Steve Gibson heard a bad joke 22 years ago and his life changed forever.
“In 1986 the joke at my high school was ‘Are you gay? Got AIDS yet?’ When you’re gay, and you hear that, it’s one of those moments when you know that your whole life is going to be different,” Gibson said.
Gibson finds nothing amusing about AIDS. He fought disease and discrimination as a student activist at Saint Louis University, as co-executive director of San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project, and finally as executive director of Magnet, the Castro’s one-stop health clinic and community center.
Magnet provides not only STD testing but also a space for art openings, public forums, and community meetings. The roots of Magnet go back eight years to a time when a pressing need was going unfulfilled in San Francisco's gay community.
“There was a chunk of change coming around to support gay men’s health services in San Francisco,” Gibson said. “At the time, there was not one place doing HIV testing in the Castro. Managing a disease epidemic for 25 years is not natural, but in San Francisco, unfortunately, gay men have to.”
But from the beginning Magnet was to be about more than public health.
“There was a feeling that more of the same was going to generate more of the same,” Gibson said. “So how do you improve the overall health of the community?”
Through Magnet, Gibson hopes to create a sense of community and fraternity in the Castro that will reduce risky behaviors like drug abuse and unprotected sex.
“The Castro has a huge international reputation, and when most of us moved here from Topeka or wherever we didn’t leave all of our [emotional] baggage behind,” Gibson said. “We expect to be treated with dignity and respect and have full rights, but we don’t treat ourselves with that same dignity and respect.”
In addition to providing health services, Magnet also hosts “art openings and book openings and socials and town hall forums,” all in the interests of creating “a community norm where whoever you are is perfect just the way you are,” Gibson said.
Gibson grew up in Indianapolis, where he "learned things like manners and that you could leave the door unlocked and what it was like to have a safe, healthy childhood,” but where he also had to cope with the deaths of both of his parents before he was 18.
“Steve’s father died of a massive heart attack when Steve was only five,“ said Nancy Hart, Gibson’s maternal aunt. “His mother passed away just around the time he was finishing [high] school. The real shame is that they never really got to know what a wonderful son they had.”
Gibson acknowledged that his parents’ deaths forced him to mature quickly.
“The years I was supposed to become a young adult I was an adult instead,“ he said.
Gibson said that after his mother’s death he came out of the closet, but only gradually.
“The Midwest is slow to come around,” said Hart, who never suspected that her nephew was gay. “I never felt like he waited to tell me, it was just the right opportunity then,” she said.
By the time Gibson enrolled at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit school, in 1992, he was not just willing to admit he was gay, he was making a stand about it.
“The first memory I have of Steve is a phone call and him saying ’I’m openly gay and I want to know if Saint Louis University is a safe place for me,’” said Professor Janice Chadha, at the time an instructor in SLU’s health department. “I told him ‘I believe we can make it safe.’”
“I was openly gay and applying to a Catholic university. They really didn’t know what to do with me,” Gibson said.
The student body initially had trouble accepting Gibson. “Steve was the first person [at SLU] who ever said ‘I’m a gay man, and from my perspective’, and the students were dumbfounded,” Chadha said.
Not satisfied just with being SLU’s first openly gay student, Gibson went on to found a student group for gays and lesbians, with Chadha as faculty adviser. “I received multiple threats, including some death threats” during that period, Gibson said.
Chadha recounted one particularly tense confrontation:
“This big football player type guy walked up to him in the hall and said ‘Steve Gibson, you’re a faggot.’ And Steve said ‘Yeah?’ And the guy said it again, ‘Steve Gibson, you’re a faggot.’ And Steve says ‘What is it I can do for you?’”
Chadha spent more time worrying about Gibson’s safety than Gibson himself did.
“She gave me her rape whistle and said ‘You’re going to needs this now more than I am,’” Gibson said.
“It was a band whistle, you could hear it a mile away,” said Chadha. “I was very scared at the time, but I don’t think Steve was ever scared. I learned a lot about being brave from Steve. [He] was one of the most challenging experiences of my academic career, and probably the most rewarding.”
Although Chadha worried, Gibson’s family lost little sleep over his potentially dangerous political stand.
