew, you can just shut down the recording for a couple of minutes.

ANDREW LUSH:

Okay. sure. It might be easiest to let things run, unless that's an issue.

WAKEFIELD:

It's not an issue for me. I promise not to say anything or if somebody knocks on the door and wants to have sex, I'll make sure they wait.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Just, just an hour. It's all in. We'll be back here in about four minutes.

WAKEFIELD:

Okay.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you.

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WAKEFIELD:

Okay. And has the light changed?

MASON FUNK:

No. We're good.

WAKEFIELD:

Alright. Well, it's raining.

MASON FUNK:

It's raining?

WAKEFIELD:

It's Seattle, it's supposed to be raining.

MASON FUNK:

Yes. Andrew says the light looks good, so we're good to go. So I think the first question I want to ask going back to the last things we were talking about is can you explain for us in simple lay person's terms,

MASON FUNK:

what you mean when you say the COVID vaccine was built on research that was done in the quest for an HIV/AIDS vaccine. Like high school biology, biochemistry, one-on-one, simple three to five minute explanation. I'd like to see how you're rubbing your eyes.

WAKEFIELD:

Okay. Gimme, gimme a second. So when I start out I'll have something.

WAKEFIELD:

I'm not sure I have-- Because I'm not doing the work, it's not something I do often. But, okay, I will try.

MASON FUNK:

Okay.

WAKEFIELD:

One of the most exciting things about having a COVID vaccine is we were able to develop it in just a few months and we were able to test it in just a few months and we were able to get an answer. Now, the reason we believe that answer and the hardest part about that answer is we have so much COVID disease in our communities that people are becoming infected. So people who have had the vaccine

WAKEFIELD:

without ever doing anything other than living their lives are being exposed to COVID disease, and we're able to see that the vaccine works. A vaccine is a really wonderful thing. We take lots of vaccines. Most of them we take when we're children, before age five. They teach the body to recognize the disease and to fight that disease.

WAKEFIELD:

We've been able to, in the last 20 years, test a number of vaccines and learn that animal models don't always teach us what we need to know because humans are humans. That we really have to test the vaccine in humans to know whether or not it works, and whether or not it has taught the body's immune defenses

WAKEFIELD:

to mount the right defense against the virus that it's looking at. The good news for us is some of the ways that we used to make HIV vaccines have been eliminated. They were eliminated because they didn't give us an immune response, and they didn't teach the body

WAKEFIELD:

to mount defense rapidly enough or strong enough. What has happened, in addition to the development of vaccines, have been tests to know just how much response is the body mounting? What is the body doing to fight this disease? And we were able to take six or seven of those different types of vaccine,

WAKEFIELD:

we were able to take what we know about antibodies and begin to develop both treatments for COVID and test vaccines. The treatments are really useful and some of them come right out of products that were originally developed to fight HIV. What many people don't remember is that AZT, the first drug that ever fought HIV

WAKEFIELD:

was "a failed cancer drug". We were able to give it to people right away because it had been tested in humans. We didn't have the right dosage, and it took us a while to learn that one drug wasn't going to fight HIV. It was going to take two or three. Those lessons learned in HIV are going to be key to developing COVID fighting drugs.

WAKEFIELD:

There are already strategies out there, for example, where you give somebody steroids and you give them a drug that helps people have a less horrifying case of COVID disease. There's a lot that we've learned in the laboratory and in the research area, it's going to get us through this COVID epidemic in record time.

WAKEFIELD:

The challenge for me is people believe because we have a biomedical intervention, because we have a vaccine, that everybody should be fighting to get that one vaccine. There are still five or six other vaccines being tested in the US and around the world. There's lots of vaccines being tested. The sad part is we don't share our information for China or India who are countries that have made wonderful vaccines.

WAKEFIELD:

I hope that they won't retaliate. I hope that they will share what they discover with us because that will help all of us be able to fight COVID in a much more rapid response. You're muted.

MASON FUNK:

Sorry. Super helpful. I know there's way, way, way, many more layers to go, but I feel like that does a good job of giving a little bit of it.

WAKEFIELD:

What I was trying to come up with is something that compared it to our phones. Our phone rings, and if it's someone who's called us before and we want them to call us, we recognize their number because our phone says it's our friend calling. If it's someone who hasn't called before and we don't know them,

WAKEFIELD:

our response is, well, hopefully they'll leave a voicemail. A vaccine teaches the body to say, that's COVID I know to respond, and I know what to do to make sure that this virus doesn't take over this human's body.

