The American LGBTQ+ Museum

December 2024 | For World AIDS Day: Phill Wilson and the Black AIDS Institute

“We knew two things:

(1) Black People were dying, and

(2) Nobody could save us, but us.”

– Phill Wilson, founder, Black AIDS Institute, in a 2018 letter  announcing his retirement and reflecting back on the Institute’s founding.

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, with only a few exceptions, the faces of the AIDS epidemic were those of white gay men. But, as with so many other things, the picture was incomplete.

Phill Wilson was living with HIV/AIDS and had been working at a number of AIDS-related organizations and agencies, when in 1999, he founded the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles to call attention to the true nature of the epidemic and to work to ensure that the new antiviral medications would be accessible to Black people living with HIV/AIDS.

In an interview with NPR in 2021, Wilson provided a true and complete picture of the AIDS/HIV epidemic. “…from the earliest days, … Black people represented 25% of the new cases in the U.S. Even as early as then, Black women represented over 50% of women diagnosed with HIV and AIDS. So Black people were always disproportionately impacted, over-represented in disease, underrepresented in advocacy, [and] underrepresented in resources dedicated to fighting the disease.”

The Black AIDS Institute is the only national HIV/AIDS think tank in the US focused exclusively on Black people. The Institute disseminates information, interprets and makes recommendations on public and private sector HIV policies, conducts training, provides direct clinical care, and provides advocacy mobilization from an unapologetically Black point of view. The Institute broadened the fight against AIDS from one solely focused on biomedical solutions to incorporating, what are known as, the social determinants of health–the contexts (e.g., poverty, substandard housing, lack of access to health care, mass incarceration) in which Black people live as a result of centuries of racism imposed on them.

During the early years of the Institute, Wilson and his staff worked to get accurate information about AIDS to the Black community. These efforts led to a five-year CDC-funded ‘Act Against AIDS’ campaign that resulted in 14 Black organizations being awarded grants to hire an AIDS coordinator to expand their work.”We were able to literally turn every Black media organization in America into an HIV/AIDS information delivery platform,” he told NPR.

After 20 years leading the Black AIDS Institute, Wilson retired in 2018. Today in 2024, the organization, as well as his legacy, endure. Learn more about the current work of the Black AIDS Institute here.

As Wilson told NPR, “[We] survived the Middle Passage together. We survived three hundred years of slavery together. When we turn towards each other, we survive, and when we allow folks to tear us apart, we actually suffer tremendously.”

Photo credit: Black AIDS Institute

November 2024 | 50 Years of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo‑and Counting!

“You know, the people ask us if we’re political and stuff like that. And I say, well, yes, of course we’re political. The minute you put a guy in a dress or, you know, a girl in trousers, that means you’re looking at something unusual in an unusual manner that you might not look at it a different way.” – Tory Dobrin, Artistic Director

Founded in 1974, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is a company of all male professionally trained dancers performing ballet and modern dance comedy, incorporating and exaggerating the foibles, accidents, and incongruities of dance.

Since its early years, the company has toured widely–across the US, even in small towns, and in 43 countries around the world. In addition to its impressive roster of performances, the Trocks, as they are known, run an extensive educational program that includes workshops, master classes, talkbacks, and even makeup seminars. They also hold movement classes at LGBTQ+ organizations in New York. The company has been featured in television show episodes, including one titled, “Ballerina Boys,” for PBS American Masters (2021).

The Trocks evolved out of the experimental theater scene that blossomed in 1960s-70s New York that often included performers in drag. Its four original dancers broke away from a company known as Gloxinia Trockadero and formed Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, holding its first performance in a loft space that was the home of a gay male discussion group.

When the company’s new agent–hired in 1979–urged them to professionalize its roster of amateur dancers, it transformed into a troupe of trained ballet dancers, all gay men, and hired a Ballet Mistress, Artistic Director, and Road Manager. A year later, Tory Dobrin was hired as a dancer after being persuaded to audition by a friend. He later became the road manager and in the mid-1990s, the Artistic Director.

Dobrin explains that, unlike club drag, the Trocks’ male ballet dancers are not trying to convince their audiences that they are female, but are instead inhabiting the characteristics and attributes of “larger than life” female characters, such as Maria Callas or Camille.

“We never wanted to fool the audience that we were women. We danced as male characters in these costumes, doing these ballet steps in drag for comedic effects, and that’s a huge difference from what you see, like in RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Female impersonation “is not what we do. We’re doing ballet impersonation and ballerina impersonation…”

“What we do is theater drag in our own way just like in Japan they have kabuki…,” he adds.

The company’s name is a tribute to a former NY drag club, The Trockadero, as well as a tribute to the Paris-based Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo, which was founded in the 1930s. In that company, which was unable to hire Russian ballet dancers after the Revolution, European dancers were known by fake Russian-sounding names to give the public the impression that the company’s reputation was on a par with the original Ballet Russe.

Giving this bit of ballet history its own satirical tribute, the Trocks’ dancers are also known by Russian-sounding names, but with a comedic twist. Included in the company are dancers named Olga Chicaboomskaya, Tamara Boom Dieva, and Natasha Notgoodenough. When he was dancing with the company, Tory Dobrin became the English ballerina, Margaret Lowandoctane.

During its 50th anniversary celebration year, which ends in December, the Trocks performed a retrospective series of programs reaching back to honor their long, distinguished history. The company’s anniversary celebration will conclude in December with a performance of a new Balanchine-inspired work, “Symphony,” choreographed by Durante Verzola at New York’s Joyce Theater. Performances will run from December 17, 2024 – January 5, 2025.