Phill Wilson Helped Black America Address Its AIDS Crisis. Guess What Kind of Dancing He's Taken Up in Retirement?
Nearly 70, the HIV longtime survivor and founder of the Black AIDS Institute is working on his memoir, living with his nephew and exploring an adorkable new hobby with his current partner.
Hey there Caftan folks. Hope you had a good Presidents’ Day weekend. I had one of those wintry upstate cabin weekends—dare I say it was a bit "I’m coming to the cottage?” Cause it was! Quite nice! However…Hudson, NY. Have any of you been? That town is full of architectural gems, but I’m sorry, no matter what season and no matter how tweely refurbished, it still always feels desolate and a bit creepy/sad to me. But otherwise it was a great weekend—and yes, it did include dancing. And only minimal glancing at the usual fasc-pocalyptic New York Times headlines.
I am very honored this week to have a Caftan chat with someone I’ve long admired and respected (and, yes I’ll say it, find quite handsome). He’s one of the many people for whom the AIDS epidemic changed the course of their life and compelled them to devote it to good things. Phill Wilson, Chicago native, lost his first lover, Chris Brownlie, to AIDS in 1989, when Phill was only 32.
Roughly around then, he found out that he, too, was HIV+. He ended up working at the center of L.A.’s governmental AIDS response through the nineties—until, at the end of the decade, he founded the Black AIDS Institute to, more or less in his words, work with Black national institutions and churches to address the AIDS epidemic (and the underlying homophobia and stigma) in Black communities. When he started BAI in 1999, the epidemic was beginning to wane among gay white men because of the introduction of the highly effective meds “cocktail” a few years prior—but Black folks were far behind in even knowing some of the basics about AIDS, as Phill explains in the interview, never mind about access to and readiness for treatment. BAI did a lot to change that over the next two decades, until Phill stepped down in 2019. (BAI still exists.)
Phill and I talked a lot about what his life is, and has been, like since his “retirement.” Phill is a very focused, self-assured, confident gentleman of a rather serious, thoughtful and deliberate bearing. However I do believe that we get a bit juicy and silly toward the end. Again, I am quite honored to have him in the Caftan “pantheon.” (Or as someone I know has begun calling it, “The Catheter Chronicles” LOL.) You will soon see that I can only restrain for so long my longtime observation that Phill is quite a handsome man. That’s why I love doing these Caftan interviews—I actually get to say things like that!
Speaking of silly and juicy, I have such a silly and fun (perhaps to the point of stupid!) Caftan chat lined up with not one but two special pundit-y guests on Wednesday. Look for that! And I’ll end, as ever, by asking that if you continue to enjoy these Caftan chats, do please consider upgrading from free to the $5/month version. I actually just got temporarily laid off from my main gig at my alum mag because I overproduced content for them the past six months and now they don’t need me for a while. So I could use the support!
And I’ll also throw out that I’m looking for new gigs (preferably remote but if it’s in/near NYC, I could hit the office a few days a week) in reporting, writing, editing, communications, media engagement, content production—preferably for some kind of do-gooder nonprofit entity but I’m open. Please drop me a line at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com if you have any leads. I’d really appreciate it!
Enjoy this chat with Phill—a true man of substance who devoted his life to good—that’s my favorite kind of daddy!
Phill, thank you so much for talking today. You live in L.A., right?
Correct. I’ve been here since 1982. I live in Los Feliz, right next to, I think, the most important thing about L.A.—Griffith Park. It’s amazing and it’s just about my backyard. I live with my nephew, whom I raised, who recently returned home. I have a partner, Karl, but we don’t live together.
We’re actually celebrating our second anniversary in March and it’s been a pretty remarkable surprise in my life. I didn’t anticipate starting a new relationship at 68. I’ll be turning 70 in April. I’ve outlived my expiration date! When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1985 or 1986, the counselor looked at me and estimated I had about six months to live. He told me to go home and put my affairs in order. I thought, “I don’t have any affairs to put in order—I’m 29 years old.” But I decided I had a choice: I could go home and prepare to die or figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I decided to focus on the living because the dying didn’t need my help.
Do you have any second-anniversary plans with Karl?
