--- title: Kiyoshi Kuromiya Helped AIDS Patients Get Life-Saving Info description: Kiyoshi Kuromiya put out a newsletter that helped AIDS/HIV patients in Philadelphia get information about treatment in the 1980s and 1990s. canonical: https://time.com/6105139/kiyoshi-kuromiya-aids-activist/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-10-21T15:40:51.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:15:52.316Z article:section: History og:title: The 'Forrest Gump of Activism' Who Helped HIV/AIDS Patients og:description: Kiyoshi Kuromiya was a gay civil rights activist and co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front movement's Philadelphia chapter og:url: https://time.com/6105139/kiyoshi-kuromiya-aids-activist/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9309e8e1010c40dd/698a1dca457a5278afd65980/Kiyoshi-Kuromiya.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3599 og:image:height: 2024 og:image:alt: Kiyoshi-Kuromiya og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The 'Forrest Gump of Activism' Who Helped HIV/AIDS Patients twitter:description: Kiyoshi Kuromiya was a gay civil rights activist and co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front movement's Philadelphia chapter twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9309e8e1010c40dd/698a1dca457a5278afd65980/Kiyoshi-Kuromiya.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The 'Forrest Gump of Activism' Who Helped HIV/AIDS Patients Get Life-Saving Treatment Information > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=0fbdb152-76e7-4132-969e-54cad1bd2934&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=0fbdb152-76e7-4132-969e-54cad1bd2934&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: Kiyoshi Kuromiya [Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: Kiyoshi Kuromiya](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/1JzJEVvE.m3u8) (6:45)  _Published 2021-10-20. In your history class, you probably learned about the Civil Rights Movement, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and the gay liberation fight. But you likely didn’t hear about Kiyoshi Kuromiya, an often overlooked activist who made many contributions to these struggles._ by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/) and [Video by Joey Lautrup](https://time.com/author/joey-lautrup/) Oct 21, 2021 3:40 PM UTC by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/) and [Video by Joey Lautrup](https://time.com/author/joey-lautrup/) Oct 21, 2021 3:40 PM UTC About a twenty-minute walk from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, in a city of sites dedicated to heroes of the American Revolution, there’s a tribute to a hero of the city’s LGBTQ+ community at the Philadelphia FIGHT community health center. It’s dedicated to Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a gay civil rights activist and co-founder of the [Gay Liberation Front](https://actupny.org/reports/kiyoshi.html) movement’s Philadelphia chapter who revolutionized the way [HIV/AIDS](https://time.com/5915401/world-aids-day-covid-coronavirus-pandemic/) patients got reliable information about the virus. The center’s Critical Path Learning Center is a free computer lab for [HIV/AIDS](https://time.com/4125655/aids-time-article-1982/) patients. It’s named after the “Critical Path Project,” a pioneering newsletter and 24-hour hotline that Kuromiya managed, providing reliable information about the [HIV/AIDS](https://time.com/3603734/world-aids-day-history/) and treatment in the earliest days of the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s. **Read More:** [_On World AIDS Day, Those Who Fought the 1980s Epidemic Find Striking Differences and Tragic Parallels in COVID-19_](https://time.com/5915401/world-aids-day-covid-coronavirus-pandemic/) Kuromiya was born May 9, 1943, in the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a Japanese-American incarceration camp in Wyoming. At the age of two, his family moved to Monrovia, Calif. He remained on the West Coast until college, when he moved cross-country to attend the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There, he had a political awakening. Che Gossett, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University who is writing a book about Kuromiya, said he would later refer to himself as the “Forrest Gump of activism” because he was involved in so many different movements. He participated in civil rights protests, and in March 1965, traveled to Montgomery, Alabama where he was beaten unconscious while participating in the Selma to Montgomery march—he had to get 20 stitches in his head, according to [a June 17, 1997, interview](https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/philadelphia-lgbt-interviews/int/kiyoshi-kuromiya) with Marc Stein, creator of the Philadelphia LGBT History