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Phil Wilson
Phil Wilson was diagnosed with HIV at the dawn of the 1980s AIDS epidemic, when outreach was done mostly in white, gay neighborhoods.
But the death of his partner from HIV-related causes in 1989 caused Wilson to catapult into activism.
Already involved with the AIDS Project in Los Angeles, he served as the AIDS Coordinator for Los Angeles, co-chair of the Los Angeles HIV Health Commission, and was on the AIDS advisory committee for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Declining health sidelined Wilson for two years, but in 1999 he went back to work and founded the Black AIDS Institute, the only national HIV/AIDS think tank focused exclusively on African-Americans,.
In 2010, Wilson was appointed to President Obama’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.
“I think that I would want people to remember that I never gave up,” he told the NPAA. “Everyone has their trigger. That’s what I am most fearful of—[that] they will give up.”
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