As Night Falls on the Kanawha Valley, Charleston City Council Leans Into the Death Drive

I awoke to the news this morning that the Charleston, West Virginia City Council has passed a new and long-debated ordinance that imposes next-level strict regulations on syringe services programs (SSPs) operating within city limits in the midst of an HIV outbreak that the CDC has labeled the most concerning in the country. I was immediately reminded of an essay by Larry Kramer. In his obituary for President Ronald Reagan, the AIDS activist and ACT-UP co-founder opens with this pronouncement: “Our murderer is dead.”

Kramer continues with a discussion of Reagan’s refusal to even acknowledge the HIV/AIDS crisis publicly until the later years of his presidency, even as it raged on killing thousands of mostly gay people. With regards to why, Kramer writes that, “We of course were never a part of his American People. And we knew it. Year after year of his hateful and endless reign we knew we were not a part of the American People he was President of. He would never talk about us, of course, or do anything for us except murder us. There were no social services for us. There was no research into our health. Even as we were dying like flies. How could he not have seen us dying? The answer is he did see us dying and he chose to do nothing.”

I am reminded of Kramer’s writing today as a queer person from the Kanawha Valley after a night spent listening to four hours of debate on a new city ordinance in which the only time HIV was mentioned was during public comment, when a community member asked why the city council does not seem to care about the huge increase in new HIV cases there. I wonder why the city council would not speak the letters “HIV”, why they spent over four hours last night debating a bill that will only make the epidemic worse when the world is on fire. Could it be that they, like Reagan, are serving another “Charlestonian People”?

Syringe services have been transformed into a hot button issue in the Kanawha Valley since they were first politicized by former Charleston Mayor Danny Jones in 2018, but over the past year many of us have witnessed an especially drastic escalation in anti-SSP tactics rooted in fear and tied to a longer history of far right and fascist organizing in the Kanawha Valley. This history is connected to the white ruling class of Charleston’s decision to route an interstate through the Black Triangle District, displacing hundreds of people. To the Textbook War of 1974, where a school was bombed during a dispute over adopting less discriminatory textbooks. To the thirteen years that have passed since 2008, during which the city of Charleston has still failed to take any significant action to make good on the West Side Community Renewal Plan they adopted, continuing to divert resources away from the very community it displaced several decades prior. To 2013, when some of the members of the cast of characters involved in anti-SSP organizing today mounted a prolonged campaign of stalking and harassment against a seventeen year old girl — me — for trying to stand up for students’ rights to receive accurate and comprehensive sex education in our public schools. To 2019, when some members of the community rallied to defend Charleston police officer Joshua Mena after he beat the living hell out of Freda Gilmore on tape. Although the Kanawha Valley likes to narrate itself as a friendly and welcoming place, history tells us that terms and conditions apply.

My heart both aches and rages for the people of Charleston now — I fear for the lives of people in Charleston and the Kanawha Valley that are now at significantly greater risk of being lost to a proliferation of untreated cases of HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, and endocarditis as well as overdose deaths. I feel enraged by those on City Council who have spent months debating whether to take a life-saving service away while investing no new resources in support services, treatment, or longer term programs to address institutional racism and uneven development in the city that helped to produce this moment. I am sitting with the confusion of why Council last night also approved $200,000 in federal grant money to go toward purchasing gas masks for the Charleston Police Department with only one Council member asking a question, just as protests are once again escalating around the country in response to police brutality. I sit in disappointment but not surprise that city government will treat the West Side as someplace needing protection during debates on a bill creating new criminal penalties for providing certain kinds of health care while failing to redistribute resources to that community or address the ways the city’s police force has facilitated mass incarceration of its residents.

Over the last several decades, the City of Charleston has been presented with a number of moments in which it could have reimagined itself as something different and begun to dismantle systems of oppression that harm and disenfranchise residents, but each time it seems to have chosen to largely continue according to the deadly status quo.

History will not look kindly on many members of Charleston’s City Council and leadership, nor will it remember fondly the many others who saw a death crisis growing worse and decided to pour gasoline on the fire. As a historian myself, I am very familiar with the story of how we lost a generation of our queer elders to HIV/AIDS because government officials refused to help or even acknowledge it was a problem. And as someone who grew up in Kanawha County at the height of the overprescription of opiates, I have personally felt the pain of losing people in my life to overdose deaths. It makes me sad to know that a group of people who stepped in to fill a need — Solutions Oriented Addiction Response (SOAR) — has been thanked with a process of public villainization rather than support.

I don’t know where Charleston goes from here. This moment has created a wound that may be impossible to heal — we will lose even more people and it will be devastating. All I can do for now is wish that it wasn’t this way. But wishing alone will not save anyone — and I hope the Charleston City Council takes that to heart.