MASON FUNK:

Great. That's a great metaphor. That makes it super clear. Now, let me ask you this. You also said we haven't had the political will

MASON FUNK:

to develop a vaccine for HIV/AIDS that sell it. Can you see like there's a lot to unpack there. And one thing that occurs to me is this may have to do with, well, I would love you to just take that sentence and kind of break it down and kind of parse it in and pull back some of the layers and explain what you mean by that. Where have we not had the political will? Why have we not?

WAKEFIELD:

When I think about not having the political will to develop an HIV vaccine, I have to look at HIV from the very beginning. We tried to relegate it to unwanted people or people that we wanted to say were challenging. I very much remember the 4H club, haemophiliacs, Haitians,

WAKEFIELD:

heroin addicts, and homosexuals. It was a virus. It wasn't picking people based on a behavior or a place that they came from. It was a virus. HIV continues to be indiscriminate. It's gonna attack whenever it has a chance to get in. And it's a smart virus. To make an HIV vaccine, just as we had to learn with drugs,

WAKEFIELD:

that there were smarter ways to make the drugs, and then we could make smarter drugs and we could take a drug that used to be five pills, five different drugs, combine them in one pill. There are smarter ways to treat HIV. A vaccine is going to have to be smarter than this very smart virus. And it's going to have to call not just on one part of the immune system,

WAKEFIELD:

but on two or three parts of the immune system to mount a response quickly, we have maybe 72 hours from the time a that person is exposed to HIV for that immune response to start. When you think of politics, that means, for me, we have to have a combined public private response. One of the things that happened wonderfully with COVID

WAKEFIELD:

was several industries were interested. Several pharmaceutical companies said, "I'll get in there. We know how to make vaccines. We have engineers, and we can put two, three, four hundred engineers on the same problem and solve it." At the same time we had philanthropists like bill Gates say, "Well, I don't know which kind of vaccine is going to work, but it's got to take seven different kinds of factories to make it.

WAKEFIELD:

I'll start building manufacturing plants." And we started building seven different types of manufacturing plants. And those plants are now available to make vaccines. That kind of public private response is not mounted for a disease where people still think it only affects unwanted folks, poor folks, gay folks.

WAKEFIELD:

I don't know that, with the other challenges we're going to have economically post COVID, with the kind of infrastructure challenges we have as a nation who hasn't paid attention to our infrastructure, that we're going to see the dollars put into HIV, particularly when we've told the public, our publics,

WAKEFIELD:

that science does not provide us with the answers. We have mounted such a fight against the CDC. We have taken NIH -- a place where clear research to solve problems continues to happen for a whole host of diseases, whether it's the heart, whether it's blood, whether it's the lungs, the nervous system --

WAKEFIELD:

and said, they don't know what they're doing. And there are people who question that. Now we've even gotten people to begin to question the FDA approval process. And believe that somehow or another, it's tainted with politics. We need to restore trust, and we need to fund scientists to end HIV. We need to make sure

WAKEFIELD:

we don't continue to have COVID infections at a high rate because people think they have rights not to do things. I read something earlier today that really struck me. We know smoking causes lung cancer, and you have a right to smoke, but you don't have a right to smoke in a public place any longer.

WAKEFIELD:

You can have all the lung cancer you're willing to have and not give it to other people. And that's not a problem. You have a right to drink alcohol, you have a right to get rip-roaring drunk and fall down. You don't have the right to get behind a car wheel and put other people at risk. If only we could get people to realize putting on a mask is taking care of themselves and taking care of other people and move forward.

MASON FUNK:

I agree a hundred percent. It's still hard to understand how people don't make that equation, but I know that a lot of people don't, but let me ask you this. As someone who has given a huge part of your career to battling HIV/AIDS on a number of fronts,

MASON FUNK:

in a number of ways, but especially the last 20 years, working in the research around the vaccine, how does it feel to see the so-called new kid on the block? COVID and of course, the massive resources that were gathered and provided and dedicated, to the point where a vaccine was developed in less than a year.

MASON FUNK:

Because these aren't the untouchables, this is "everybody". Does that promote some kind of an emotional response in you?