“He’s not someone I’ve ever sat around and worried about,” said Nancy Hart. “He believed in what he did. He would not back down from his cause.”
According to Chadha, Gibson transformed the school.
“They went form being a Catholic University that didn’t even talk about gay and lesbian issues to flying the pink triangle flag from the student union building,” she said.
Gibson noticed his impact in more subtle ways.
“I had someone walk up to me in the hallway and say ‘Are you Steve Gibson?’ And when I said ‘yes’ he just said ‘Thank you’ and walked away.”
“When he graduated I went and got him a sheet cake with pink triangles and ‘Steve Gibson, Shameless Agitator’ written on it,” Chadha said, noting that the bakery kept a photo of the cake on display for years.
Gibson moved to San Francisco in 1993 with a specific mission in mind to fight the spread of HIV.
“I moved out here with my master’s in social work. I lived in the Castro and I was young and cute and just blond enough for it to matter. I thought I was going save the world,” said Gibson.
“I finally convinced the Stop AIDS project to hire me in 1994,” Gibson said. “It was the plague years, but people were starting to live longer. It used to be people would walk down the streets and say ‘I knew so and so who died there, who died there, who died there.‘ There would be a hundred people who had died within a block. You don’t get that anymore.”
Gibson said that even after decades of safe sex education a need for outreach still existed.
“Brushing your teeth is fairly simple, and it only involves one person. We know that we’re supposed to brush three times a day, but most of us don’t,” he said. “Sex, on the other hand, is complicated, and it involves two people. Minimum.”
Steve Abbott, who sits on the board of Stop AIDS, said that Gibson was a perfect fit for the organization.
“He loved the project and its mission. He’d found his calling,” Abbott said. “It was always a pleasure to see him.”
Beginning as a volunteer for Stop AIDS in 1994, Gibson worked his way up to co-executive director.
“He really wove himself into the fabric of the project,” Abbott said. “We had an issue with leadership at the time and Steve stepped right up and said ‘I’m not sure if I have the skill set, but I’m in.’”
In 2000 Gibson left Stop AIDS to begin work on what would eventually become Magnet. Abbott was sorry to see him go, but called Gibson’s work since “very impressive.”
“People come into Stop AIDS and they do what they do and they move on,” Abbott said. “Steve is an example of moving on to a whole other level.”
A group photo just inside the entrance of the Stop AIDS headquarters prominently displays Gibson.
“Every time I walk in the door, there’s Steve,” Abbott said. “He’s still very much a part of the project.”
Getting Magnet off the ground turned out to be harder than Gibson imagined.
“It was hell,” said Kevin Roe, the first employee Gibson hired. “Neither of us had any idea what we were getting into. The building wasn’t even open, [Steve] had a desk in someone else’s office, I had no desk and no office, and there was no one to help.”
Roe credits Gibson for steering Magnet through its growing pains.
“He held up. His hair got whiter, but he’s still here. That’s how it is, you take as much hell as you can until you crack,” Roe said.
Gibson described himself as “a workaholic” who devotes as much as 60 hours a week to Magnet.
“He lies,” said Roe. “It’s more like 65, 70.“
Roe said that Magnet has been a success, citing a decline in the rate of new syphilis infections every year since the center opened.
“Besides,” he added, “where else can you go for a seminar on the pros and cons of barebacking versus non barebacking? We ask the community ‘What do you need?’ and then we provide it.”
Roe said that after a slow start in the first year, the demand for Magnet’s services skyrocketed. “Once the word got out there about what we offered, we’ve been playing catch-up ever since,” he said.
Opening Magnet brought Gibson some unexpected insight about himself.
“My aunt told me ‘Your mom and dad would be so proud of the work you’re doing’, and it was really surprising to me how much that meant to me,” he said. “I’m a grown man, but I’m still looking for my parents’ approval.”
Gibson doubts that his position at Magnet will be permanent, but isn't sure where he'll go next.
“When this started [Kevin Roe and I] both agreed with each other that we’d give ourselves five years in the position,” Gibson said, noting that five years were up but neither was leaving.
