Woodstock Pride Fest Announces 2025 Grand Marshals Joe Weyland and Patti Vasquez

 

Note—From out good friends at Woodstock Pride.

Woodstock Pride is proud to announce the Grand Marshals for the 2025 Woodstock Pride Fest, taking place Sunday, June 15 from 1 to 3pm in historic downtown Woodstock. This year’s Hometown Hero Grand Marshal is Joe Weyland, a longtime Woodstock resident, LGBTQ+ activist, devoted husband, and proud dog dad. Joe’s work in the community has touched countless lives through advocacy, visibility, and compassion.

“As an HIV+ gay man living and thriving in Woodstock, I could not be prouder to be a part of PrideFest and to help bring the AIDS Memorial Quilt to McHenry County to honor and remember all those lost to this disease,” Weyland said.

 

Joining Joe is our Celebrity Grand Marshal, Patti Vasquez, comedian, activist, and host onWCPT. Patti is a true ally—she uses her voice and platform to uplift the LGBTQ+ community and advocate for many marginalized populations. PrideFest marks her return to Woodstock after she headlined Laughstock in 2019.

“Patti embodies the spirit of allyship in action,” said Melissa McMahon, Coordinator of Woodstock PrideFest.  “She brings energy, compassion, and joy to every stage she graces.”

PrideFest 2025 will feature a vibrant parade on June 15, live music and performances, local vendors, family activities, and the emotional and educational experience of panels and public viewing of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. It’s a weekend of celebration, remembrance, and community building.

 

A section of the legendary AIDS Memorial quilt will be on display at Unity Spiritual Center,  225 W. Calhoun Street during Pride Fest.

“I’m so proud of everything we’re bringing to Woodstock next weekend,” McMahon said. “We hope all will join us fora weekend of love, pride, and unity.”

For full details, schedules, and more, visit www.woodstockilpride.com or e-mail Melissapride1@gmail.com. .

World AIDS Day/First Sunday in Advent Redux—Murfin Verse

Back in 2001 World AIDS Day coincided with the First Sunday of Advent.  AIDS was then a death sentence.  Homosexual communities were stalked by a merciless plague.  Panic about the disease had spread far into the safe, middleclass hinterlands.  Misinformation and disinformation was rife—you could catch it from public toilet seats, the most casual physical contact.   Alvin Querhammer who owned the funeral home next door to me and doubled as the McHenry County Coroner wrote a piece for the Northwest Herald claiming that the HIV virus could be spread through the air circulation of jet liners and recommending that those infected be rounded up and kept in remote detention camps.

The opinion that AIDS was God’s justifiable wrath and just punishment for sodomites and fornicators was routinely propagated from many a pulpit.

There were signs that thing were ever-so-slowly changing.  Indiana teenager Ryan White had become the face of acceptably innocent victims.  Movie star Rock Hudson had become the first celebrity widely to be an acknowledged victim.  Elizabeth Taylor and Elton John lent their star power to awareness and charities for research and palliative care.  Panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt were being made, assembled, and displayed across the country.  Red ribbons were being worn widely.  World AIDS Day was established in 1988 and was marked annually on December 1.

In 2001 churches across the country were asked to ring their bells that day in a display both in memoriam and offering hope.  Our congregation, then known as the Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock had already been doing educational work to counter the hysteria and fear in the community.  We agreed to participate.  As far as I knew we were then the only church in McHenry County to participate.  I was the regular bell ringer at the old Church—the Quasimodo of Dean Street.  It fell to me to toll the bell during our Advent service.

I also prepared a poem to be read as our Chalice Lighting.

The serendipitous alignment of AIDS Awareness Day and the First Sunday in Advent has rolled around again this year.  Circumstances have changed.  Drug treatments can now control the HIV infection allowing people to live long lives in remission—if they can afford the expensive drug cocktails.  Awareness campaign dramatically reduced transmission in the Gay community but it continues to spread among women, intravenous drug users, and now among the elderly in retirement communities.

Worse, AIDS is still pandemic in much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of southern Asia.  Medical treatment is inadequate, drugs to expensive, and prevention crippled by the U.S. gag order that forbids dissemination of information on prophylactic protection by health agencies receiving American aid even indirectly.

An Advent Wreath--First Sunday.

