A memorial service will be held in Southern California later this month for longtime activist and former San Francisco resident Ferd Eggan, who died July 7 in Los Angeles after battling liver cancer complicated by HIV and hepatitis C. He was 60.
"He was a warrior, strategist, writer, artist, activist, and friend in the political, social, and intellectual movements for liberation of our time," said his long-term friend Walt Senterfit, national board chair of the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project.
Born in October 1946 in the small town of Alpena, Michigan, Mr. Eggan became an activist at an early age. In a recent interview with IN Los Angeles, he recalled that in his teens he was the youngest member of the Michigan Democratic Caucus in support of John F. Kennedy, but he abandoned electoral politics and got involved with more radical activism around the time he left home to attend the University of Chicago on a scholarship in 1964.
Moved by demonstrations in Chicago, Mr. Eggan recalled on a Web site dedicated to veterans of the civil rights movement that he dropped out of school – thereby relinquishing his student draft deferment – and burned his draft card and filed as a conscientious objector. In 1965, he went to South Carolina to assist with voter registration. He became involved with a black soldier on leave from Vietnam, which led to his being run out of town. Mr. Eggan eventually ended his work in the south in response to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's urging that white activists should focus on anti-racist work among whites.
In the years that followed, Mr. Eggan traveled between New York City (where, he recalled, he was around the corner from Christopher Street on the first night of the Stonewall riots, but was "too afraid to join in") and San Francisco (where he became friends with the radical queer performance troupe, the Cockettes). In 1972, while appearing as an extra in a San Francisco Opera production of Aida, Mr. Eggan and two others unfurled a banner from the stage reading, "Dykes and Fags Support the Vietnamese Peace Plan."
Mr. Eggan returned to the Chicago area with his then-partner, documentary filmmaker Carel Rowe, where he soon joined the Chicago chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. He worked for a while with a childcare co-op run by women connected with the "Jane" group, which helped women get underground abortions, and he taught Puerto Rican high school students for 11 years.
Diagnosed with HIV in 1986, Mr. Eggan immersed himself in AIDS activism, co-founding the Chicago chapter of ACT UP, as well as ACT UP's PISD (People with Immune System Disorders) caucus. "What we accomplished in a few years shook up the whole system of medical care worldwide," he later wrote. "What couldn't be accomplished, what we had a hard time even noticing in our emergency operations, was that global economic and political priorities were not changed just because a few lousy drugs were doled out to those who could afford them."
In 1990, Mr. Eggan moved to Los Angeles, where he became executive director of Being Alive: The People with HIV/AIDS Action Coalition. Between 1993 and 2001, he served as the AIDS coordinator for the city of Los Angeles. He was instrumental in convincing then-Mayor Richard Riordan to declare a state of emergency, giving needle exchange programs official authorization and funding. He supported prisoners with HIV/AIDS, fought for housing for people with AIDS (including active drug users), and helped obtain funding for a landmark study of gay men who used crystal methamphetamine.
On June 21, less than three weeks before his death, the Los Angeles City Council honored Mr. Eggan for his service.
"We would not be where we are today if it had not been for people like Ferd," said Dr. Michael Gottlieb, who in 1981 authored the first medical case report that heralded the advent of AIDS. "Part of the founding generation of AIDS activists, he has been involved with AIDS for the life of the epidemic. Even if there were activist leaders waiting in the wings – and regrettably there aren't – Ferd Eggan would be irreplaceable."
Mr. Eggan retired on disability in 2001 and concentrated on his creative writing, journalism, video art, and his blog, "Communiques from a Cranky PWA."
"We're human beings and we want all the things that human beings want, and if we just limit ourselves to a few crumbs in the civic arena, then we're not being true to ourselves," Mr. Eggan said in his recent interview. "I think we can have a better world, and I hope everybody is able to direct their steps in that direction."
According to the Los Angeles Times , Mr. Eggan is survived by two brothers.
Mr. Eggan was cremated, and his ashes will be scattered over Big Sur. A memorial service will be held Sunday, July 29 at 3 p.m. at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center's Village at Ed Gould Plaza. Other memorials are being planned for San Francisco and Chicago.