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THE VILLAGE AIDS MEMORIAL

Main Menu
 * The Mission
 * The HistoryMenu Toggle
   * (Pre)History
   * A People’s Church
   * St. Mother Teresa
   * Marsha P. Johnson
   * Notable Plaques
 * Become A Caretaker!
 * Contact


 * #SAYTHEIRNAMES SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN
   
   580 volunteers each say one of the names from the 580 plaques of the
   #VillageAIDSMemorial. There is power speaking the names of victims aloud.
   Please support this #LivingMemorial by following on Instagram:
   
    * instagram

Preservation campaign of the historic & sacred artifact & relic

The Village AIDS Memorial

the ENDANGERED 1st AIDS Memorial in NYC & the only AIDS memorial in a house of
worship anywhere in the world born from “Patron Saint of Christopher Street”
Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson & Nobel Peace Prize winner Saint Mother Teresa

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“Please save the Village AIDS Memorial; it’s the first AIDS Memorial in New York
City and the only permanent AIDS memorial in a house of worship anywhere in the
world that was born from Saint Mother Teresa’s AIDS activism and connected to
[Stonewall legend] Marsha P. Johnson before she passed.”

-Whoopi Goldberg



To help raise awareness, please follow and share the Village AIDS Memorial
#SayTheirNames Campaign on Instagram (by clicking here) where 580 volunteers
each say a name from one of the 580 plaques on this memorial.



“One of the things I think- I hope -we learned from the AIDS pandemic, which
after all continues in some countries to this day, is that we are all intimately
connected, and connected to every other life form, and we are here to support
each other, and love one another, and learn from one another.”

-Dame Emma Thompson

The AIDS Pandemic is far from over: according to the United Nations, some
estimates suggest that upwards of 18 Black children die every hour, 444 Black
children die every day, and 162 thousand young, gifted and Black children die
every year.

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“Vincent Rossi is among the first 2000 New Yorkers who died of AIDS, out of the
over 100 thousand that would ultimately perish in the hardest hit city of the
AIDS pandemic in the United States.”

– Brad Pitt

In the United States of America, Trans People of Color are one of the most
vulnerable communities to the AIDS pandemic; according to the CDC, one study
found that 60% of Black Trans women polled were living with HIV. They are also
more likely to experience homelessness, poverty, violence, murder, imprisonment,
prejudice, lack of access and opportunity, love and empathy.

To contribute financially towards this treasured community credited with
sparking the LGBTQ civil rights movement at Stonewall in 1969, then sustaining
and leading the movement over the next decades and through the AIDS pandemic,
please consider purchasing one of the 580 limited-edition Village AIDS Memorial
push-pin buttons (each numbered and connected to one of the 580 plaques on this
memorial):

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Click on the Button to Purchase a Village AIDS Memorial Push-Pin Campaign
Button!

Not only will your generous support raise awareness, but 100% of your
tax-deductible donation of $20 will be equally distributed between these two
charities: For the Gworls and Trans Housing Coalition!





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The Village AIDS Memorial was born in 1992 at the Church of Saint Veronica on
Christopher Street, just a stone’s throw away from the Stonewall Inn in
Greenwich Village, New York City, where the world-wide Gay Rights Movement began
over 50 years ago. This memorial honors people who died of AIDS on 580
individual plaques mounted inside the sanctuary of this church, making it the
only permanent AIDS memorial in a house of worship anywhere in the world.
Considering that it honors hundreds from the LGBTQ community (& a drag queen
named Carlata) inside the sanctuary of Roman Catholic church (where God is said
to dwell), the existence of the Village AIDS Memorial is a miracle- and we’ve
got the saints to prove it: “Patron Saint of Christopher Street” Marsha “PAY IT
NO MIND” Johnson & Nobel Peace Prize winner Saint Mother Teresa.