WAKEFIELD:

When I think about whether or not there is a challenge for me around the fact that we've put all these resources into COVID research versus HIV research versus

WAKEFIELD:

any disease research that affects people that I know. What I'm grateful for is that this rapid response has helped shine a spotlight on the needs of a healthcare system that doesn't provide evenly. That there isn't equity in providing healthcare or access

WAKEFIELD:

to what we know about science. I'm grateful for that. I believe that that's going to lead us going forward into activities and into responses that say, "You know, last year I stood in the streets saying Black lives matter, this year, I get to sit at a desk. I get to sit in the halls of Congress. I get to sit in the halls of my local legislature and say,

WAKEFIELD:

it's not just black lives matter, all lives matter." We need to find ways to make sure that whatever the intervention is, that it's accessible for all people. That those people who need help, whether it's around diabetes and nutrition, or whether it's around HIV deserve a healthcare system that responds to their needs.

MASON FUNK:

That takes me back to one of the themes I wanted to explore, which is community-based care. You have spoken, you talked about the time you ... I love you call her Debbie Burke. I only know her as Deborah with the fabulous scarves. You called her Debbie, and you talked about a trip. I'd love to have you tell that story cause it's delightful.

MASON FUNK:

But the theme being the difference between having, having medical care sort of parachuted in as compared with having the medical care, be attuned to the community that it's intended to serve. It's a huge theme, but I wonder if you could kind of take us down that path.

WAKEFIELD:

One of the delights of my work for the last many years

WAKEFIELD:

has been having the trust of scientists, and having that trust that comes from one scientist or one government leader passed on to another government leader. A few years back, I remember being in Thailand, we were going to test an HIV vaccine in Thailand, that had been developed here in the United States. They sent two of us out to figure out

WAKEFIELD:

what to do about community health. One was Dr. Deborah Birx and the other was me. My philosophy was always, we do research with people, not on people. And Dr. Birx, coming from a military background, had a philosophy, you put it in a box car, you develop it, you measure the effectiveness of it, and it works. Well, we were walking through

WAKEFIELD:

the streets of Thailand, we were walking through the fields of Thailand during rainy seasons. She said, "I don't really understand what this is about." And I said, "Let me show you." We went out to communities. We walked door to door in communities, as I really believe Debbie has done during COVID times. I respect her as Dr. Birx,

WAKEFIELD:

but she's become a friend, so I call her Debbie. Said, "They have a community education system. We don't have to build one for vaccines. Let's use the people, if they have in their communities, who teach individuals about community health. The Thai people wanted to help develop a vaccine that would help the rest of the world, and they were willing to let

WAKEFIELD:

these two Americans come in and have conversations with them." It took a lot of listening and she was certainly somebody willing to say, "Well, Wakefield's here. He said let's listen, let's listen." And then take that, what we learned on those streets in Thailand, and figure out how to make it implementable and work with the universities in Thailand

WAKEFIELD:

and work with the health systems in Thailand, so that we did vaccine research. It's important to note that after years and years of failed vaccines, the Thai vaccine was the first one we ever had that actually showed us a signal. It was only 34% effective, which sounds like not a lot,

WAKEFIELD:

but we spent nine years trying to figure out how we got to that 34%, and then we're able to make the next generation vaccine. There are lots of people like Debbie Birx and Tony Fauci, who I call Tony. I mentioned earlier being in Uganda for an ethics conference, and I was there with a really wonderful ethicist that I got to know because I called her on the phone.

WAKEFIELD:

I said, "I've read a couple of articles that you've written. You seem to have an ethical approach that really looks at individuals across the field." And there were people from WHO, who said, "Why don't we send Wakefield to Uganda and let him talk to community folks?" Went to Uganda, and while they were having their meeting with the Ugandan scientist,

WAKEFIELD:

I was having my meetings in the barbershops and with the shoe shine boys who were helping me break apart, why we were having trouble building trust in Uganda, one night at dinner, I was sitting with this ethicist, Dr. Christine Grady, and she said, "My husband also says. My husband also says." I said, you talk like your husband knows me. I said,

WAKEFIELD:

I don't think I know your husband. She said, of course you do, Tony Fauci. You know, we lived in an era where professional women didn't always take on the last name of their husbands. I was really pleasantly surprised to find out that they were in a family where the values of engaging communities are high, and that they both used their professional work to ensure that that became part of the science that was happening at NIH.

