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Interview Transcript [music intro] I was born on January 19, 1954

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And where were you born? I was born in Houston, Texas in St. Joseph's Hospital. And I'm guessing that's where your family was originally from? That's right, my parents were living here in Houston and this is my family home. Awesome, sounds great.

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How was your upbringing? Well I spent a couple of years here in Houston and then my father, who was a chemical engineer working with Shell, got transferred to Norco, Louisiana outside of

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New Orleans. So I actually spent 13 years growing up in the suburbs of New Orleans. And we moved back to Houston back in 1970, so I've been here pretty much . .. Where you a high school student when you moved back?

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Yes, I was a junior in high school when we moved back, and I went to high school out at Cy-Fair high school, way out in Northwest part ... That's great, and do you have any siblings? I have two brothers, both younger.

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And are they still currently in Houston? Actually they are, yes. One of them is a geophysicist with BP, and the other one makes videos and films at Texas Heart Institute for open heart surgeries and

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works with the cardiologists there. His father actually ... My dad actually works for BP, he's an engineer ... You told us about your father's occupation, did your mother have an occupation as well? She had worked as a legal secretary for Shell for a

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couple of years after my youngest brother finished school, but most of the time she was at home with us. And how would you say your family influenced your career overall, have they been supportive, have they not been supportive?

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Well, I think they're very supportive, I've always enjoyed a lot of support from my family, I'm very fortunate in that regard, very blessed. That's great to hear. We've done plenty of research about you and you've been very

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involved in the GLBT community. What's one of your best experiences in the LGBT community, and where have you felt you've made the most impact? Well, I think pretty clearly my biggest impact has been in the care of people with

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HIV and AIDS over the last 25 - 30 years, I saw my first person with HIV when I was still in training, I was a resident at the VA hospital here in Houston and I saw a young man who

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came in, he was much like in a lot of ways because I was younger then too, right? And it was obvious that he had something that we would later come to identify as HIV, but at the time it wasn't even called HIV, we did a lot

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of tests and couldn't really find anything, that was in 1982. And what was your reaction to finding, at the time, did you know very much about

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HIV? Or was this before you attended the first ever international conference in Georgia about HIV? Was this before that? This was before that.

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I got my start in HIV because of my interest in sexually transmitted diseases. When I came out while I was in medical school in about 1977, I was 23 years old, there about.

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And as it turned out, the city health department clinic had an elective where you could actually see patients as a first or second year medical student

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before you would normally get to experience any kind of clinical interaction with patients. So, I was interested just from the opportunity to do some hands on medicine, but

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also as part of my coming out process, because I knew that sexually transmitted diseases were very common in gay men, sexually active gay men with multiple anonymous partners. So, I took an interest in that and I worked there and it

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was really exciting and I actually did quite a bit of research about illnesses that occurred in sexually active gay men, so when HIV came along, it was a very natural

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transition, because we knew that a transmission of HIV had to be by sexual means. And in fact, it followed a pattern of transmission of hepatitis B, which suggested that it was a virus and that it was a

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blood born pathogen, this was long before the virus was ever discovered. So that's how I got into HIV and AIDS care, and I was kind of the resident "expert" among the residents in HIV and AIDS during my residency program.

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Wow, that's very very impressive. And you're actually a Rice graduate, right? I am, yea. And what was your major at Rice? Well, I wound up with a degree in psychology, well I

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initially started out in biochemistry, but I just couldn't quite crack p-chem. I was spending too much time at the Thresher Office. Very nice.

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And what college where you? I was in Lovett, Lovett College, back before it was coeducational. And how did you decide to go to medical school? Was it something that you thought about very early, or was it something that while you were at Rice you decided?

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Ever since I was very very young, I knew I wanted to be a physician. And why did you start up this particular clinic? Well, I had practiced medicine in a number of different locations, I did my

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training in the medical center at Baylor College of Medicine and Baylor affiliated hospitals, and when I finished that I worked for a year to fulfill a scholarship obligation with the National Health Service Corp in El Paso, Texas because I got scholarship support

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while I was in medical school, and I went there to pay back part of my time in El Paso. But then, in 1985 I couldn't stand it any longer, I had to get back to Houston, and so I, even though

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I still owed the money, I wanted to pay them money to be released from my obligation and I came back to Houston and worked at MD Anderson in the AIDS program there, and I had a faculty appointment. The AIDS program at Anderson was very succesfull,

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we opened up a hospital for treatment of people with HIV and AIDS. It was only open for a year, it was up on the north freeway, it was called the Institute for immunological

