Dazon Dixon Diallo at the Atlanta ‘Seven Days in June’ event.

On June 5, 2026, as part of the national “Seven Days in June” campaign, Atlanta advocates held a rally and vigil in Piedmont Park. We told our stories and vented our rage at an administration that is dismantling social safety net programs and gutting public health prevention and treatment efforts.

Our number included Maxx Boykin of PrEP4All, Malcolm Reid of the U.S. People Living with HIV/AIDS Caucus, Dazon Dixon Diallo of Sisterlove, Jeff Graham and Noel Heatherland of Georgia Equality, Allison Glass of Amplify Georgia, the Rev. E.N.Hill, community advocate Jon Greaves, and former CDC employees who have banded together as the National Public Health Coalition, among others.

Here are my remarks at the event, which also marked HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day:

My name is Mark. It is a name that will be remembered by those who love me.

On June 5, 1981, exactly 45 years ago today, a doctor with the name of Michael Gottlieb published a report in a CDC publication about five men who mysteriously died from pneumocystis pneumonia. Those five men had a disease that did not yet have a name. But those patients had names. Their names were Michael and Chuck and Gary and Phil and Brad.

Within a couple of years we would know how they died. They had a virus we named HIV, and a disease we named AIDS.

45 years ago. Since then, an estimated 45 million people around the world have died of AIDS. Many of them were friends of mine. All of them left someone who is grieving them to this day.

Only a few years after that report, we had the first test for HIV and as soon as it became available I took it and I was positive. That was more than 41 years ago. Why I didn’t die, why I am standing here four decades later when so many others are not, is a question I stopped asking a long time ago. 

I know part of the why. Because our government got off its racist and homophobic ass in the 1980s and 1990s and engaged in research. Because there were safety net programs that saved my life when my health and my finances collapsed. Because the people most affected by the disease, brown bodies, black bodies, trans bodies, queer bodies, stood up and took care of one another and started food pantries and support groups and clinics and organizations.

We fought against the ignorance and fear of who we were and the virus we carried.

I say all this because what is going on right now fills me with a familiar, creeping dread. 

The very safety net programs that helped me stay alive are being slashed by billions of dollars. Cuts to Medicare are set to go into effect after the midterms, in what has got to be one of the more cynical cases of bait-and-switch that we have seen in politics. 

Food programs. Health insurance subsidies. All getting the ax. Already, more than half a million people in Georgia have opted not to renew their health insurance because they lost the aid they needed to pay for it. People will die. We will be raising candles at vigils to them someday.

I remember what it was like to feel truly forlorn, to feel that as a gay man living with HIV, my government did not care if I lived or died. Well, we’re now dealing with a regime that has bigger ambitions. It does not care if ANY of us die as long as they can keep profiting and building obscene wealth and making black market bets on wars and covering every flat surface with gold leaf.

But here’s the thing. I know the names of those people too, and so do you. And I am going to remember those names, and every name of every person who did not have the courage to stand up to this agenda of hatred and neglect. I am going to remember those names as long as it takes to wipe them off the political landscape. 

I am going to take the grief I feel over lost friends, and the grief I feel for the death and suffering yet to come due to these insane, cruel policies, and I am transforming it into action. 

I am taking my action to the polls. I am taking action to phone banks, and town halls, and onto the letters to the editor pages, and anywhere I can add my voice. We must all do this. We are all capable of doing this.

And when this passes, and it surely will, I will return to holding close the names of those I love and those I have lost. And the names of the people who brought this chaos on this country? Well, history will render its verdict on their legacy, but as for me, I will forget their names. 

I do not have room for them. I am full. 

Mark

p.s. My comments section below are not working at the moment. It’s not you. We’re working on it.