MASON FUNK:

That's a great story. Well, I want to circle on to some other topics and we may or may not make it back. These themes, there's so many rich themes to cover. But I don't want to forget

MASON FUNK:

because it's so much of this moment. I was listening to the New York Times podcast, the daily, yesterday, I think. They were talking, as you've heard reported, the very low percentages, reportedly low percentages among people of color, communities of color, who trust this vaccine. I've heard this reported several different places,

MASON FUNK:

percentages in the twenties and the thirties of people in the Latinex Hispanic community and the Black African-American community who say they're going to be willing to take the COVID vaccine. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? In terms of the historical reasons for some of that resistance, maybe other reasons. And, if you were at the head of the vaccination effort, how you would be talking to these communities who have a lot of resistance.

WAKEFIELD:

It is very interesting to me that we keep reading, and what's reported by today's journalists that black and Brown people may not take the vaccine and that they've done these surveys. What I always keep in mind about these wonderful surveys is the people that are answering those surveys are the people that were willing to answer the surveys. They did not do those surveys in a barbershop.

WAKEFIELD:

They did not do those surveys in a housing project. They did them where it was safe and nice to do surveys. Having worked in HIV, vaccine research and encouraging people to participate for years. I remember in particular, one time we went out and we did a really deep in-depth survey with folks about government trust.

WAKEFIELD:

And there were high rates of distrust among Black and Brown people of the U S government. They remembered things like Tuskegee.There was quite a bit of knowledge of Henrietta Lacks in the research that had been done, and the fact that her family didn't benefit and she didn't benefit from the research as much as the entire scientific enterprise benefited.

WAKEFIELD:

The trust was not defined by any one incident. Matter of fact, many people would say, "Well, you know about Tuskegee." You would ask them what happened to Tuskegee, where black men were denied penicillin, and basically given a story that we didn't have anything that would cure what they had, so that scientists could learn more.

WAKEFIELD:

But most of the people that could say, "You know about Tuskegee" had no idea what happened at Tuskegee. What I remember most from that survey were individuals who would say, I won't take anything that's distributed by the federal government, but I'll only take something if it has FDA approval.

WAKEFIELD:

Well, there, wasn't a realization of the of the dichotomy of what they were saying. I'm really proud of the people I've worked with for the last 20 years, because they have learned the value of community engagement. I was excited to watch on the national news and in the rollout of the COVID vaccine, a Black nurse giving a Black woman, one of the earliest doses of this vaccine.

WAKEFIELD:

Because people are going to want to see, do the people giving the vaccine look like me and do the people taking the vaccine look like me. Now, what will be really important in a couple of weeks is to have the woman that took that first dose on TV saying, "Hey, I'm fine." Or, "Hey, I'm not fine", if she's not fine. I'm quite sure she'll be fine. Fairly sure she may be able to say,

WAKEFIELD:

"My arm was sore," or "I had a headache for half a day." But the trust of science is been a big problem. Our current systems that don't allow healthcare workers to build relationships. You get 10 to 12 minutes with any patient, these persons with a lot of fear.

WAKEFIELD:

Now there's a phenomenon called the white coat syndrome. I, as an individual, suffer white coat syndrome. I see a doctor that I have seen for the last 18 years. When I go to his office, my blood pressure is always elevated. If someone else in his office takes my blood pressure, and I see numbers that I haven't seen since my last visit.

WAKEFIELD:

If he takes my blood pressure, it's back down in the normal range. And these kinds of things are not explicable through surveys or going out and asking people what they're going to do, when what they're actually going to do is probably decided at the moment when an intervention is offered.

MASON FUNK:

Again, that's super helpful that provides a lot of layers, a little more nuance than the typical news you hear recorded on the nightly news. So thank you for that. Alright. Looking at my list of questions. Well, one of the things you said

MASON FUNK:

in your written survey-- Well, actually let's go back to HIV, we're going to go one direction back. You said, I think with Ray, if it weren't for the lesbians and you didn't even finish the thought, but of course it went into my notes and I think this is in reference to HIV/AIDS and the worst of the epidemic or not maybe more broadly speaking the entire epidemic, but I wonder if you could finish or unpack that half sentence for us, if it weren't for the lesbians.

