From the Publisher: Recognition for successes, and a hopeful future

It is bittersweet that Out Front is able to produce this special edition for the 25th anniversary of AIDS Walk Colorado.

On one hand, we are pleased to be a community partner with Colorado AIDS Project. We are proud of their successes and wish them many more in the future. On the other, it continues to sadden us that there is a need for CAP and its signature fundraiser.

Like most of you reading this, I learned of HIV and AIDS in the late 1980s. But it wasn’t until 1990 that the virus played any sort of significant role in my life.

1990. Phil Price, Out Front’s founder, was still at the helm. George H. W. Bush was president. There was no Facebook, or iPhone.  Al Gore had yet to invent the Internet, but BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) were all the rage and a pager was a status symbol.

As hard as it is to imagine a world before cell phones and Twitter, it’s even harder to imagine a world before HIV/AIDS. But there’s growing hope, day after day, that we might actually be able to imagine a world post-HIV.

But before we get too ahead of ourselves, let us take a moment to revisit the early experiences of the disease.

As a young man in the early ’90s, friend after friend would confide in me that they were positive. While there were some of my friends that just seemed to vanish and who have most likely passed on, most gathered whatever strength they had and fought. Fought for their dignity. Fought for their brothers. Fought for a cure. But mostly fought to keep hope alive and fear at bay – the fear of succumbing to the virus and reaching the point of no return with the illness.

It’s the hope and fight that have and continue to bring our community closer. Folks like Ellis McFadden – one of CAP’s first volunteers – and Dayna Menninger – an 11th grader at the Denver Waldorf School who has raised a life-time total of $46,000 – together to form not just a network of support, but an awareness of how powerful we as humans can be when we work together. It is with a common purpose and set of beliefs that magic seems to happen.

There truly is something magical about the experience of locking arms with our fellow neighbor and setting out to make a difference in the world – no matter how big or how small. Why is that? What’s so magical about that? I think the magic ingredient can also be found in the fact that we are moved to tears when watching the Olympics regardless of the competitor’s nationality. And I would argue it’s the same thing that gives us goose-bumps when you see a young child rush ahead to open and hold the door for grandma. It’s the goodness and doing “good” that truly makes the world go-round.

So during this 25th year celebration, acknowledge the goodness in people, and setout to always do good by your neighbor, because it is within the act of doing good and giving of our selves that together we can move mountains.

Celebrate with me just how truly powerful we as humans can be, as you flip through our story, “The 25 Faces of AIDS.”