“At some point you have to move on and do something else, but what that might be, who knows?”
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“In 1986 the joke at my high school was ‘Are you gay? Got AIDS yet?’ When you’re gay, and you hear that, it’s one of those moments when you know that your whole life is going to be different,” Gibson said.
Gibson finds nothing amusing about AIDS. He fought disease and discrimination as a student activist at Saint Louis University, as co-executive director of San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project, and finally as executive director of Magnet, the Castro’s one-stop health clinic and community center.
Magnet provides not only STD testing but also a space for art openings, public forums, and community meetings. The roots of Magnet go back eight years to a time when a pressing need was going unfulfilled in San Francisco's gay community.
“There was a chunk of change coming around to support gay men’s health services in San Francisco,” Gibson said. “At the time, there was not one place doing HIV testing in the Castro. Managing a disease epidemic for 25 years is not natural, but in San Francisco, unfortunately, gay men have to.”
But from the beginning Magnet was to be about more than public health.
“There was a feeling that more of the same was going to generate more of the same,” Gibson said. “So how do you improve the overall health of the community?”
Through Magnet, Gibson hopes to create a sense of community and fraternity in the Castro that will reduce risky behaviors like drug abuse and unprotected sex.
“The Castro has a huge international reputation, and when most of us moved here from Topeka or wherever we didn’t leave all of our [emotional] baggage behind,” Gibson said. “We expect to be treated with dignity and respect and have full rights, but we don’t treat ourselves with that same dignity and respect.”
In addition to providing health services, Magnet also hosts “art openings and book openings and socials and town hall forums,” all in the interests of creating “a community norm where whoever you are is perfect just the way you are,” Gibson said.
Gibson grew up in Indianapolis, where he "learned things like manners and that you could leave the door unlocked and what it was like to have a safe, healthy childhood,” but where he also had to cope with the deaths of both of his parents before he was 18.
“Steve’s father died of a massive heart attack when Steve was only five,“ said Nancy Hart, Gibson’s maternal aunt. “His mother passed away just around the time he was finishing [high] school. The real shame is that they never really got to know what a wonderful son they had.”
Gibson acknowledged that his parents’ deaths forced him to mature quickly.
“The years I was supposed to become a young adult I was an adult instead,“ he said.
Gibson said that after his mother’s death he came out of the closet, but only gradually.
“The Midwest is slow to come around,” said Hart, who never suspected that her nephew was gay. “I never felt like he waited to tell me, it was just the right opportunity then,” she said.
By the time Gibson enrolled at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit school, in 1992, he was not just willing to admit he was gay, he was making a stand about it.
“The first memory I have of Steve is a phone call and him saying ’I’m openly gay and I want to know if Saint Louis University is a safe place for me,’” said Professor Janice Chadha, at the time an instructor in SLU’s health department. “I told him ‘I believe we can make it safe.’”
“I was openly gay and applying to a Catholic university. They really didn’t know what to do with me,” Gibson said.
The student body initially had trouble accepting Gibson. “Steve was the first person [at SLU] who ever said ‘I’m a gay man, and from my perspective’, and the students were dumbfounded,” Chadha said.
Not satisfied just with being SLU’s first openly gay student, Gibson went on to found a student group for gays and lesbians, with Chadha as faculty adviser. “I received multiple threats, including some death threats” during that period, Gibson said.
Chadha recounted one particularly tense confrontation:
“This big football player type guy walked up to him in the hall and said ‘Steve Gibson, you’re a faggot.’ And Steve said ‘Yeah?’ And the guy said it again, ‘Steve Gibson, you’re a faggot.’ And Steve says ‘What is it I can do for you?’”
Chadha spent more time worrying about Gibson’s safety than Gibson himself did.
“She gave me her rape whistle and said ‘You’re going to needs this now more than I am,’” Gibson said.
“It was a band whistle, you could hear it a mile away,” said Chadha. “I was very scared at the time, but I don’t think Steve was ever scared. I learned a lot about being brave from Steve. [He] was one of the most challenging experiences of my academic career, and probably the most rewarding.”
Although Chadha worried, Gibson’s family lost little sleep over his potentially dangerous political stand.