WAKEFIELD:

It was always interesting to me to think about identity politics and what has helped me and the people I know and love make it through. Early on in this epidemic, in the HIV epidemic, my friends were all afraid of what might happen to them as an individual. I was afraid of what might happen

WAKEFIELD:

to me as an individual. What I know is that there were lesbians who would come along and they would provide care. They would provide meals. They would provide leadership to organizations that weren't about their health, and they would help us learn lessons from cancer survivors.

WAKEFIELD:

They would help us pay attention to our lives in a way that allowed us to stay in the fight and to believe that our lives mattered. And to get over our fears. You can have a conversation with your lesbian friend about your fears around HIV, long before you could have them with your doctor or with your best friend.

WAKEFIELD:

And I'm just really grateful for the response of the lesbian community. Many people will remember seeing-- I had it, I lost it, there was a movie, Oh, starring Mark Ruffalo. Anyway, in the early days of the gay men's health crisis

WAKEFIELD:

there, there was a movie made with with Hollywood actors that came back and told the story. Let me stop and get the name of the movie. You're on mute.

MASON FUNK:

[inaudible] The Kids Are Alright, but I think it's

WAKEFIELD:

No, it's a Jim Parsons Normal Heart, I believe. Yeah,

MASON FUNK:

Thank you, Andrew.

WAKEFIELD:

One of my delights in life is that many of the things in the HIV epidemic

WAKEFIELD:

have been captured by Hollywood on film. One of the stronger voices of the HIV epidemic wrote a book called the normal heart, and it was made into a movie. In that movie, you get to see lesbians who show up at gay men's health crisis. And they say, "I don't know what I can do, but I'm going to run the helpline." People say, "But what can you do?" And they say,

WAKEFIELD:

"I can listen." That was really paramount for mental health and being able to sustain the fact that our lives had value, is having someone who didn't have to bring their own emotions to the conversation, but could listen and could offer hope and hope is what gets us through. It's gotten us through with the HIV crisis. It's going to get us through the rest of this COVID pandemic

MASON FUNK:

And the importance there of someone, as you said, whose own emotions are not going to get-- Who are not in the mix. Who are able to have that conversation from a non ... They're not carrying the grief, they're not carrying the fear in the same way that a gay man would be.

WAKEFIELD:

Yeah. I think that what is really important about the lesbians is that they were suffering grief and loss with us, and they cared with us about what happened to us as a total community, but they didn't have to carry that grief and loss coupled with a personal fear of their own health. They could continue to love without worrying about personal risk. And that gave them an objectivity that you weren't able to find any place else in the community.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I also wanted to circle back to something you said. Again, can't remember in which, if it was written or in your prep interview. I think it was written in your pre-questionnaire. You said, "Some people think I don't experience discrimination because I work well with LGBT leader."

WAKEFIELD:

I probably did say something like that. One of the things I have certainly found is that I'm a person who finds a way to build bridges, that's been a hallmark. I've been fortunate enough to have little

WAKEFIELD:

acronyms in my brain that really helped me. One of them is, wait, why am I talking? Or why am I typing? And it allows me to work with people who sometimes have made me so angry that I have to hold every muscle in my body still to keep from jumping across the table. But I learned from many of the leaders in the civil rights movement.

WAKEFIELD:

I remember so much Shirley Chisholm saying, "If they don't invite you to the table, bring a folding chair." Which is really helpful because, that says to me, you know that you have a seat at the table, and if they won't give it to you just show up. I have trouble, sometimes, with friends who are surprised

WAKEFIELD:

when we talk about racism that I have experienced discrimination. One of the earliest memories for me of that is I had gone to church one Sunday morning, I was in a suit and tie, stopped at a 7-eleven to get a pack of gum. And I came out and I was surrounded by five police cars.

WAKEFIELD:

I hadn't done anything wrong. I looked like a respectable citizen, I thought. I said, "What did I do?" And they said, "You just listen for a minute." And as they talked, it turned out I was in a red Chevy, they were looking for a white Chevy convertible with four men in it, and I was the only black man that they could find at the moment. So they stopped me to see what I knew about it.

