How the first AIDS charity was born in a New York living room
80 gay men collect money in a living room and so found GMHC.
On 11 August 1981, around 80 gay men crowded into the Greenwich Village flat of the writer Larry Kramer in New York. A few weeks earlier, under the headline "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals", the "New York Times" had reported nationwide for the first time on a mysterious cluster of Kaposi's sarcoma and rare forms of pneumonia among gay men. The doctor and journalist Lawrence Mass, who had already written the first newspaper reports on the subject in May, called a meeting together with Kramer to share information and raise money for research into the disease.
That evening, the dermatologist Alvin Friedman-Kien from New York University spoke about the rare form of cancer he had observed in some of his patients. No one in the room knew what caused the disease, how it was transmitted or how many people were already affected. At the end of the evening a hat was passed round, and those present donated 6,635 dollars for research: the first fundraising collection in history for what would soon become known as AIDS.
This informal meeting gave rise in January 1982 to Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), officially founded by Lawrence Mass, Larry Kramer, Nathan Fain, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport and Edmund White. GMHC is regarded as the world's first AIDS service organisation. Among other things, it set up a telephone helpline, which at first was run from a simple answering machine in a volunteer's flat, and did vital work in education and support for a community largely abandoned by the government and the public. Larry Kramer himself later left the organisation over tactical differences and in 1987 founded the more confrontational activist group ACT UP. GMHC still exists today.