Reggie Williams

Reggie Williams (April 29, 1951 – February 7, 1999) was an American AIDS activist, who fought for culturally relevant AIDS education and services for gay and bisexual men of color. Williams served as a board member for the National Association of Black and White Men Together and as the first executive director of the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention.

Early life Reggie Williams was born on April 29, 1951, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Withrow High School in 1969. In 1981 he moved to San Francisco with Tim Isbell, his boyfriend at the time, and began working as an X-ray technician at the University of California Medical Center.

In 1984, Williams began organizing in San Francisco to address the AIDS epidemic among Black gay men and other gay men of color, at around the same time that similar efforts were getting underway in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Williams was concerned that existing AIDS education efforts, which were organized largely by white gay men, were not reaching gay men of color. This work led him to help found the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention (NTFAP), and to serve as the group's first executive director, from 1988 to 1994. Williams would work to fill this gap in services, making AIDS outreach and education for gay and bisexual men of color the focus of much of the rest of his life. In 1984 Williams helped to found an AIDS Task Force within BWMT/SF to address these racial inequities in AIDS treatment and services in San Francisco. As co-chair of the BWMT/SF AIDS Task Force, he met with representatives from the Shanti Project, a local center providing support services to people with AIDS, to address allegations of racial discrimination by staff members.

In 1991, NTFAP suffered a dramatic reduction in CDC funding due to conservative backlash over its use of public funds to conduct sexually explicit AIDS education workshops. As a result, the group launched the Campaign for Fairness to demand more funding for AIDS education and services aimed at gay and bisexual men of color. Williams himself testified before a congressional subcommittee in July 1992, where he argued that gay and bisexual men of color should have a greater role in shaping AIDS policy. The following year, in 1993, the CDC mandated that local, state, and territorial health departments involve members of communities affected by HIV/AIDS in deciding how federal AIDS funding should be used, opening the door for the kind of change that Williams had demanded. He was succeeded in this role by Randy Miller. NTFAP ceased operations in 1998. Schreiber was prohibited from moving to the United States at the time because of his HIV-positive status.

Williams suffered a bout of Pneumocystis pneumonia in 1995, and was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996. In spite of his declining health, Williams was able to travel periodically, and returned to California in 1997 and 1998. He died from AIDS complications on February 7, 1999, at age 47.