WAKEFIELD:

I, of course, knew nothing about it, and had been taught by my parents to just appear calm no matter what you wanted to do. That teaching came for me in the late fifties, early sixties. It's challenging to me that here we are this many years later, and we still have to teach our children

WAKEFIELD:

to "behave", and to make sure that they don't resist. I think we've developed wonderful language these days, and we call things microaggressions, but microaggressions nine times out of 10, when I experienced them are racism that's blatant,

WAKEFIELD:

and I still experience them. I've experienced enough of them over the years that I think I've developed a thick skin and at least go back to that acronym, "Why am I talking?" And I've learned to surround myself with people that love me and live in a bubble, and trust that I don't have to have friends

WAKEFIELD:

and I don't have to spend time with persons who find resources that fuel their racism. Just a few months ago, I was working with somebody. I had been working with them for a couple of months on a project. They made a statement and I said, "I think it's best we not talk politics." They said, "I don't want to talk politics,

WAKEFIELD:

but I don't understand why a man as smart as Joe Biden could choose that woman to be his running mate." I was able to say to them, "We're not going to work together anymore. This project is over. Not my job to change the way you think. I don't know what source you have, but if that's your opinion, someone has helped you have that opinion and it's not mine to fix you.

WAKEFIELD:

It was sad because it was a young man who I was mentoring and I had to walk away from that relationship. I hope someday I'll be at a place where I can re-engage because he is a nice person. But he certainly has a resource that would not keep me in a working relationship with him.

MASON FUNK:

You highlighted earlier, the need to have people ... I forget how you framed it. The people at the table and the people who are in the streets. I sometimes say to people, you need to have people inside and people outside, holding a rock or a brick. And you seem like you have such a well-developed sensibility around that.

MASON FUNK:

To me, it's one of the most beautiful themes of any social justice movement, including ours, that we've been able to navigate that, figuring out people on the inside, people on the outside. People sitting on the police budget, because they can effect ... Just one sec,.

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, people coming down the hall. I wondered if you could just take a minute more to just expound on that dance and how those two pieces, I know it's a little bit abstract, but in your experience, what have you seen about those two pieces working together to apply pressure in a way that gets things done?

WAKEFIELD:

Early on we talked about my childhood life. And one of the things I realized was that people aren't always going to see eye to eye and people aren't always going to embrace the values or the needs that you might have. I remember when I first went on the board of health in the city of Chicago, I was supposed to be the HIV guy. Well, I showed up at my first board meeting,

WAKEFIELD:

I had read the things about food safety, I had read the things about environmental concerns, and most importantly, I had read about the low birth rate. When they asked if any of the board members had issues, I said, "I'm a bit concerned. Here we are, the city of Chicago and our birth rate is comparable to that of Jackson, Mississippi,

WAKEFIELD:

in terms of the number of deaths, we have got to do something about that." Someone actually said to me, "You're the HIV guy." My response is, "I'm a member of the board of health and the health of all the citizens of Chicago matter." As I thought about that later in the day, I realized that you build allies by paying attention

WAKEFIELD:

to the needs of all the people. It was certainly easy for me, after that first meeting, to get people from food safety, from infant mortality to pay attention to HIV/AIDS issues. I wish I could tell you that I went in with that as a philosophy. What I know about my successes as an individual is I've just been living my life. I didn't take pictures.

WAKEFIELD:

I didn't have a philosophy. I was just trying to be the best Wakefield that could show up on any given day. And that's what has worked for me.

MASON FUNK:

You really mean you didn't take pictures?

WAKEFIELD:

I didn't. It's funny because I think about that time or the time in Thailand, and in my mind,

WAKEFIELD:

there's such great images of being there in the rainy season and trudging through and working. We were working with the Thai military and they were a really interesting bunch of guys. But some of it is because I'm old and we didn't have cell phones, but most of it is, this isn't a photo op.

