BOYSTOWN — Boystown is nothing like it was in the '90s, Justin Hayford will tell you.
A far cry from the vibrant scene of Pride Parades and late-night revelry, the epicenter of Chicago's LGBT community was then a skeletal haunt, suffocating by the AIDS epidemic.
Hayford, 52, began his work as a paralegal with the AIDS Legal Council — now the Legal Council for Health Justice — in 1991, just as AIDS was rising in the public sphere. On Thursday, his 25 years of advocacy work will be honored with the Chicago Bar Association's Liberty Bell award.
In his first week, Hayford's phone was ringing off the hook.
After helping a man with HIV who'd been suddenly evicted by his own father, Hayford rushed to the bedside of a gaunt day laborer. The man needed to change his will in his final moments, leaving everything to his niece — the only family member who would speak to him following his HIV diagnosis.
"Back then, everybody was dying," Hayford said. "Our colleagues were dying, clients died. That legacy of loss is extraordinary."
Walking down Halsted Street at the time, Hayford recalls "this parade of people with walkers and men who barely had any meat left on their bones."
In Buck's Saloon — a bar that would provide direct support to people with HIV and help cover their rent — he'd sit with a colleague, staring in horror and awe at the empty seats thinking, "My God, what have we lived through?"
But buried in that horror were "the best moments of humanity," which kept Hayford going.
"Almost always at the bedside you have the mother, the father, the lover, who sits in that chair every day, even when the person in the bed doesn't know they're there," Hayford said. "Witnessing love beyond the limits of hope was extraordinarily motivating."
Looking back 25 years later, Hayford is struck by how the AIDS epidemic crossed so many social issues. Homophobia, racism, sexism, poverty and mental illness each played a role, "coalescing in this one movement," he said.
While AIDS still affects 1.2 million people in the United States and 36.9 million with HIV worldwide, the "state of emergency" has largely passed.
Buck's Saloon is gone, replaced by Replay. For Boystown's young partiers AIDS is a manageable reality, far from the all-consuming epidemic Hayford experienced.
"In some ways, that is the proper and healthy response," Hayford said. "You can never expect a generation behind you to know what you went through — how could you?"
Now, his conversations with clients about AIDS have shifted entirely.
"Back in the day, we were, by and large, clearing a little space for a moment of justice before a client would succumb to the illness — in some ways preparing people for a dignified death," Hayford said. "Now, we're really helping people build better lives."
In addition to his tireless efforts with the Legal Council, Hayford also wrote about the political and legal aspects of the crisis for the Chicago Reader, In These Times and The Progressive. He raises more than $10,000 each year for the Legal Council as an award-winning cabaret performer, producing multiple albums of '30s and '40s hits.
The Chicago Bar Association selected Hayford for the 2016 Liberty Bell award because of his legal advocacy for low-income people with HIV and his continued work to make their lives better. The award is granted each year to a non-lawyer with a "sense of responsibility for community welfare and public duty."
And Hayford said his work is far from over.
Despite an early misconception that gay men were the primary affected population, the impoverished are increasingly at risk.
Approximately 70 percent of new cases are in sub-Saharan Africa, and most people living with HIV or at risk for HIV don't have access to prevention and treatment, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
"Gay people are finally able to say, 'I have a right to everything else that anybody else has,' but that's a very middle class, privileged male perception of what the government should provide you," Hayford said.
People of color, transgender people and the poor continue to have those rights challenged — which means Hayford and the Legal Council for Health Justice still have plenty of work to do.
"That is the next big thing we have to fight for," Hayford said. "Why shouldn't we expect as much as we demanded 30 years ago? Why should we expect less when people who are simply poor are affected?"
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