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disorders, and unfortunately it was forced to close because the costs of operating it were greater than the revenue that they could generate, the business side of the hospital was not

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managed very well, and so I went into private practice with a group of other doctors who were interested in HIV and AIDS and I stayed in that group from 1987 until basically

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1998. And at that point, by 1998, HIV was no longer the immediate death threat that it might have seemed to be in the past, and we had really good treatments available, and the

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numbers of people who were in the hospital had drastically declined and so I had the chance to branch out on my own and open up a clinic here in the Montrose area to do primary care which was what my original interest was back at

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the beginning. And so, I opened up this office. Alright, so now we're going to focus a little bit more on your research papers. What paper that you have published was the most meaningful to you?

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And, what was the impact it had on the community, the scientific community? Well, I probably would have followed a career in academic medicine if MD Anderson

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had not decided they didn't want anything to do with HIV and AIDS, as part of this closure of that AIDS hospital in 1987, MD Anderson said we don't want the AIDS

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program back. And none of the other academic institutions in the city would pick up the AIDS program, and so Houston really wound up getting a black eye for many years from

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the federal research establishment, because we had a funded AIDS treatment evaluation unit, multi-year grant support and MD Anderson basically said, we don't want it.

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So consequently, I wound up getting involved more in clinical medicine than in doing research. I did research when I was at Anderson and along the way, but I would not be, it would be misleading if I told you I was a big AIDS researcher, because that's

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not... I'm a clinician. I had the opportunity when I was at Anderson to work with my mentor, Evan Hirsch, who was an immunologist and, brilliant man, he had some

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contacts with a French Company called(?). We did research on a drug called diethyl dithiocarbonate, kind of

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approaching the treatment of HIV disease from the immune enhancing point of view, and we were able to get positive results from the studies, but this had been the pre antiviral

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area so consequently was difficult to show the kind of clinical endpoints that we needed to see to get a drug licensed, because the immune enhancing drugs don't really work in

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the absence of an affective antiviral control. So, even now it's not really understood how the drug worked, although we were able to show that it was

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effective using surrogate markers, and that paper wound up getting published in the journal of the American Medical Association. That was probably the highpoint of my academic

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career. You were saying before that MD Anderson basically said that they no longer wanted to deal with AIDS or HIV. Do you think that may have had an effect on the reason on why Houston has one of the highest rates of HIV

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positive patients currently, maybe because the information about AIDS or HIV didn't get out as much? No, I don' t think so. I think that HIV was here long before, and I think it's a

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little misleading to say that Houston has a very high rate, I think cities have a high rate of infection generally, what it did was it made it more difficult for people to get access to new

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treatments until relatively recently. A lot of those patients that we were taking care of at the AIDS hospital and at MD Anderson before that really had no insurance at all, so consequently the cost of taking care of them fell on

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MD Anderson, when the AIDS hospital closed, Anderson did not feel that it was their main calling to take care of people with HIV and AIDs, they felt that our issue is cancer,

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and even though there is a lot of overlap, that was the basis for them not to, not resuming the programs that they had previously. Plus they didn't want to have huge costs, so those folks that

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didn't have insurance wound up going to the county system, Harris County hospital district, they were residents of Harris County, and that was the basis for opening the Thomas Street

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Clinic, which is the Harris County hospital facility that takes care of people with HIV and AIDS. How would you say, we mentioned before, you said that you attended the first

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international conference on AIDS in Atlanta, Georgia, what did they discuss? How did it affect your clinic and how was it, basically? Was there anything you can tell us that was

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particular interesting to you? It was a very exciting time, it may be hard to recreate the perspective that we had back then in 1984 when there was so much that was unknown,

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there was a terrific amount of fear, some of that fear was stoked irresponsibly by physicians who had a political axe to grind, I remember in particular there was a cardiovascular surgeon

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from the west side of town who had a big push on, to require people to have health cards if they were going to work in restaurants because there was a fear that HIV could be transmitted by

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casual contact, even though there was no evidence to that effect at all, there were situations where people were denied health care because nurses or doctors or physical therapists

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were afraid to touch patients, families were rejecting patients from their homes. They wanted them to have their own plates to eat on, and glasses to drink out of.