WAKEFIELD:

Last week, I found a photo, someone asked if I had a photo of me with Dr. Fauci. And I have one photo because a coworker wanted a picture with Dr. Fauci. I was there to do the work. He was there to do the work. We weren't there for photo ops

MASON FUNK:

Those of us in the documentary/film production world,

MASON FUNK:

that stabs us in the heart. We will learn to live with that fact because the work is the most important thing, needless to say,

WAKEFIELD:

I guess there's one other piece that's important to tell about HIV work.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

WAKEFIELD:

Being a black person in leadership and doing HIV work early in the epidemic, one of the challenges for me was

WAKEFIELD:

that the folks in New York and the folks in San Francisco, and even LA often thought those people in the Midwest don't know anything. I remember early on making a decision that I would work with Burroughs Wellcome, who was the company that distributed AZT, and that

WAKEFIELD:

I would ask them for money. They agreed to give us a fairly large grant to distribute information about HIV and to publish a magazine that eventually was able to go to several thousand people every month across the Midwest. I got a call from a leader in San Francisco, and I got a call from a leader in New York saying, "How could you take their money?"

WAKEFIELD:

And I said, "How could I not take their money?" The people that we serve in our organization on a daily basis are taking their pill. They're making money. Yeah. I know it's big pharma. But part of what we did was ensure there's language in our agreement that says, this is an educational grant, and if we need to criticize their products, we will. Well, there was skepticism.

WAKEFIELD:

No way you'd ever criticize their products after taking that much money. A few months later, there was bad news about AZT. We published it. We told them ahead of time, we're going out next week with bad news about your product, but that's our agreement. We were fortunate that we had the foresight to have that language

WAKEFIELD:

because when it came time to renew our grant, they were ready to renew our grant. All of those people who were skeptical about our relationship were then calling saying, "How did you get money from them? What other pharmaceutical companies should we be getting money from?" It changed the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and community-based organizations.

WAKEFIELD:

Not maybe that just at one time, but I will always remember it as having made a difference. And it wasn't just a Wakefield action. The men and women I worked with at Test Positive Aware, we said we were committed to living and we were committed to living well, and that was our goal. We were going to give people information, even if we didn't know if it was the right information. Share with them our sources and let them make their own decisions.

MASON FUNK:

Great. That's a great story and piece of information and thought. We're at 3:07 and I have four short standardized questions that we ask all of our subjects. The questions are short and I invite you to kind of try to just respond from the hip and give us kind of a short response

MASON FUNK:

so that we can get through the four of them pretty quickly. The first one is, if you could tell 15 year old Wakefield, anything, what would you tell him?

WAKEFIELD:

If I could tell 15 year old Wakefield anything, it would be keep in mind what your dad said about the president of the United States, having to unzip his pants

WAKEFIELD:

when he stands in front of a urinal. That you are equally as important, and you will meet people as you go through life. For example, I remember riding in the car with Coretta Scott King, and she was upset that she hadn't had a chance to get her nails done. I said, no problem. We'll stop at the drugstore, we'll get some polish, and by the time we arrive at this speaking engagement, your nails will be fine. And we did,

WAKEFIELD:

because I learned that in respect of persons was based on paying attention to their lives as much as paying attention to your needs.

MASON FUNK:

Excellent, wonderful story. Is there is there some trait or characteristic or quality that defines us

MASON FUNK:

as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, straight people, or queer people you might consider our superpower? Is there a so-called queer superpower? And if so, what do you think it is?

WAKEFIELD:

I think that the super power is the capacity to make a statement without imploding

WAKEFIELD:

when other people berate you for who you are, and to have a life that values yourself, values your sexuality and values who you are without feeling that you have to act on that need you have, to choke that ever living whatever out of somebody. I don't know a gay person

WAKEFIELD:

who hasn't had a moment when that's exactly what they wanted to do.

MASON FUNK:

That's wonderful. Thank you for that. Why is it important to you to share your story?

WAKEFIELD:

I think it's important for me to share my story because I'm reaching a place where I won't get to meet as many young people who will benefit from the wisdom of Wakefield. When I retired, I was really grateful that there wasn't a big retirement party, but there was Facebook and social media where people who I hadn't met could say to me,

WAKEFIELD:

wow. I remember one of those posts from a man who said, "Someone introduced me to him, and he asked me to go to lunch with him. We spent a half hour and I changed my career." I had no idea that my conversation had that impact, but sharing stories allows people to find words that give meaning to what they want to do

WAKEFIELD:

or what they think they want to do, or permission to say no to things that aren't important to them in life.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. That's wonderful. Thank you. And lastly OUTWORDS, this organization, this archive being a project to record stories like yours, with the people we call our elders across the US, and reaching into as many different communities and sub-communities as possible,

MASON FUNK:

what do you see as the value of doing that work? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer, that would be great.

