HIV/AIDS Activist And Icon Shawn Lang Remembered To Mark AIDS Awareness Month

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy led a gathering in West Hartford, Conn. Monday to mark AIDS Consciousness Month and have a good time the lifetime of the late Shawn Lang, the previous deputy director of AIDS Connecticut. Lang died unexpectedly Oct. 17, 2021. She was 65.

Murphy mentioned it was Lang who helped elevate his personal consciousness of these residing with HIV and AIDS when he was a younger state Senator in 2003.

“Shawn Lang was an important, nice buddy of mine, any individual who taught me so much in regards to the significance of doing prevention, work and therapy work across the AIDS inhabitants in Connecticut. And he or she was a hero to me,” Murphy informed Forbes. “And it is a month the place we’re recommitting ourselves to the worldwide AIDS combat. I believed it was necessary to acknowledge her legacy, but in addition have a dialog about what extra we have to do right here in Connecticut and what extra we have to do world wide.”

Murphy and native advocates for these residing with HIV and AIDS met in a festively-decorated auditorium on the Elmwood Neighborhood Middle to debate Lang’s legacy and the continuing points they face in serving the neighborhood, comparable to state and federal funding and housing wants.

“She was solely 5 toes tall, however she beloved everybody, and by the top of immediately, she’d be hugging you as effectively,” John Merz, CEO of Advancing Connecticut Collectively, informed WTNH-TV. “She simply had the most important coronary heart and most of that coronary heart was loving individuals with HIV/AIDS.” What was AIDS Connecticut when Lang was deputy director is now Advancing Connecticut Together.

“We have seen a reasonably dramatic discount within the variety of AIDS instances world wide,” mentioned Murphy. “We have had success, however we should not and may’t relaxation till we’ve got eradicated AIDS and we’ve got the flexibility to try this now with each therapy and prevention strategies.”

Becoming a member of the senator was State Sen. Derek Slap of West Hartford, whose personal father died of AIDS, West Hartford State Rep. Kate Farrar and East Hartford State Rep. Jeff Currey. Currey is considered one of three overtly homosexual members of the Connecticut state legislature.

“There aren’t any actual phrases to seize all that she did for the neighborhood and probably the most susceptible all through the state of Connecticut,” mentioned Currey, remembering Lang. “I believe it is wonderful that Sen. Murphy is right here immediately to debate hopefully what we’ll see on the White Home after various administrations and many years, during which no one actually addressed the problem at hand. And it will be attention-grabbing to see what President Biden comes up with in 2020 together with his strategic plan.”

“We have been coping with AIDS for a protracted, very long time, and I believe there is a hazard of complacency coming in and we have to combat in opposition to that,” mentioned Slap. “I’ve a private connection to it as effectively: My father handed away from AIDS 29 years in the past, so any time I can take part in occasions like this, it is necessary for me.”

Murphy mentioned there’s a corollary between the AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s a lesson that requires worldwide consideration.

“We clearly have been in a position to make progress on AIDS as a result of we’ve got centered on prevention and on therapy,” he mentioned. “We have to do the identical factor with COVID. We have to acknowledge that for individuals residing with AIDS, COVID is a gigantic menace. You’re twice as prone to die from COVID when you have AIDS. And that is why in locations with excessive charges of an infection for each viruses, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, we have to essentially push vaccine there as shortly as potential, figuring out that elevated threat.”

Along with his fellow senators in Washington persevering with to research the Jan. 6 rebel, Connecticut making ready to recollect the victims of the Sandy Hook bloodbath 9 years in the past Tuesday and the rising loss of life toll for transgender People, which now stands at 50, Murphy spoke out in opposition to one other epidemic, considered one of violence.

“I actually fear that we’re at a second in American historical past the place violence is changing into normalized, and in danger, initially, are our LGBTQ neighborhood members,” he mentioned. “This has obtained to be one thing that each events are speaking about, and it begins in our faculties. It begins with our legal guidelines. , when we’ve got legal guidelines on the books in sure states during which you may get fired out of your job due to who you’re keen on, when we’ve got faculties which might be in a position to legally discriminate in opposition to college students primarily based on their gender identification or their sexual orientation, we’re sending a message of bigotry and a message of discrimination. So, you realize, it is my job in elected workplace to vary the legal guidelines for the higher and passing issues just like the Equality Act, which I believe will present a downward strain on the elevated ranges of violence we’re seeing.”