As a Health and Human Services Director & Community-Centered Researcher at APAIT, a division of Special Service for Groups, Inc., Jury Candelario has been a long-time leader in intersectional AIDS advocacy and public health equity efforts.
Jury has been an AIDS advocate since 1995. His work has taken him to the White House under the Obama administration and he has made a tremendous impact on the provision of public health services to LGBTQ+ Asian Americans. Initially, though, his introduction to the space was personal.
In the ‘90s, Jury lost an uncle to AIDS complications. He’d grown up with this uncle as a young kid in the Philippines and was able to visit him in the final years of his life, too. Like many Filipinos, Jury’s uncle served as a crew member on a ship, and this is likely where he contracted HIV.
As a young gay Filipino man navigating his own coming out, the stigma and shame surrounding his uncle’s death and the early stages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic hit home for Jury. After his uncle’s death, family members erroneously attributed his death to cancer.
Jury knew better. This experience drew him to volunteer for an AIDS walk at his high school, his first experience in service of the mission that now drives him. He’s remained a stalwart AIDS advocate to this day.
“I started from the ground up.”
While he currently occupies a director-level position, Jury started with street-level advocacy and community organizing work. In his early years of action, he worked from 2-4 AM in the morning, engaging directly with community members to mobilize them into action. Through this experience, he’s been able to witness folks grow out of the lowest of the lows to thrive and live full lives.
“Those are, to me, the biggest achievements. Being able to do that collectively, right? And, you know, it’s not me, it’s my whole team.” The spirit of community Jury carries with him in his advocacy efforts, the pride he has for the people he’s worked with and the folks he’s served that are successful because of it, are what has made his career so impactful. “That’s how we move the dial.”
Intersectional Solidarity
For his work, Jury was recently awarded the Spirit of Accomplice Award by the Trans-Latina
coalition. He has always incorporated a commitment to solidarity into his work, viewing an intersectional lens as not just essential to but inextricable from mutual aid and community service work. Of this priority, he says: “To me, it was a no-brainer.”
This idea remains with him from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when Asian Americans were not considered part of the impacted community despite being heavily affected. “We may not have had the highest numbers, but we were still very much impacted.”
In order for the Asian American community to be served adequately, it was necessary to build interethnic coalitions and collaborate with organizations to amplify Asian American voices. It was out of this need that APAIT (Access to Prevention, Advocacy, Intervention, and Treatment) was founded as part of the Gay Men of Color Consortium (now the Communities of Color Coalition).
APAIT: The Founding Years
“APAIT was established in 1987 as a grassroots AIDS service organization (ASO) for Asian and Pacific Islanders (APIs) who were dying alone from AIDS-related stigma and shame.” (apaitssg.org)
In the early ‘90s, it needed to be proved to the Asian American community that the AIDS epidemic was a relevant issue for us: that our impacted relatives and families were not the only affected Asian Americans, and that the solution was not silence or shame. In this effort, Jury says, it was necessary for advocates to be “a mixture of loud and proud and quiet and careful.”
Before the virus was well-understood, clinics didn’t know how to treat HIV/AIDS patients, so folks arrived at APAIT. Part of the endeavor of proving relevance to Asian American communities was demonstrating that affected Asian Americans existed, that they were trying to access services, and that they were community members: familiar faces.
Without powerful community members, APAIT could never have gained momentum as it did. Organizations like Asian Pacific Gays and Friends (formerly Asian Pacific Lesbians & Gays), AAPI Equity Alliance (formerly Asian American Equity Alliance, and AJSOCAL (formerly APA Legal Center), offered support for founding efforts. This helped founding members “build their muscle” in getting the support of the Asian Pacific community as the marriage equality movement ran parallel to AIDS advocacy efforts.
Members of these groups “were seeing their friends die alone”, many of them still-closeted immigrants. APAIT began as a grief counseling program to respond to mental health needs of affected community members. Within a few years, it began to provide services. AIDS evolved from a death sentence to a manageable condition, and APAIT helped patients properly manage it.
Obstacles to Service
In recent years, we have in many ways gone back to the drawing board because of increasing attacks on LGBTQ+ and Asian American communities. While AIDS has become a manageable condition, patients must actively participate in their healthcare. This means that folks with intersectional identities are less likely to receive proper care with increased challenges to accessing services. For trans, gender non-conforming, and intersex folks, there exists a looming threat of healthcare being made unavailable, as well as resurging and continuing stigma towards HIV/AIDS. Issues previously reformed are reopening and worsening, creating challenges for care providers, too.
Moreover, it’s difficult to locate data that accurately represents the impact of AIDS/HIV data in Asian American communities. The erasure of AAPIs as disaggregated data points in the United States has been persistent for decades and the effort to separate data remains an ongoing fight. Data that represents the community we serve is critical. “Data, to me, drives how we create programs, how we highlight the needs of our communities, so it’s really critical for any organization… we shouldn’t stop collecting just because it’s not popular at the moment.”
However, there are difficulties with gathering helpful data beyond due diligence during analysis. When those surveyed are part of a vulnerable population that’s under attack, clients are hesitant to access services that document them as part of that vulnerable population for fear of attracting attention to themselves. This manifests as an increased inclination towards remote services and a reduction in folks accessing services at all.
Significant progress has been made towards mitigating these barriers in previous years, but with hostile policy decisions from the current federal administration mounting, it is becoming more challenging to continue Jury’s work at APAIT and beyond.
The Current Moment (& How to Meet It)
Jury’s current priorities for intersectional queer and AAPI advocacy include equal treatment for trans folks, particularly in communities of color. It’s disheartening to him to see folks in the larger LGBTQ+ community outright deny support for the transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex community, and he believes we have a lot of work to do to advance and preserve what rights trans folks do have.
To do this, unity is the path forward. Jury recalls the early days of the fight for civil rights for gays and lesbians, and how these rights were sometimes earned at the expense of coalitions with the transgender community. In a moment of increasing divisions in political circles today, where minority groups are often pit against each other in the fight for representation, Jury calls for steadiness and coalition: “If there’s infighting in our own communities of color, we’re participating in ongoing chaos.”
Further, this fight is intersectional. In his role at APAIT, Jury says, “We have not shied away. We will continue to be thought partners and co-instigators in the fight towards trans liberation.” He recognizes that LGBTQ+ people of color are targets in multiple different ways and continues to probe how to combat the mounting attacks against them without diminishing visibility for these communities. Safety and visibility can be at odds in this work, and it is a priority for Jury to strike a measured balance.
So, he leads with self-love, an act he calls “courageous” in our current political moment. “Self-love is radical,” Jury explains, “In a world where you are going to get hate-crimed just for who you are.”
