Celebrating Pride And Honoring the Courage That Started It All

In 1985, four years after that first warning sign went largely unheeded, a hospice volunteer named Ganga Stone visited a man named Richard Sale, who was living with AIDS and too sick to cook for himself, or even to leave his home. She arrived not with a public-health plan or a government grant, but a meal.

That small act—one person seeing another’s hunger, illness, and isolation, and deciding that none of it was acceptable—was the beginning of God’s Love We Deliver. It is a simple origin story, but not a sentimental one. God’s Love We Deliver began because people were dying, and because too many of them were dying alone. The official systems that should have addressed the AIDS crisis with the urgency it demanded instead met it with fear, moral judgment, silence, and empty promises.

Despite Ganga’s simple act of kindness, AIDS did not “bring people together” in any easy sense. The medical mystery of 1981 quickly became a public-health emergency, and that public-health emergency became a test of national character. This country failed that test for far too long. AIDS took lovers, sons, brothers, friends, artists, teachers, nurses, neighbors, and strangers. It exposed not only the vulnerability of the human body, but the cruelty of a society that could decide, implicitly or explicitly, that some suffering mattered less because of who was suffering.

Part of the failure was bureaucratic. Part of it was political. Much of it was stigma. Because AIDS was first identified largely among gay men, it was treated by many people less as a disease than as a moral indictment. The sick were made to carry the weight of other people’s fear, suspicion, and disgust. The result was devastating: delayed action, inadequate education, public confusion, and widespread abandonment.

And yet that is not the whole story.

At bedsides, in church basements, in apartment kitchens, in hospital rooms, and on bicycles moving through New York streets, another America was doing its part. Family members stayed when others fled. Nurses touched patients when others were afraid to be in the same room. Artists made grief visible. Activists forced institutions to speak, fund, research, and treat.

Pride flags on our SoHo terrace

At God’s Love We Deliver, our answer was food. A meal delivered to someone with AIDS was nutrition, of course. But it was also recognition of basic human dignity. Every meal delivered to someone too ill or too isolated said: You are not untouchable. You are not forgotten. You are not a diagnosis, a risk category, a moral debate, or abandoned. You are a person, and someone is coming to your door with food and love.

Ganga Stone once explained the work plainly: “You can’t comfort people who have not eaten.” That sentence contains a whole philosophy of care. Dignity doesn’t have to be an abstraction; it does have to be practical. It can even just be something as simple as lunch.

Four decades later, the crisis has changed, as has the work of God’s Love We Deliver, but the moral questions remain. What do we owe people living with serious illness? What do we owe those who are isolated, hungry, and scared? What do we owe people whose struggle is easy for others to ignore?

Across New York City, those same questions are still being answered by organizations born in the early years of the AIDS crisis. GMHC turned fear and misinformation into testing, prevention, advocacy, and housing support. ACT UP forced government, medicine, and the pharmaceutical industry to move faster, speak more honestly, and treat people with AIDS as active partners rather than passive victims. Callen-Lorde helped build community-based HIV care rooted in dignity and access. Bailey House, Housing Works, and Harlem United insisted that housing, health care, legal support, and anti-stigma work are parts of the same fight for survival.

Together, these organizations remind us that the answer to abandonment was never one service alone; it was a whole infrastructure of care, protest, memory, and love.

Our client, Mark

The anniversary of that first CDC report should not be treated merely as a medical milestone. It is a civic anniversary, too—a reminder of what communities can build in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.

A meal by itself cannot cure a serious illness. But it can affirm dignity and remind people living with the dual crises of hunger and illness that they are not forgotten, and send a powerful message to policymakers that medically tailored meals are worth investing in because human lives are worth investing in. That is where justice begins.

As we head into Pride weekend and Sunday’s March, we remember and celebrate all those who have been affected by HIV/AIDS, those who have done so much to change the face of the epidemic, and our LGBTQ+ community members. We love you!