“He’s not someone I’ve ever sat around and worried about,” said Nancy Hart. “He believed in what he did. He would not back down from his cause.”
According to Chadha, Gibson transformed the school.
“They went form being a Catholic University that didn’t even talk about gay and lesbian issues to flying the pink triangle flag from the student union building,” she said.
Gibson noticed his impact in more subtle ways.
“I had someone walk up to me in the hallway and say ‘Are you Steve Gibson?’ And when I said ‘yes’ he just said ‘Thank you’ and walked away.”
“When he graduated I went and got him a sheet cake with pink triangles and ‘Steve Gibson, Shameless Agitator’ written on it,” Chadha said, noting that the bakery kept a photo of the cake on display for years.
Gibson moved to San Francisco in 1993 with a specific mission in mind to fight the spread of HIV.
“I moved out here with my master’s in social work. I lived in the Castro and I was young and cute and just blond enough for it to matter. I thought I was going save the world,” said Gibson.
“I finally convinced the Stop AIDS project to hire me in 1994,” Gibson said. “It was the plague years, but people were starting to live longer. It used to be people would walk down the streets and say ‘I knew so and so who died there, who died there, who died there.‘ There would be a hundred people who had died within a block. You don’t get that anymore.”
Gibson said that even after decades of safe sex education a need for outreach still existed.
“Brushing your teeth is fairly simple, and it only involves one person. We know that we’re supposed to brush three times a day, but most of us don’t,” he said. “Sex, on the other hand, is complicated, and it involves two people. Minimum.”
Steve Abbott, who sits on the board of Stop AIDS, said that Gibson was a perfect fit for the organization.
“He loved the project and its mission. He’d found his calling,” Abbott said. “It was always a pleasure to see him.”
Beginning as a volunteer for Stop AIDS in 1994, Gibson worked his way up to co-executive director.
“He really wove himself into the fabric of the project,” Abbott said. “We had an issue with leadership at the time and Steve stepped right up and said ‘I’m not sure if I have the skill set, but I’m in.’”
In 2000 Gibson left Stop AIDS to begin work on what would eventually become Magnet. Abbott was sorry to see him go, but called Gibson’s work since “very impressive.”
“People come into Stop AIDS and they do what they do and they move on,” Abbott said. “Steve is an example of moving on to a whole other level.”
A group photo just inside the entrance of the Stop AIDS headquarters prominently displays Gibson.
“Every time I walk in the door, there’s Steve,” Abbott said. “He’s still very much a part of the project.”
Getting Magnet off the ground turned out to be harder than Gibson imagined.
“It was hell,” said Kevin Roe, the first employee Gibson hired. “Neither of us had any idea what we were getting into. The building wasn’t even open, [Steve] had a desk in someone else’s office, I had no desk and no office, and there was no one to help.”
Roe credits Gibson for steering Magnet through its growing pains.
“He held up. His hair got whiter, but he’s still here. That’s how it is, you take as much hell as you can until you crack,” Roe said.
Gibson described himself as “a workaholic” who devotes as much as 60 hours a week to Magnet.
“He lies,” said Roe. “It’s more like 65, 70.“
Roe said that Magnet has been a success, citing a decline in the rate of new syphilis infections every year since the center opened.
“Besides,” he added, “where else can you go for a seminar on the pros and cons of barebacking versus non barebacking? We ask the community ‘What do you need?’ and then we provide it.”
Roe said that after a slow start in the first year, the demand for Magnet’s services skyrocketed. “Once the word got out there about what we offered, we’ve been playing catch-up ever since,” he said.
Opening Magnet brought Gibson some unexpected insight about himself.
“My aunt told me ‘Your mom and dad would be so proud of the work you’re doing’, and it was really surprising to me how much that meant to me,” he said. “I’m a grown man, but I’m still looking for my parents’ approval.”
Gibson doubts that his position at Magnet will be permanent, but isn't sure where he'll go next.
“When this started [Kevin Roe and I] both agreed with each other that we’d give ourselves five years in the position,” Gibson said, noting that five years were up but neither was leaving.
“At some point you have to move on and do something else, but what that might be, who knows?”
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