Not yet. We spend a lot of our time apart. He’ll be coming to L.A. and we’ll figure it out, which is what we’ve been doing the last two years. We met in Puerto Vallarta, where we both have a place, but otherwise he lives in Sacramento. The way I look at it, it’s not our job to predetermine when any part of our lives, including our time for relationships, is over. Just be open to the way that things evolve. We wake up in the morning and the assignment is to figure out what the day will bring, and to be there for it.
What have the past two years with Karl been like?
I wasn’t looking for a relationship when we met, and neither was he. But we enjoyed spending time together without any expectations. And as questions came up, we talked about it and figured out what to do. And we try really hard to celebrate what feels good and to be honest, as one gets to know another person, observations that you make. So for our anniversary, we both enjoy acknowledging these kinds of occasions. At the same time, we don’t always need or want for them to be these big events. And because we’re long-distance, it’s been important to us to not put the burden of being on vacation on the time we spend together. When we spend time together in Puerto Vallarta, often my go is for that to be as normalized as possible.
As in you’re not on vacation but just living and working in the same place?
Exactly. We don’t aspire to be on an adventure necessarily, but to live. When I’m there, I work when I work. Chris Brownlie, my first partner, said, “People think relationships are about the explosions, the excitement, the orgasms. But really they’re about who takes out the trash and changes the cat litter.” So you have to find joy in that stuff, because it’s everlasting.
What did you learn early on about Karl that helped you feel like you wanted to keep hanging out with him?
I’ve spent most of my life embedded in the LGBTQ and the AIDS movements. Everything about my existence has been about that, including my social life. And for much of that time, I had huge amounts of suppression of emotion, because the only way to survive during the pandemic, for me, was to believe I couldn’t take time out to deal with the emotional trauma I was facing because it would distract from work I was facing immediately. And I was also fearful that if I took time out to appropriately grieve what was going on, I would never be able to come out of that. So now, where I am intentionally working to not suppress [emotions], one thing I appreciate about Karl is that he’s old enough that he has a relationship with the pandemic, including a personal one, but he wasn’t in the throes of it.
How old is he?
He’s 61. So it was refreshing that he allows me to be present with a different perspective on things.
Do you feel he’s a good ear for everything you’ve experienced? Or maybe you don’t feel that you need to share that.
I try to bring my authentic self into the room, not what I think he wants to see or what he can handle. We want people to love us but we forget that they can’t love us if they don’t know us. At the same time, I don’t flood the zone. But I show up as I show up.
One of the wonderful things about being chosen by him is that there are things I’ve experienced that he has not. I’ve traveled the world over the last 40-plus years and have been to most of the continents. And he hasn’t traveled as much, so we’ve been traveling a lot. Early in our relationship, we went to Europe together, which was his first time outside North America. It was exciting to watch him experience these places, and to share my memories of Europe with him.
What’s been the best thing about the relationship for you so far?
It’s been a long time since I was with someone with the desire and bandwidth to take care of me. I am usually the caretaker. I was the oldest child of four in my family so I had a sense of responsibility very early on. We lived in the housing projects on Chicago’s South Side. As the oldest child, I was required to pitch in, and as I grew older, the role came naturally to me. Also, at a young age, I felt like one of the ways I could protect myself was to be a decision-maker in as many spaces as I placed myself.
Do you think you’re naturally an alpha? A leader?
I’m definitely naturally a leader. I wouldn’t call myself alpha, although many people—and I have to believe they’re correct—think I’m a Type A personality. I need to know where the train is going if I’m in one of the cars.
And I prefer to be in the engine room.
But now with Karl, I get to experience someone who says, “I got your back—not to worry.”
What’s been the most challenging part of the relationship?
[pauses] Karl is a linear person. He doesn’t like to multitask. You finish one thing, then do the next thing. And I could not be more different, partly borne out of spending 40-plus years in the HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ movement, because they were not linear. We were being attacked from all sides. And you have to develop an expertise in pivoting easily. I’m always working on multiple things. We’re both retired. But though I don’t have a job, I still have all the interests and activities that are important to me. Karl says that I’m the hardest-working retired person he’s ever met.
What’s an incredibly romantic moment you two have had together?
