Carrying On

Charity still fighting HIV/AIDS 25 years after founder dies

By RITA PRICE

The Columbus Dispatch

COLUMBUS

If anyone in their circle of friends was going to make it, to somehow defy the death sentence that loomed over an HIV diagnosis back then, it would be Matt Taylor.

Keith Burkes believed that with all his heart. It almost makes sense to him still, 25 years after Taylor – brilliant chemistry major, popular floor manager at COSI, pioneering AIDS volunteer – succumbed to the disease he had helped others fight.

“I thought Matt would be here today,” Burkes said, smiling at the notion.

Taylor’s mission instead became his legacy. Project OpenHand-Columbus, the charity he created to provide nutritional assistance to central Ohioans suffering from severe weight loss caused by AIDS, held on through the worst of the epidemic. The charity continues a quarter century later, in a different form, one of a relatively few grass-roots organizations remaining from the early days of local HIV advocacy.

“What has happened here, and places elsewhere in the country, is that it was not feasible to sustain 20 small, struggling, hand-to-mouth AIDS organizations,” said Bill Hardy, president and CEO of Columbus-based Equitas Health, one of the nation’s largest LGBT health care organizations. “The needs of the community have changed.”

And so has the outlook for the approximately 24,000 Ohioans living with HIV. People who get treatment quickly and stick to a medication regimen can remain healthy, with undetectable levels of the virus and near-normal life spans.

“Life expectancy went from months in 1996 to decades in 2019,” Hardy said.

During the early 1990s, all Taylor could do was use nutrition to buy time. He modeled his Columbus charity after the Project OpenHand organizations that had started on the West and East coasts during the mid-1980s, traveling to San Francisco and New York to work in kitchens and deliver meals so that he could replicate the effort at home.

“At the time, wasting syndrome was very real,” Burkes said. “People were starving. And there was the discrimination part – if people knew, they were afraid to touch you. If you were in the hospital, they put your food outside the door. It was like Ebola.”

Burkes had been diagnosed with HIV, too. It was devastating news for the former Ohio State University student, who enjoyed a run of fame in the 1970s as the first African-American to perform the role of Brutus Buckeye.

The virus that quickly took Taylor and so many other gay and bisexual men, however, didn’t seem to affect Burkes the same way. “I’m 65 now,” the Hilltop resident said. “And probably healthier now than I was then.”

The state counted 1,019 new diagnoses of HIV infection in 2017, according to the most-recent data from the Ohio Department of Health. Blacks accounted for about 45 percent of the new cases, which translates to a rate more than six times higher than that among whites. Women accounted for 19 percent of new cases.

Hardy said disparities in access to medications, care and awareness are thwarting some of the advances made with anti-retroviral therapy and prophylaxis medications. “HIV continues to follow the poor and the marginalized,” he said, including growing numbers of people who use needles to inject opioids.