Michael Anthony Petrelis (born January 26, 1959) is an American AIDS activist, LGBTQ rights activist, and blogger. He was diagnosed with Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in 1985 in New York City, New York. As a member of the Lavender Hill Mob, a forerunner to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), he was among the first AIDS activists to protest responses to the disease. He was a co-founding member of ACT UP in New York City, New York, and later helped organize ACT UP chapters in Portland, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and New Hampshire, as well as the ACT UP Presidential Project. Petrelis was also a founding member of Queer Nation/National Capital, the Washington D.C. chapter of the militant LGBTQ rights organization.
In 1990, he organized a nationwide boycott of products manufactured by Philip Morris Companies, Inc. (now Altria Group, Inc.), including Marlboro cigarettes and Miller beer, to protest the company's support for Jesse Helms, a Republican senator from North Carolina whose rhetoric and policy positions Petrelis said were harmful to LGBTQ communities. Petrelis was among several activists who disclosed, in 1989, that Mark Hatfield, a Republican senator from Oregon who supported anti-gay legislation, was secretly gay, the first such political outing of an elected official by American activists. Over the next few years, Petrelis became an outspoken proponent of outing and one of its most prominent practitioners; at a 1990 press conference on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, he outed a dozen public figures, although no news outlets published the names, and he played a pivotal role in the 1991 outing of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Pete Williams by writer Michelangelo Signorile in The Advocate, an American LGBT-interest magazine.
When Terry M. Helvey and an accomplice, Charles E. Vins, murdered Helvey's shipmate, U.S. Navy Seaman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. in October 1992, because Schindler was gay, Petrelis traveled twice to Japan to press the Navy for justice on Schindler's behalf and to monitor the trial, while raising awareness of the hate crime in the U.S.
After relocating to San Francisco, California, in 1995, Petrelis successfully lobbied the city's Department of Public Health (SFDPH) to make the female condom available to gay men, and advocated reopening the gay bathhouses there. He also founded the AIDS Accountability Project, a watchdog organization that obtained IRS tax forms 990 from nonprofit AIDS service organizations, then published the financial information disclosed therein online. He currently lives with his partner of eighteen years, Mike Merrigan, and writes a blog called The Petrelis Files. On April 5, 2014, Petrelis announced his candidacy for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, running against incumbent Scott Wiener for the District 8 seat, representing the Castro, Noe Valley, Diamond Heights, and Glen Park neighborhoods of San Francisco.
In January 1999, Out magazine included Petrelis in the Out 100, recognizing him, for creating the AIDS Accountability Project, as one of the "people who defined 1998". The Advocate has published a variety of articles about him, one in August 1999, named Petrelis among its "Best and Brightest Activists" citing the AIDS Accountability Project and other controversial causes while another from 2002 spoke less glowingly about him.
Petrelis has been involved in several controversies related to his protest tactics. In the early 2000s, he and another activist were charged after making repeated late-night phone calls to journalists and public-health officials; the case included allegations of stalking, conspiracy, and criminal harassment, and they ultimately pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges involving threatening or harassing calls. Years later, Petrelis drew additional criticism when he attempted to photograph local politician Scott Wiener in a restroom at San Francisco City Hall during a protest related to Wiener's stance on public nudity laws. A judge subsequently issued an order requiring Petrelis to stay away from Wiener.
Early years and influences
Petrelis was born in Newark, New Jersey, where he lived for "four or five" years before his family moved to Caldwell, a nearby suburb. According to a family legend, his maternal grandmother once created a scene when his mother failed to win a Shirley Temple look-alike contest in Newark, overturning the judges' table and screaming, "This is a mafia-rigged beauty contest! My daughter's the most beautiful one!" Petrelis said of the legend, "...of course, I wasn't there, and you don't necessarily inherit that kind of whatever it takes to do it, but sometimes, you've just got to overturn some tables and remember that, for me, I have a Mediterranean background and that anger is okay."
Petrelis attended an alternative high school in East Orange, New Jersey, where he was openly gay. He remembers first becoming involved with the gay community as a teenager, traveling to the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. In the city, Petrelis discovered he could make money as a sex worker and engaged in "lots and lots of unsafe sex." After graduating high school in 1977, he spent the following summer hitchhiking across the United States to San Francisco, California, where he lived for the next three years.
In San Francisco, Petrelis witnessed the White Night riots at San Francisco City Hall, a reaction to the lenient sentencing of Dan White, convicted of killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk. Petrelis remembers feeling outrage on hearing the news of White's sentence and said of the property destruction he had watched that night, "I remember feeling that was okay — that you had to have this destruction of personal property to send a message...to gay people here in San Francisco— [White's lenient sentence] is not okay. And we had to look out for ourselves — even with the relative liberal attitudes of San Francisco."