So there is still much to remember this year as we light the first candle in the Advent wreath.  

My poem was included in my 2004 Skinner House Books collection We Build Temples in the Heart.

AIDS Advent Sunday

We Light a candle and await, 

            await the coming of light and hope,

            the promise foretold, fulfilled.

We light a candle and await,

            await the pealing of the bells in joy triumphant,

            where now they toll in somber mourning.

We light a candle and await,

            await the hour of reunion,

            prodigal and patriarch alike embraced,

            alike forgiven,

            all that was sundered made whole again.

We light a candle and await,

            await the gifts a million shortened lives

            could have wrapped for us

            and our delight at their discovery.

We light a candle and await,

            await the day the Quilt is at last finished,

            can be lovingly folded and nestled in cedar,

            and taken out only on cold nights

            to wrap us in the warmth of remembrance.

We light a candle and await.

—Patrick Murfin

Uh-Oh, World AIDS Day Gets New Poster Boy

Way back in 1984 as America was in the grips of a social panic over the so-called Gay Plague that seemed to threaten us with mass extinction from exposure from the air in jet liners or public toilet seats and respectable members of Congress were suggesting rounding up all Gays and putting them in the old abandoned McCarran Act concentration camps originally intended for Commies or on desert islands far, far away, it took a chaste, white Indiana 14 year old who was innocently infected through a blood transfusion to put a human face on the disease and begin to generate public sympathy for any of its victims.  Ryan White became the first poster boy of AIDS Awareness.  He showed up on the cover of People, sat on the couch of the Today Show, and was pals with Michael Jackson and Elton John.  When he died at age 19 in 1990 the nation wept.

Ryan White put an acceptable human face on AIDS with grace and dignity.

It took the Memorial Quilt, Red Ribbons, Angels in America, and the in-your-face militancy of Act Up to change the culture and the public’s mind.  Gay people counted too, it turned out.  Maybe even, if you stretched your standards, slutty women and junkies.  There was a parade of new faces of AIDS—Rock Hudson, Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth Glaser and her infected children, Arthur Ashe, etc.

Then came basketball super star Magic Johnson who announced that he was infected with HIV but not with full-blown AIDS.  But thanks to new drug treatments made possible by the relentless campaigns for public awareness, too many empty chairs at Thanksgivings, and wild-eyed radicalism of Act Up, Johnson not only survived, but seemed to thrive.  The tsunami of AIDS deaths suddenly subsided.  Like magic the scourge seemed to fade away and was soon forgotten by the public, which turned to new panics to obsess over.

Now we get Charlie Sheen and the inevitable circus. 

Now more than thirty years after Ryan White, AIDS is back in the headlines competing with terrorists, refugees, immigrants, Black protesters, and White zealots thanks to the baddest of the bad boys, Charlie Sheen whose drug, hooker, and booze meltdown a couple of years ago kept the tabloids, celeb stalking TV shows, and the allegedly serious mainstream press agog for months on end.

Gee, thanks Charlie.  We think.  On the 27th annual World AIDS Day Sheen has resurrected the image of the infection as the just deserts of the immoral.  A perfect fit for the rising tide of Puritanical Fundamentalist Right Wing power.  You can hear the we-told-you-sos rising.

It couldn’t come at a worse time, with death rates for AIDS creeping back up among a generation that never experienced the devastating losses of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s and whose sex education and safety classes have been stripped from many classrooms by abstinence only public policy.  The attack on Planned Parenthood and contraception has reduced the wide spread availability of condoms and instruction in their use that was key in slowing down infections rates.  It has also made medical testing, care, and treatment harder to come by.  AIDS is making a comeback, along with a raft of venereal diseases including syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia.  Infection rates are rising fastest in women and in minority, especially Black communities.  Just the kind of folks the religious crazies and their political enablers want to see suffer God’s wrath.

Come to think of it, maybe Charlie was just what we need to remind us that all lives have inherit worth and dignity even when it is well disguised and that in this case All Lives really do Matter.  It is a challenge and dare not to fall back into somnambulant complacency.

A 1990 Act Up Die-In in the Chicago Loop.  Maybe its time to revisit this kind of activism.

So dig out those old Red Ribbons.  Roll up your sleeves.  It’s World AIDS Day.  We have work to do.  Again.