SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
W hen Heshie Zinman visited his buddies — died of pneumonia.

HIV/AIDS patients in Pennsylvania Hospital
Th ough HIV can be transmitted through any unpro-
— in the mid-1980s, delivering their food tected sexual encounter or through intravenous drug
trays or just saying hi, he would hold his breath, sneak- use, the disease’s initial proximity to gay men gave it its
ing out of the room into the hall or bathroom to suck early monikers of the “gay cancer” and “Gay-Related
in a gulp of air.

Immune Defi ciency,” stigmatizing gay men and the
Zinman, now 71, is on the Governor’s Pennsylvania queer community who supported them.

Commission for LGBT Aff airs, advocating for the
Th ough the American Jewish community now
greater inclusion and cultural competency to sup- prides itself on its support of the LGBT community,
port older LGBT people, and the co-chair of pRiSm, with the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia
Congregation Rodeph Shalom’s LGBT affi nity and Philadelphia-based J. Proud Consortium holding
group. He’s the co-founder of the AIDS Library of events for June’s Pride Month, that allyship was not
Philadelphia, now the Critical Path Learning Center at always guaranteed. As the larger Jewish community
Philadelphia FIGHT.

— as well as most religious institutions — turned their
An activist during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, backs on gay people in the 1980s, the Jewish LGBT
Zinman witnessed the deaths of loved ones and the community took the responsibility of supporting each
complacency of the government to address the epi- other into their own hands. Th e road to wide accep-
demic. Aft er more than 1 million
reported COVID deaths in the United
States in 2022, the toll of one public
health crisis in the wake of another one
still impacts Zinman.

“Th e ’80s and the ’90s were fi lled
with trauma and fear. For me, the
COVID pandemic brought back a lot
of issues around death and dying,”
Zinman said. “And although com-
pletely diff erent, people losing people
every day, the losses of what it meant
to the family, what it meant to society,
what it meant to the arts, what it meant
to culture, I had lots of rushes of the
AIDS epidemic.”
From 1981 to 1990, there were
100,777 deaths of those diagnosed
with AIDS reported to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention.

Th e disease fi rst made headlines in the
U.S. in 1981, when fi ve healthy, young
Beth Ahavah founder Jerry Silverman (left) and other Beth Ahavah
members in front of their Letitia Street location in 2007
gay men in Los Angeles suddenly
16 JUNE 23, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
tance in larger Jewish institutions took decades.

Zinman came out in 1979, and following a divorce
and a layoff from his job at an architectural design fi rm
in 1984, he found himself, like many other gay men,
fi nding community at a gay bar in Philadelphia.

“It was at that point that I’m now bartending, that
people started getting sick and started having these
horrible experiences of death and dying and being
tossed out of their apartments,” Zinman said.

Th e bar, per Zinman’s insistence, transformed from
a place for some gay men to escape news of the epi-
demic to a place of community support. It was the hub
of fundraisers and workshops on safer sex. Zinman
became a member of the Philadelphia AIDS Task
Force and was diagnosed with HIV in 1989, years aft er
he began his eff orts to support friends and community
members living with the disease.

“My whole thinking was looking at the
environment — the fear, the discrimina-
tion, deaths and the dying — I fi gured this
could be me, and so I just was petrifi ed,”
he said. “My fear and my anguish and my
grief just kind of catapulted me into my
AIDS activism. Every time I got anxious, I
went to another meeting. I started another
program.” Outside of LGBT nightlife, support for
queer people was sparse.

In the late 1970s, hepatitis B, another
sexually transmitted disease, was of
greater concern to the gay community,
said David Fair, a Philadelphia-based
LGBT and AIDS activist. Th ough anxiety
of the disease prompted the beginning of
LGBT-oriented health care such as the
Lavender Health collective, it also fueled
the fl ames of gay stigma and homophobia.

“Th ere were a lot of scare tactics used in
those years. People were afraid you could
catch it from a toilet seat, or you could
scyther5 / iStock / Getty Images Plus
LGBT Acceptance
Swells, But Queer Jews
Remember Pain of
AIDS Crisis
Photo from the Jewish Exponent archives
feature story