There’ve been a lot. But last year for my birthday, I had no idea what I wanted to do even though he kept asking. A month before, he said, “How about going to Hawaii for a few days?” I’ve been to Hawaii a few times. It’s not one of my favorite places. In fact, one of the worst vacations I’ve ever taken was to Hawaii. It was with an ex-partner during Covid, and it revealed that we really weren’t compatible. So I said to Karl, “Hawaii is not one of my happy spots—but okay, because I don’t have any better idea.” So he put together a really low-key three days in Maui—no fanfare. We found this really lovely cheap motel right on the beach and spent three days going to the beach and having dinner. It rained every night but the days were absolutely beautiful.
I love that. Phill, what is a fairly typical day like for you?
I usually get up at 7 a.m. and do my Spanish lesson on Duolingo. Then I usually call or text Karl to see how his morning is, followed by a Facetime call with my dad in Chicago, who’s 90. He’s doing well, so I’m grateful for that. Then I get up and make myself breakfast—tea, oatmeal and fruit—and take my morning meds. Then I’ll sit down and start working, taking calls, those kinds of things. And I’ll do that until I make myself some sort of lunch, then I’ll go for a walk. I had a stroke more than two years ago, so I try to walk anywhere from a half-hour to an hour every day and do my stretching exercises. Then I come back and continue to work on whatever I’m working on, which at the moment is my taxes. Then it’s time to have dinner and go to bed. I try my best to head to bed around 9:30 because, at this point in my life, I rarely sleep through the entire night so, if I go to bed early enough, I’ll get eight hours of sleep, which I basically need, even if it’s interrupted.
Oh, also I’ll sometimes have a meal or watch TV with my nephew. He’s really into sports and music and I’m not so much. But we will watch football together. I’ll decide before which team I want to win. Like I wanted the Seahawks to win the Super Bowl. [They did.]
What were you like as a kid?
Focused and determined. My father would come home from work and read out loud The Chicago Sun-Times, which was more the paper that Black Chicagoans would read over The Chicago Tribune, which was more conservative.
He’d read it out loud while he was holding me, so that was my introduction to language. So as a result, by the time I started kindergarten, I already knew how to read and write. I very quickly became obsessed with doing well in school. Also, I saw that other kids arrived to school not nearly as prepared as I was, and I thought that wasn’t fair. The teachers treated kids differently depending on what the kids knew and how they looked.
By “not as well prepared,” do you mean like with homework, or not as well groomed?
Teachers didn’t have to work hard on teaching me because I already knew things. They had to work hard on entertaining me because I was bored easily. And I didn’t think it was fair for the other kids to struggle with things that I thought came easy. I didn’t know then that I knew things because my parents invested the time. So I’d do my own work quickly and then would help one of the other kids, which my teachers did not appreciate.
In your whole K-12 experience, did you ever feel challenged? Like a teacher who gave you extra books to read?
I had a history teacher in seventh grade named Mrs. Henry. It was the advanced track. I remember her demanding that we gave everything our best. I was obsessed with grades—annoyingly so. I’d do extra credit and demand an A+. I’d get angry if the teacher said, “There’s no such thing as an A+. You got an A and that’s as good as it gets.” Then I’d say, “But I want the A+ to reflect the extra credit!”
[laughs] You were that kid.
I was. At the end of the year, Mrs. Henry would say, “I’m not giving anyone an A because I don’t believe you all did the best that you could do.” Much to my surprise, that made sense to me and I’ve never forgotten it. She contributed a lot to who I’ve become.
Did you have an awakening at some point in your K-12 about race, politics, history?
I think I was five or six the first time I saw a real white person, because we lived in the projects where everyone was Black. I didn’t have a white teacher until fourth grade. We had our ice, orange juice, milk and eggs delivered by the Home Juice Company. But once our regular Home Juice guy, who was Black, was sick or something, so this white guy came. He knocked and I answered and there was this white man who asked to see my mother. I slammed the door in his face and ran screaming at the top of my lungs to tell my mother. My real goal was to get my siblings to come see this guy.
You hadn’t seen white people on TV?
Of course , but we had a little black and white TV and I was five or six. To see a white person in living color was a very new experience. So when my mother opened the door, I’m yanking on her skirt—an annoying habit I had. She asked, “What’s the matter?” I said, “I have a question.” I looked at the guy and said, “What happened to your face?” He was a redhead with freckles. He got embarrassed and his whole face went red, which made me say, “Whoa! How did you do that?”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Caftan Chronicles to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.