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We look at that now and we say, that's crazy, that's ridiculous. But at the time, with the level of fear and hysteria, that was the environment we were operating under. Is there a particular story that could help us understand the

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fear and hysteria that was there during the 1980's? I'd have to think to come up with a specific instance, but I know that when people, if

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they disclose that they have HIV to their family members, a lot of people got kicked out of their houses. People did not want anything to do with them. You also have to remember that the level of homophobia 25, 30 years

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ago was much higher than what it is now, I think that we've made big progress as a society in accepting homosexuality as a natural part of creation,

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but back then it wasn't quite that way, it wasn't quite that way, the uh, there was great hope at that time that there would be scientific advancement that could lead to a cure in rapid order.

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Margaret Heckler, who was at the time Secretary of Health and Human Services, cabinet position under Ronald Reagan, came to the first international AIDS meeting, talked about

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how a cure was going to be forthcoming very soon, this is a promise that gets repeated over and over and over again over the years. But, I guess the thing that was most exciting about that conference was the opportunity

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that you had to get together with all these experts from across the field, and all the creative energy that people had as they were trying to bring ideas on how we could look at HIV, and the kinds of studies that could be done.

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Everyone was like this sponge, you just wanted to soak up all this information that was around you, because there were so many bright, creative people. It was a very exciting place to

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be. We actually were just talking about this in class today, about how apparently in Malaysia they say that there's a so called cure to HIV or AIDS. Do you have an opinion

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about that? Well I' m not sure what this is in reference to exactly because I haven't read about that, but there have been all kinds of crazy cures for HIV over the decades,

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and none of those pan out, none of them, what we have now is not a cure for HIV and AIDS, but a treatment, a treatment that allows people to live a normal quality of life, and a normal

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quantity of life. And in that regard, HIV is no different than any other chronic disease like high blood pressure and diabetes, neither of those have cures, but they have effective treatments, and if people have access to those treatments and if they take those

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treatments, then they can lead a normal life. HIV is no different. How would you say society's perception of HIV and AIDS has changed in the last 30 years? You mentioned before that now we look at HIV and we're not,

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like we find it ridiculous when we people say you know, we can't eat the same food or something like that. Is there anything else you would like to add on to, about how society's perception about AIDS has changed? I think it's helpful to not be

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so monolithic, maybe that's one thing that's changed, we have to recognize that there are different populations of people, different groups of people who react in different ways, overall probably there is a lot more

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recognition of how HIV is transmitted and how it's not transmitted. I think to a certain degree,

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you almost might treat HIV a little too casually in some circles. I wonder if young gay men for example see HIV as so

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little of a threat that they don't always take precautions that are appropriate, oh if I get HIV, well I'll just take a pill, it's a little more than that, I think that probably one of the biggest obstacles

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now in the population as a whole is that a lot of people perceive themselves as not having so much risk and so they don't get tested, and consequently there are a number of people that go

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undetected, and don't get treated and are capable of transmitting the virus to other people without even knowing it. So, I think it's important for sexually active people to get tested and to know their

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HIV status so they can take appropriate action to protect themselves and to protect others. You know I was thinking back, I wanted to mention this before you go on, back from that

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initial AIDS conference in Atlanta, Donald Francis was a researcher for the Centers for Disease Control, he had done a lot of work on hepatitis,

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he spoke at a seminar that I was at, and Randy Schultz, the journalist who wrote the book And the Band Plays On about the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, it was interesting reading

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that in Schultz's book and saying oh yea I was there, I remember that conversation, what Don Francis talked about was how, at the time, the recommendation was well,

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HIV's out there and we don't know what causes it but let's be more careful about who we have sex with and not have sex with so many people. So if I cut my number of partners down arbitrarily from let's say 10

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in whatever unit of time to 2, that's an 80% reduction. That ought to be an 80% reduction in risk. The problem is though, that with the geometric increase in the number of HIV

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cases we were receiving at the time, it was a shifting incidents there in the population or prevalence in the population, so you might reduce the number of partners you have, but each individual partners has a higher risk now, so that's

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not an effective strategy really, reducing your number of partners isn't necessarily an effective strategy when the epidemic is on that geometric grade of increase. I noticed your cross on your jacket.

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Do you ever feel, well, do you consider yourself to be a religious man? Actually I'm in seminary, so I guess so. Do you ever feel like your religion has conflicted with your views on

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homosexuality or the AIDS epidemic? Oh no. Well, not mine, I recognize that the church is wrestling with its understanding of sexuality, in many ways the church lags behind the

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culture in its understanding and acceptance of that. Part of my calling to ordained ministry is to give face and voice to gay

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people in the church and I cannot imagine doing what I have done with HIV and AIDS without having the support of a congregation of believers who love and support me.

