{"id":27933,"date":"2014-11-27T01:53:40","date_gmt":"2014-11-27T06:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wendybrandes.com\/blog\/?p=27933"},"modified":"2014-11-27T01:57:42","modified_gmt":"2014-11-27T06:57:42","slug":"throwback-thanksgiving-thursday-aids-dance-a-thon-1994","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wendybrandes.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/throwback-thanksgiving-thursday-aids-dance-a-thon-1994\/","title":{"rendered":"Throwback Thanksgiving Thursday: AIDS Dance-a-Thon 1994"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exactly twenty years and one day ago today, I was at the five-hour-long GMHC AIDS Dance-a-Thon at the Javits Center in New York.<\/p>\n

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An old poster for the event.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was my second year at the Dance-a-Thon and I was extremely serious about my fundraising. I was one of those people who went around the office terrorizing people till they donated. I would take a dollar per hour of dancing if that’s all I could get out of someone.<\/p>\n

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Dancing the night away in 1994. Me on the left, my sister Terri Berry on the right.<\/p><\/div>\n

The ’94 event took place two weeks after activist Pedro Zamora died of AIDS at the age of 22. Handsome, charming and openly gay, Pedro had appeared on MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco<\/em><\/a> and was credited with humanizing people living with HIV for a wide audience.<\/p>\n

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Pedro Zamora. Click for video.<\/p><\/div>\n

My new friend<\/a> Bill Clinton<\/a> was a big fan of Pedro’s<\/a>, saying he lived a life of “compassion and fearlessness<\/a>.” Pedro was groundbreaking in another way: His commitment ceremony with partner Sean Sasser<\/a> was the first ever broadcast on U.S. television. (I’m sad to see that Sasser died last year at age 44<\/a>, after being HIV positive for 25 years.)<\/p>\n