Rick Marchand: The AIDS Kit

Rick Marchand of AIDS Vancouver is interviewed at the organization office about how Vancouver AIDS organizations came together to create the AIDS Kit for Celebration ’90 registrants.

Marchand:  “Last year we did a needs assessment of the gay community in Vancouver and found that certainly we were able to identify a lot of the prevention and education needs in this area. We’ve been traditionally underfunded in this province – the province has never given any kind of funding to do programming for gay and bisexual men.

Along with that of course we realized that the Gay Games were coming and what were we going to do about that, and it was a major undertaking we thought.

In this area there’s a recently funded Women & AIDS project and early on we got together and thought it would be really good for both of our organizations and the communities if we worked cooperatively on this project and came up with two different packages to suit the needs of lesbians and gay and bisexual men.

In Canada, as in the United States, there’s no statistics kept on lesbians and so that’s been a major drawback for really knowing what’s going on in communities. At the same time, for example I was just at a conference in Washington, D.C. and I know that lesbians in the States are very, very concerned about not having access to information and to know really what’s going on, so there’s a lot of fear and confusion and anger in the lesbian communities.

I think that everybody has an interpretation of what safer sex is and what their risk is, and it’s really important for gays and lesbians to be talking about this issue. So, I think that would be the overall goal – get people talking – of course we want people to play safely during the Gay Games.”