Minnesota AIDS Project (MAP)

Founded at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Minnesota by a small group of gay volunteers, the Minnesota AIDS Project (MAP) provided education, prevention resources, and services for HIV-positive people and people with AIDS during the tumultuous early years of the epidemic. Organized on a grassroots level within the communities most affected by the virus, MAP became a model for successful community responses to public health crises. Its activities led directly and indirectly to a huge expansion of services and organizations serving HIV-positive people and people with AIDS in Minnesota and beyond.

In 1982, mere months after the initial appearance of AIDS in New York, the outspoken gay activist Bruce Brockway became the first Minnesotan to be diagnosed with the disease. Within months, Brockway and a handful of other volunteers formed what became the Minnesota AIDS Project (MAP) in an attempt to respond to the devastation wreaked by the disease in Minneapolis’ gay community. In addition to Brockaway, original participants included Bill Runyon, Ford Campbell, Morris Floyd, Jon Whyte, Tom Wilson Weinberg, Brian Malloy, Eric Engstrom, Roy Schimdt, and Dennis Kearney. With their friends and lovers becoming sick and dying suddenly, and faced with stigma and public hysteria, they cared for their loved ones themselves. They also attempted to prevent the spread of what was eventually identified as HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

In its early years, MAP was a ragtag effort, staffed entirely by volunteers and driven by their passion. It drew strength from the militancy of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s and a belief in community support in the face of a frightening and mysterious epidemic. The organization operated out of volunteers’ homes, and began its work by opening a hotline. Volunteers answered callers’ questions about symptoms, explained how to care for people with HIV/AIDS, and gave out information on friendly health and social services in Minneapolis.

MAP’s work took a two-pronged approach: preventing the spread of HIV and caring for those already living with the virus. MAP volunteers provided palliative care to the dying and emotional support to their loved ones, responded to people in crisis, and founded a “buddy” system. Volunteers appointed as buddies accompanied people with HIV/AIDS to appointments and staved off the loneliness that often came with the stigmatizing diagnosis. In addition, the group was on the forefront of HIV prevention, giving seminars on safe-sex practices and devising an array of creative methods to spread the message far and wide.

Things changed drastically for MAP in 1985, when it began to get large grants from state and county health departments, enabling it to move into an official space, hire its first staff, and broaden its work. Prevention efforts ramped up; MAP did extensive outreach in the gay male community, specifically the bars and bathhouses that were considered central to the disease’s spread, while also educating countless mainstream organizations.

Along with being a main provider of safe-sex education, MAP remained a central force for support and advocacy for people with HIV/AIDS even as other organizations appeared in the mid-1980s. In a span of three years, it founded a housing program, an annual Pledgewalk for AIDS that served as both a celebration of life and an acknowledgment of collective grief, and a Life Enhancement Program for people with HIV/AIDS. To paraphrase a MAP volunteer in the late 1980s, the organization sought to pull back the “curtain of doom” that HIV/AIDS created, and foster connection, love, and joy among those directly and indirectly impacted by the disease.

Beginning in the early 1990s, changes in the landscape of the epidemic led to a shift in MAP’s role, ending its status as the central hub of the community response to HIV/AIDS. After thirty-five years of operation, MAP merged with the Rainbow Health Initiative to form JustUs Health in 2018.

Faced with a perplexing, terrifying illness ravaging an already small, marginalized community, the founders, volunteers, and staff of the Minnesota AIDS Project came up with a bold grassroots response, using compassion, mutual support, and the power of education, agitation, and insurrection to fight for themselves and their loved ones. In the 2020s, much of the LGBTQIA+ advocacy and public health infrastructure in Minnesota can be traced back to the seeds planted in those small meetings in the spring of 1983.