UCLA Center for the Study of Women

I started doing AIDS work in the early 1990s. I was a young Filipino man raised to believe in charity. I started as a volunteer at the Chris Brownlee Hospice for People with AIDS. In the hospice, I was informed that people were there to live out the last six months of their lives. My job was to make those last months as comfortable as possible. The only face of AIDS that I knew at the time was always gay and usually white. When I started volunteering, I was not prepared to see people of color and I certainly didn't expect to see women. I was shocked when I met a Filipina—a woman who resembled some of the aunties who raised me—dying of AIDS.