Local opinion: Tucson’s LGBTQ+ community turns grief into resolve

A week before our community gathered for the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation community forum, Tucson lost Vincent Anthony Siqueiros and Cameron Davis Capara, two gay men shot and killed outside Venture-N in an attack police confirmed was motivated by hate toward the LGBTQ+ community. Nearly a thousand of us stood together at Catalina Park two nights later, holding candles for two men many of us knew, and all of us claimed as our own. There are no words equal to that loss, and we will not pretend otherwise. To their families and to everyone who loved them, this community grieves with you.

So, when we convened our forum on Sept. 8 at Marshall Auditorium on the Tucson Medical Center campus, grief walked in with us. It could have kept people home. Instead, it filled the room. That is who Southern Arizona has always been. For more than four decades, through the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic, this community answered loss by taking care of each other. Neighbors delivered meals, volunteers sat at bedsides and determined advocates built the organizations that still serve us today. We gathered on Sept. 8 in that same spirit, and we left with something grief alone cannot provide: resolve.

What we shared in the forum that evening demands that resolve — and more. Federal funding cuts and shifting program requirements tied to Medicare, AHCCCS and federal HIV funding are dismantling the prevention infrastructure that ended the dying. Education programs that teach people how to protect themselves. Testing that finds infections early. Syringe services that stop transmission. Access to PrEP, the medication that prevents HIV infection when taken as prescribed. Treatment that keeps people living with HIV and hepatitis C healthy and their virus undetectable. These services are being cut piece by piece, and we need to say clearly what that means.

It means people will die. Not in a distant decade and not somewhere else. Let us be direct: if we do not step up, we could very well face the return of an AIDS epidemic in this country, an epidemic we successfully stopped in its tracks. And we stopped it with the very tools now being defunded. Prevention, testing, education and treatment are the reason a diagnosis stopped being a death sentence. When they shrink, infections rise. When infections rise, and care is out of reach, people get sick, and some of them do not recover. Many of us in that auditorium buried friends and family, partners and patients the last time. We know exactly what an epidemic looks like. We refuse to watch it return.

The forum's panels laid out the full picture: the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth, the trans community and older adults navigating aging and caregiving, alongside a medical update on the epidemic's history, PrEP access and the local impact of the funding changes. Vicki Cuscino of the Direct Advocacy & Resource Center closed the program with practical ways to engage the policymakers whose decisions are driving all of this, and attendees left with concrete action items in hand.

Now the work continues, and it belongs to all of us. We will hold more community conversations. We are not asking permission to protect our neighbors. We have done this work for 40 years, and we will keep doing it. We will keep the services running. We will keep telling legislators in Washington and Phoenix, respectfully and relentlessly, what their budget lines do to the people of Southern Arizona. And we will keep showing up for each other, because that is what this community does when it is hurt.

Vincent and Cameron were us. The people who depend on HIV and hepatitis C prevention and care are us. If you were in that auditorium, thank you. If you were not, there is a place for you in this work, and we would be glad to help you find it. Tucson has never looked away from its neighbors. We are not about to start.