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I have been a member at Bering Memorial United Methodist Church for 21 years, and that's the reason I, I mean I grew up in the church, and there was a long period in which I didn't practice, but in 1989, that

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was really some of the worst years of HIV really, and there were so many people that were dying, I really needed to reconnect with God and so that was when I went back to church.

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And part of the reason I went to Bering was because Bering had an active ministry for people with HIV and AIDS. Bering had set up a dental clinic to take care of people with HIV who

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had dental problems, because there were so many dentists who wouldn't have anything to do with them. They had a support group for people with HIV and AIDS that is still meeting to this day, this is one of the

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longest running HIV/ AIDS support group in the world, here in Houston the Bering support network, they meet every Wednesday evening. They had set up a day care center, an adult day care center for people affected by HIV

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and AIDS so that they would have a place to go during the day, and they could stay in their homes, maybe their partner was working, they weren't healthy enough to stay by themselves at home and so in order for the partner to continue to work, they had a day care center where a

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person could go and have a meal and receive the attention that they needed and in the evening the partner picks him up and takes him back home. These were very, very new concepts in anywhere

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in the world, right here in Montrose, Bering Memorial United Methodist Church, 1440 Harold. So that ministry gave them integrity in my mind, so that's why I went back

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to that particular church. Would you say that you were brought up religiously, or did you discover Christianity by yourself? Well, I was

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brought up in a family that went to church every Sunday, and participated in church and in Sunday school, and in summer camp, and all those activities up through about high school, and then in high school I kind of drifted

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away from it. You know, I still went to church occasionally on Sundays, but it wasn't the center of my life after the beginning of high school. I noticed that you gave a sermon over sex and being single, actions

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for holy living, I was wondering why you gave this sermon and what inspired you to give a sermon about this. I

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think it has to do with my my interest in helping people examine sexuality and how that fits into the wholeness of their being, instead of sort of fragmenting our lives in

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all these different spheres, I said earlier that I think the church is in many ways behind the culture in terms of understanding sexuality as a beautiful part of our creative nature, a

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good gift of god, and so that is why I preached that sermon, is more to raise questions than to give answers. And, I believe inspiration comes from the spirit.

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Other than the clinic and the Bering Methodist church, how else have you been involved in the community, are there any other organizations that you are a part of that you would like to speak of?

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Well, I told you before how I was interested in sexually transmitted diseases back when I was in medical school. As part of the research I mentioned earlier, I did an elective at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta in October of 1980,

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and at the time I was, well, let me take a step back. In July of 1978, I organized the first group of lesbian

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and gay health professionals in Houston. It was affiliated with the American Medical Student Association, the name of the group was the Lesbian and Gay People in Medicine. We had monthly meetings, it was really more social than anything else, around the

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same time there was a clinic, the Montrose Clinic Committee of the Gay Political Caucus, it was interested in opening

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a gay clinic for treating sexually transmitted diseases, and it became apparent to them that that was really not the appropriate place or organization to fit under, so

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David Banuelos who was the head of that committee and I together set up a work group to organize what eventually became Montrose Clinic.

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And, I'm very proud of the leadership that I gave in those early years. I did an elective at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta October of 1980, and I wrote a plan,

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a detailed plan showing what the principles of operating a clinic would be, what the treatment protocols would look like, what the rationale for all of this was, and that really became, that document became the

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thing around which all these other activities could organize. Montrose clinic opened I guess in 1981. It's still currently here right?

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When the Montrose clinic merged, they changed their name, they merged they've moved to different locations here and there, but back at the time it was very important for

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our community. That's all the questions I have. Shawn or Xiao, do either of you have any? Not in particular. I'm good. You know when I was at Rice, I was editor for the Thresher for two years, two whole

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years, it was crazy, and I loved it, and I think in some way, my work at the Thresher really helped me learn to write and to communicate in a way that has been useful for me

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throughout my life, in medicine, and now anticipating a move into ministry as well. You're anticipating a move into ministry? Yes, I'm in seminary, I'm about halfway through, so I'm not sure

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exactly how this looks, combining medicine and ministry, there's plenty of archetypes to follow. A lot of interest nowadays is being given

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to the emergent church, and the church has got to change, the church is not a building, the church is people. Many of the old ways are kind of falling aside, we don't know what

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the church will look like, but one model of that is what they call bivocational ministry, where people have a calling to work in the church, but they also have a calling to work in the secular world and

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earn a living as well. I'm leading a group from church this summer to

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Kenya, we're going to work at an AIDS hospital in(?), Kenya. That's very exciting. That's going to be a fun trip, wow.