Love at Work
How a church, two professors and HIV and AIDS survivors came together to form the Valentine’s upcoming exhibit.
By Sabrina Moreno
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Originally posted on Style Weekly
In the nook of a chapel within St. Paul’s Baptist Church, Lindsay Bryant is talking about the silicone model of a penis she has in the trunk of her car.
“Yes! And with condoms. I got a bunch, you need any?”
Willnette Cunningham, a former postal worker, AIDS survivor and fellow HIV-awareness activist who’s known Bryant since high school, breaks out laughing before saying to always check the expiration date. It’s in the crease of the opening.
There’s a model of a vagina, too, but Cunningham hasn’t seen that one.
This conversation isn’t uncommon within these walls. It’s been 25 years since a group within the church including Bryant and the Rev. Eric King — then called the AIDS awareness prevention ministry — penned a letter to the Rev. Lance Watson asking if he could do a sermon around compassion and love.
“And could we give out condoms in church?” Bryant adds. “And could we do HIV testing? And would he be tested from the pulpit? And Reverend Lance Watson said yes, yes, yes and still yes.”
In the 1990s, churches were the last ones saying anything about the HIV/AIDS crisis, adds King, let alone acknowledging how it primarily affected African American men.
Eric King, Zakia McKensey. Photo by Michael Simon
“I suspect that many pastors had a sort of existential decision to make,” King says. “Are we going to sit here and just do funerals? Or are we going to help save lives?”
St. Paul’s — a predominantly black congregation — chose the latter. It has offered HIV testing, free condoms and HIV/AIDS support organizations such as Nia, which is now funded through the Virginia Department of Health, since 1995.
Since then, Bryant and King have been going to churches, using scripture and passing out a hefty manual that’s Heath Department-approved to raise HIV awareness. Bryant also presents safe sex practices with yes, the silicone models, at annual conventions of African American churches on the East Coast.
“I’m on the agenda to get up and pass out condoms. Can you imagine?” Bryant, a graduate and trained facilitator from the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, says giddily.
Though on Jan. 23, Bryant, Cunningham and King will take on a different kind of stage: the Valentine’s “Voices from Richmond’s Hidden Epidemic.”
The exhibit, years in the making thanks to University of Richmond professors Laura Browder and Patricia Herrera, will present 30 black-and-white portraits of HIV survivors, health care workers, caregivers and activists accompanied by their stories. There will also be Nationz Foundation’s mobile HIV testing unit on opening day, information on Nia and cascading text panels, resembling a quilt, that memorialize daily experiences of people with HIV.