Project. He was also an ardent anti-war demonstrator. In April 1968, he posted fliers inviting UPenn students to the university’s Van Pelt Library to watch a dog being burned in a protest over the use of napalm (which was deployed widely during the Vietnam War). When more than 2,000 outraged and curious students showed up, they found a flier that read: “Congratulations on your anti-napalm protest. You saved the life of a dog. Now, how about saving the lives of tens of thousands of people in Vietnam.” In the early 1980s, as the AIDS virus was beginning to devastate the gay community, Kuromiya re-focused his activism around AIDS patients’ rights. As one of the [founders](https://time.com/4912312/act-up-stephen-barker-photos/) of the AIDS advocacy group [ACT UP](https://time.com/4912312/act-up-stephen-barker-photos/), he co-wrote its first standard for care for AIDS, the first document of its kind. In a 1994 Philadelphia _Inquirer_ profile, the paper described him as “the city’s most knowledgeable layman about HIV.” And Kuromiya was early to see the benefits of the potential of online newsletters for getting more life-saving information on HIV/AIDS treatment to patients in real time. “You didn’t have to wait for the next journal to come out in the month; you could get on the very day… the information that might be the difference between your surviving another month or not,” says Chris Bartlett, who met Kuromiya through ACT UP Philadelphia in 1990 and is now the Executive Director of the William Way LGBT Community Center, home to Kuromiya’s archives—conference materials, scientific articles, newspaper clippings he collected about HIV/AIDS. **Read more:** [_AIDS Activist Larry Kramer: ‘I Don’t Regret Anything I’ve Done or Said’_](https://time.com/3926293/larry-kramer-activism-hbo-documentary/) In addition to helping people stay safe with [HIV/AIDS](https://time.com/5440824/freddie-mercury-celebrity-aids-awareness/), he worked to safeguard relevant information from online censorship in a culture where anti-gay, conservative forces were trying to do just that. In 1996 he [participated](https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/free-speech-challenge-internet-censorship-law) in one of the court cases that led to the overturn of sections of the Communications Decency Act aimed at blocking “patently offensive” material online. In his testimony, Kuromiya argued it could lead to the censorship of sexual information necessary to help curb the spread of HIV/AIDS. “I don’t know what ‘patently offensive’ means in terms of providing life-saving information to people with AIDS, including teenagers,” he [told](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0322decency.html) a panel of federal judges. Kuromiya also took care of AIDS patients. “In the days before there was really any treatment, \[he\] was doing on an _ad hoc_ basis what we would call hospice care now,” says Jane Shull, CEO of Philadelphia FIGHT, who met Kuromiya at an ACT UP meeting in the late 1980s. And his activism was personal. He found out he was HIV-positive in 1989, and died on May 10, 2000, at the age of 57, from complications of AIDS, according to [a New York _Times_ obituary.](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/28/us/kiyoshi-kuromiya-57-fighter-for-the-rights-of-aids-patients.html) His diagnosis had only emboldened him to work towards destigmatizing HIV/AIDS. Explaining why he was so focused on his work to Philadelphia LGBT History Project creator Marc Stein in their 1997 interview, [Kuromiya said simply](https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/philadelphia-lgbt-interviews/int/kiyoshi-kuromiya): “I really believe that activism is therapeutic.” ## Transcript Kiyoshi's a great example of somebody who from a really young age knew he was different, both because he was Asian and because he was queer. Instead of running away from those feelings and from those perspectives he gained, he dove in even deeper into them. He was unashamed of who he was, and, you know, he believed that the way he lived his life, completely free and open, was the way that everyone should have the freedom to live their lives. In your history class, you probably learned about the Civil Rights Movement, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and the gay liberation fight, but you likely didn't hear about Kiyoshi Kuromiya, an often overlooked activist who made many contributions to these and other struggles. Kiyoshi Kuromiya was born in an internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming in 1945. Internment really, I think, molded his consciousness so that he saw radical political struggles as one against all forms of confinement, be it internment, closets or cages. He, at a very early age, recognized that he was queer actually by reading the Kinsey Reports, and he