WAKEFIELD:

I'm particularly grateful to be able to tell my story to OUTWORDS, because we live in an age where people read less, they glance at things and think that they've read,

WAKEFIELD:

but they will listen. All of us now use podcasts as our background to our daily activity. We can garden, we can clean, we can paint, listening. The stories of gay and lesbian leaders are the stories that will help us find a fabric and a thread that weaves us into more meaningful lives,

WAKEFIELD:

and lives that are about living vibrantly and not living in shame. And I'll just add a current news example to that. I've watched a few people say, why in the world would Joe Biden name Pete Buttigieg as the secretary of transportation.

WAKEFIELD:

And all I could think of as I read that was, well, he's been a mayor. Every mayor has had to deal with infrastructure issues. Every mayor has had to deal with budgets that include what the state wants, what their city wants, and more importantly, what federal dollars are available. Who else to lead us in building transportation infrastructure and using data to make those decisions, than Pete Buttigieg.

WAKEFIELD:

It has absolutely nothing to do with his military background, with his sexuality, with his run for president. But I actually personally hope that it allows America to see what a smart man he is. And that some day, we'll see him back in that candidacy for that leadership office.

MASON FUNK:

I think we

[inaudible]. He's not only a smart guy, but he's young.

MASON FUNK:

He's got a game plan, you can be sure of that. I'll send you a photo. Like a lot of people, I got to pose for a photo with him when he came to LA. I'll send you a series of photos because he was going to speak, there's maybe a hundred people in a room, and he was going to speak. But he's a pretty short guy, so he was looking for something to stand on.

MASON FUNK:

He found a piano bench and he began to climb up on it. But somebody kind of reached and said, "Whoa, watch out. There's a beam right over your head." Which if you weren't careful, he would have plunked his head on the beam. And I'm like, again, that filmmaker, I'm taking photographs to beat the band. And so I've got a nice little series of photos of him going, "Whoa," and then kind of badly standing up straight. It was a sweet moment. Yeah,

WAKEFIELD:

For sure. For sure. Wow.

MASON FUNK:

Is there anything, Wakefield that you just want to share as a parting thought before we sign off?

WAKEFIELD:

Not necessarily that needs to be recorded, but I've lived from the days of vinyl records to the days of eight track tapes, cassette tapes, and now the digital age.

WAKEFIELD:

And I just hope that whatever ways OUTWORDS recordings are preserved, they're available in whatever the next generation of implants. You know, I fully expect we'll have little skin implants that we touch ourselves and we hear whatever stories we want to hear, but not because of so much for my story, but because an archive

WAKEFIELD:

captures things that aren't captured any other way, and so I appreciate a chance to participate.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. We have conversations about how to make sure that all these interviews, I think you're number 154, are, in fact, preserved in a format that is timeless. And that's a challenge, you know, because hard drives fail.

MASON FUNK:

But, thankfully, there's such a thing as acid free paper. If nothing else, we can always print these interviews out, and they will live on in books for at least centuries to come.

WAKEFIELD:

Not only books, let me ask you this. Have you started to work with libraries so that they make them available? I mean, I know there's an audiobook of pride ... Whatever the pride title is,

MASON FUNK:

The Book of Pride.

WAKEFIELD:

The Book of Pride

MASON FUNK:

(pause)

MASON FUNK:

we're always strategizing around, is how to make sure everything is safely preserved and then made available in as many different ways as possible.

WAKEFIELD:

Well, I will encourage you to start thinking now about what kind of broadcast and podcast you're going to put out next June because we won't be gathering necessarily in large gatherings in the street yet. We might, some might. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. When we started down that path this past June, because already we were shut down. But we have an opportunity to think again for this coming June, for sure. So thank you for that.

WAKEFIELD:

Alright. I'll need a few minutes with Andrew. I know you have to go, you have an appointment.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. You'll stay on with Andrew and he'll do some housekeeping with you. Andrew, thank you so much. And Wakefield, thank you. This was such a pleasure.

WAKEFIELD:

Thanks. Have a good evening. Again, don't forget to tell Jay I said, hi.

MASON FUNK:

I won't forget. And we'll talk soon.

WAKEFIELD:

Alright? Okay. Bye bye.

ANDREW LUSH:

Alright, I'm just stopping this here. There we go.