Petrelis moved to New York, in 1981, where he renewed his acquaintance with a male couple he knew from his teenage visits to the city. One of these men was the first of Petrelis' friends to die of the disease that would later come to be known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
AIDS diagnosis
Through the early months and spring of 1985, Petrelis suffered from a persistent illness that one doctor diagnosed as influenza; by that summer, he had developed a "bump" on his arm and was referred to a dermatologist at New York University (NYU) Hospital. At first, Petrelis balked; earning his living as a temporary office worker, he had neither insurance nor money to pay a dermatologist. Urged by the referring physician, he relented.
At NYU Hospital, Dr. Patrick N. Hennessey removed a biopsy of the suspicious lesion and stitched the incision. Petrelis remembered not wanting to return to have the stitches removed, again for lack of insurance and money, assuming that "if there's bad news, they'll call me up and tell me." When Hennessey's office did call and insisted Petrelis must see the doctor, he resolved to "...worry about payment later."
On the afternoon of August 26, 1985, Petrelis returned to Hennessey's office for removal of the stitches. Hennessey explained the results of the biopsy: the lesion was Kaposi's sarcoma, an opportunistic infection. He told Petrelis he had AIDS and that more such opportunistic infections would follow. His prognosis was terminal, with six months to a year to live. Henley advised him to go to the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) as soon as possible, draft a will, and find a doctor.
Introduction to activism
Upon hearing news of Petrelis' AIDS diagnosis, the friend with whom Petrelis lived asked him to leave; he was soon sleeping on numerous friends' couches and engaged in his first campaign: to pressure the city to support the AIDS Resource Center's (ARC) proposed purchase of the River Hotel on Christopher Street at the West Side Highway. With help from Mayor Edward Koch's administration, ARC planned to open the first residence for people with AIDS in the United States. Also active in the campaign were Andy Humm of the Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Rights (CLGR), Buddy Noro of People With AIDS, and Bill Bahlman and Marty Robinson of the Gay and Lesbian Anti-defamation League (now the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD).
Robinson, whom Petrelis remembered meeting by chance one night outside New York City's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center on West 13th Street, as the two men waited for a GLAAD meeting to begin, was a veteran activist. Throughout the 1960s, he had been active in the Mattachine Society, one of the first homophile organizations in the United States. He was present at the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village bar, when officers from the New York City Police Department raided it on June 28, 1969, sparking the resistance known as the Stonewall riots, and he was a featured speaker at the subsequent rally in Sheridan Square, attended by two thousand people. In the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, he co-founded the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), where he was credited with developing the zap, a protest tactic that would become a central component of ACT UP's strategy.
Frustrated with what Bahlman called the "timid sort of nature" of GLAAD's and CLGR's tactics in the face of the AIDS crisis, Robinson and Noro determined that they needed to start a new group. In the late summer of 1986, in the wake of the Supreme Court of the United States' ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, they began meeting with a small group of friends at Bahlman's apartment. In addition to Robinson, Noro, and Bahlman, early participants included Henry Yaeger Jean Elizabeth Glass Eric Perez, and Petrelis. The group would come to call itself the Lavender Hill Mob, after a well-known comic British film — a title they believed captured the personality of the group and its actions: gay, confrontational, creative, and humorous.
Petrelis recalled, during this time, attending a community meeting at St. Vincent's Hospital at which he, alone, confronted Koch advisor John LoCicero and Carol Greitzer, Councilwoman from New York City's Third District where the River Hotel was located. Petrelis believed Greitzer was "dragging her heels on this deal". Without waiting for the question and answer session, and without fear of arrest, Petrelis says he "just let them have it."
Petrelis also helped organize a Lavender Hill Mob demonstration, camping overnight in a tent outside Gracie Mansion, to protest the city's year-long delay in approving the contract and signing the paperwork for the River Hotel project. Bahlman believed the protest was instrumental; the city approved the contract within days.
Named Bailey House in honor of the Reverend Mead Miner Bailey, one of ARC's founders, the facility finally opened on December 10, 1986. Petrelis was among its first residents.
Lavender Hill Mob's opposition to mandatory AIDS testing
On February 24, 1987, Petrelis traveled with Bill Bahlman, Eric Perez, Marty Robinson, and Henry Yaeger to Atlanta, Georgia, where the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had convened the largest meeting yet held on the subject of AIDS. Eight hundred state and federal health officials attended the two-day conference to discuss proposed CDC guidelines for the use of AIDS antibody testing in preventing the spread of the disease; specifically, the CDC was considering whether to recommend such testing of patients admitted to hospitals, patients seeking clinical treatment for family planning, drug addiction or sexually transmitted diseases, prison inmates, and couples planning to marry.