also faced criminalization due to queerness and was arrested as a youth for like cruising in a park by cops who were surveilling the park. He saw that also as a moment of repression. He moved to Philadelphia to go to U Penn, and while he was there, he also began participating in radical activism. He was in Montgomery, Alabama in 1965 at the kind of end of the Selma to Montgomery March. He was attacked by police there. He said he was like the Forest Gump of activism. So he was in so many different places and helped to be a part of so many different movements. He distributed a bunch of flyers actually saying that during the height of the Vietnam War, when napalm bombing was happening, that a dog would be napalmed. They never intended to burn a dog, but hundreds of people turned out to protest the burning of the dog, and they were met with flyers that said, 'Well you turned out to protest the burning of a dog. Next time turn out to protest the burning of children.' Prior to the Gay Liberation 70s, there was a homophile movement, and he was part of that in Philadelphia, and then also helped to start the Gay Liberation Front in Philadelphia. Our fight against homosexual oppression is one with the revolutionary struggles of all oppressed peoples for life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He was intersectional before that that was a word or a thing. He introduced the Black Panthers to the Gay Liberation Movement. Because this was a guy who was an activist, and, you know, the issues of the times were going to be the issues that that he involved himself in. In the 1980s, Kuromiya learned that he had contracted HIV. During this time, queer activists, who had watched many loved ones die, formed organizations like Act Up to draw attention to the AIDS crisis from politicians, scientists, and drug companies. I met Kiyoshi in Act Up in the late 1980s. What he did all along was to try to stay sufficiently aware and up on things to get the best possible care for himself, but then he turned that into trying to get the best possible care for other people. He helped to start a organization called the Critical Path AIDS Project which ran the first like national hotline for HIV AIDS in the country and was a kind of early means of using the internet to give information around HIV AIDS. The first standard of care published by anybody in the United States for treating AIDS was the Act Up standard of care that Kiyoshi and John Lotts, another AIDS activist, wrote. Kiyoshi took care of people with AIDS in Philadelphia when they were very sick. His house in Center City, Philadelphia was just a meeting ground for anyone who needed help. So you know, there were homeless gay men passing through there, there were university professors and pharmaceutical experts. He always got his care from a network of health centers that were free if you didn't have any money to pay or if you didn't have insurance. He did not feel that he had the right to get something that the poorest people could not get. In 2000, Kuromiya passed away from complications of AIDS. But much of his work lives on today. When Kiyoshi died, we thought that it really was our duty to keep trying to carry out the work that he had been doing. We have a long list of educational programs that we do, one of which is the Critical Path Center, which was named after Kiyoshi's project. To this day, Act Up shows up at the mayor's house once a week to fight for housing for people with AIDS, to fight for good health care for people with AIDS, and the fact that that work goes on is directly correlated to the teachings that we learned from Kiyoshi. There was the belief that you could, you know, lift up one, that this will lift up all. You do learn that through learning about the lives of people who had absorbed that lesson somehow and who pushed forward and who made change against great odds and that was Kiyoshi. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6105139/kiyoshi-kuromiya-aids-activist/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6105139/kiyoshi-kuromiya-aids-activist/"},"headline":"The 'Forrest Gump of Activism' Who Helped HIV/AIDS Patients Get Life-Saving Treatment Information","datePublished":"2021-10-21T15:40:51.000Z","dateModified":"2026-10-14T09:15:52.316Z","description":"Kiyoshi Kuromiya put out a newsletter that helped AIDS/HIV patients in Philadelphia get information about treatment in the 1980s and 1990s.","url":"https://time.com/6105139/kiyoshi-kuromiya-aids-activist/","keywords":["health","video","Explainer","LGBTQ","nationpod","sponsorshipblock topic","Celebrating LGBTQIA History"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9309e8e1010c40dd/698a1dca457a5278afd65980/Kiyoshi-Kuromiya.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Olivia B. 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