When my coworker told me that we had the opportunity to go to the 2025 Pines Party on Fire Island, I jumped at it without hesitation. I knew bits and pieces of GMHC’s history there, but it wasn’t until I arrived on the island that Friday morning in early August that I truly began to feel the weight of our legacy.
As a young gay man, Matt Nadel was discomfited to learn in 2020 that his father, Phil Nadel, had invested in the viatical settlements industry in the early years of the AIDS crisis. “He shared that he’d made a good bit of money off of the life insurance policies of gay men who died of AIDS. That’s what funded my childhood,” Nadel says.
When HIV activist and author Victoria Noe couldn’t find a single book that told the stories of straight women fighting the AIDS epidemic, she decided to write it herself. That led her to GMHC Community Relations Director Krishna Stone, who started working for the agency in the epidemic’s early days, when gay white men were leading the charge.
Edmund White, who was pioneering as a leading, openly-gay writer, and who became a shining star of our literatures and heritage, passed away at 85 at his home in New York City on June 3, 2025. Though his flagging health left him increasingly housebound in the aftermath of a heart attack and strokes, he continued his blazingly prolific career as litterateur and gadfly right up to his last hours…