In July 2017, the Archdiocese of New York closed this church and made official
plans to remove the Village AIDS Memorial. By some miracle, a hail-Mary
grassroots appeal to the Vatican was successful after a 4 year battle & on May
28th, the Vatican ordered the Archdiocese of New York to remove this church from
sale in honor of its sacred connection to Saint Mother Teresa. The Church of
Saint Veronica remains closed except for two symbolic masses per year; on June
7, 2021, the first of these masses, & the first time the church was open to the
public in four years, it was revealed that someone removed

Plaque  N°294: Timothy Alger (1960-1994)

The Village AIDS Memorial is still endangered- the Archdiocese of New York has
an outstanding order to remove it. Notice in the image below how the holes show
no natural wear & tear- Timothy Alger’s plaque was removed carefully & with
intention by someone who had the keys to enter the shuttered church…

The Church of Saint Veronica is a true people’s church because it took 16 years,
starting in 1887, for poor Irish Catholics to pool their pennies together to
build this church, worshipping in the meantime in a horse stable for three
years, and then a packed basement. All the while, other churches of the period
took an average of a year to 18 months, tops, to construct. Even after the
church was completed, the Archdiocese refused to declare the space sacred in the
eyes of God until the mortgage was paid off, which didn’t happen for another 24
years. All in all, it was a full 40 years from when the first brick was laid,
till the time that the Church of Saint Veronica was officially sanctified, a
feat so incredible that it prompted Cardinal Hayes to make this now-broken
promise:


“I want to say publicly that this is an accomplishment which will go into the
records of this Archdiocese and that it will be recorded in letters of gold. I
bear you not only my own congratulations and felicitations, but those of all the
people and all the clergy of our Archdiocese.”



Click here to learn more of the fascinating history of the Church of Saint
Veronica, which sits on land that has been known to Native Americans for
millennia as “Manetu” or “Spirit“, then part of the first free Black
inhabitation in North America developed in 1643 known as the “Land of the
Blacks”, birthing a legacy of continuous Black inhabitation at the heart of
Greenwich Village, which developed into a community known as “Little Africa”
during the 19th and 20th centuries centered on Minetta (Manetu) Lane, & is
primarily manifested today in the extraordinary community of Queer People of
Color that cling to Christopher Street and the Christopher Street Pier as sacred
spaces since before the days of pop-saint Marsha P. Johnson.





Saint Mother Teresa’s “Gift of Love”



Winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize Saint Mother Teresa is seen in this
photograph personally opening THE GIFT OF LOVE, what is believed to be the
world’s first ever AIDS hospice on Christmas Eve 1985 in the rectory of the
Church of Saint Veronica. Saint Mother Teresa ordered her religious congregation
of nuns- the Missionaries of Charity- to care for AIDS patients who had little
to no resources as they wasted away and inevitably died. (The Missionaries of
Charity continue to occupy the rectory of the church to this day.) Saint Mother
Teresa’s first AIDS patient was Raymond Galvin, who died six days after arrival
to the church, and is one of three non-violent prisoners the saint released from
Sing Sing Correctional Facility that Christmas. Little did she know that the
Church of Saint Veronica was just feet away from the former site of Newgate
Prison, the state of New York’s official prison from 1797 until 1828, when Sing
Sing was built to replace it. A miracle?

All in all, over 200 AIDS patients died at Saint Mother Teresa’s historic AIDS
hospice, almost all of them gay, and most of them People of Color. The Village
AIDS Memorial honors no less than 167 of these poor souls with nowhere else to
turn. “They are often very broken and unwanted by the time they come to us,”
confessed Sister Mary, despite the Missionary of Charity’s constitutional
aversion to press coverage so as to avoid the sin of self-aggrandizement.
Because it memorializes the names of those who died of AIDS at the hospice and,
perhaps, can tell us something about the demographic information of the types of
people most vulnerable to mass disease outbreaks like the one we are currently
experiencing, the Village AIDS Memorial is a sacred and historic record for
People of Color as well as the LGBTQ community. The Nobel Peace prize-winner
certainly held the AIDS ministry at this church close to her heart and soul; as
newspaper reports testify, Saint Mother Teresa would continue visiting her Gift
of Love throughout the years, last blessing the nuns and patients of her New
York City AIDS hospice in person just two months before she died in Calcutta,
India on September 5, 1997.



Click here to find out what made former New York City Mayor Ed Koch believe in
miracles: “I know of no person in the world – and I mean that with all sincerity
– who could get government to work so expeditiously as Mother Teresa did.
Government takes a long time to work, except when a saint calls!”



The Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson Connection



Legendary Black Trans leader of the Stonewall Uprising Marsha P. Johnson is seen
in the photo below standing in front of a Pride Week soup kitchen at the Church
of Saint Veronica carrying two plastic bags, perhaps benefitting from these
types of essential services provided by the church. This was one of many such
examples of outreach by this unique Roman Catholic Church to an LGBTQ community
besieged by the AIDS pandemic. The church also hosted free breakfast and lunch
service for over 40 people with AIDS who were previously rejected from other
locations due to fear and prejudice. Though she is more often remembered as one
of the most influential civil rights leader of the 20th century or in the rosy
light of her glamorous role as muse to Andy Warhol, it’s important to recognize
and honor that Marsha was a prostitute and often homeless. Not long after this
photo was taken, Marsha was found floating in the Hudson River near the
Christopher Street Pier, just a few short blocks from the Village AIDS Memorial.

Despite a “massive wound” to the back of her head, the New York City Police
Department ruled Marsha’s death a suicide, causing outrage in the community at
the time in an early example of the type of purpose that powers the Black Lives
Matter Movement of today. Nearly 30 years on, and Black Trans people are still
facing violent and mysterious murders at an alarming rate in the United States
of America. The connection between Marsha’s life and the Village AIDS Memorial
is even more poignant when one realizes that Marsha was HIV positive and, in
fact, cared for AIDS patients in the last days of their lives. According to the
Center for Disease Control (CDC), approximately 44% of Black Trans women are
living with HIV/AIDS.

“I don’t think you should be ashamed of anybody who has AIDS, I think you should
stand as close to them as you can and help them out as much as you can. I’m a
strong believer in that and that’s how come I try and do that for anybody that
has the virus, including myself…”

-Marsha P. Johnson, 11 days before her death

Also during that fated interview on June 26, 1992 (the same day the Village AIDS
Memorial was dedicated), Marsha P. Johnson unwittingly honored the man on Plaque
N°1 of this memorial:

“Ed Murphy was the one who put me in the Stonewall Car in 1980; he took me from
the back of the [Gay Pride] parades and put me up-front.”

– Marsha P. Johnson

In addition to her presence in front of the Church of Saint Veronica soup
kitchen, Marsha marched in a parade down Christopher Street on June 29, 1991 to
the Church of St. Veronica for the first interdenominational AIDS memorial
service in history (below). This would be amongst her last activist causes
before she was found in the Hudson River. The NYPD threw her corpse from the
river over the rampart, so that her body hit the pavement like a dead fish, as
“blood came out of her eyes and her mouth,” according to Markus Maier, a Village
resident who witnessed the event. “The cops left and there was one left over
that looked after the body until the coroners came-that took hours for the
coroners to come, to actually pick the body up. They covered half the body…”

“It was very nasty because the way they pulled her out. They just dropped her.
And we were all like, ‘Oh my God!’ They just dropped her. They just dropped her
right on the floor. It was like ‘Oh my God…’”




Click here to explore this important connection between the Village AIDS
Memorial and the “Patron Saint” of the LGBTQ community Marsha P. Johnson, who
days before her death proclaimed “I got married to Jesus Christ in church when I
was 16 years old” (Brides of Christ have been a sign of sainthood since the
earliest Christian martyrs.) According to eye-witnesses, Marsha’s devotion was
so grand that she was found on several occasions at a Catholic Church in
Hoboken, NJ at 6am in the morning, laying prostrate on the floor of the church,
fervently praying to a statue of the Virgin Mary or away from the alter, because
she believed it to be too holy.



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Some Notable Plaques

If this memorial should be saved for any one plaque’s sake it should be saved
for Plaque N° 233, which honors Little Lisa Carrascosa, the youngest person on
the Village AIDS Memorial who died from AIDS at the tender age of 5 years-old.
Little Lisa’s is the only one of the 580 plaques that is violently helter
skelter, hinting at the horror of her fate. There is something deeply wrong
here. Something that should never happen again, God willing. If she stays where
she is, resting above her mother and father, Little Lisa might help make that
dream a reality and no child will ever die from HIV/AIDS ever again.



According to the United Nations, there are 3.7 million children living with the
AIDS virus in the world today, 580 thousand Black children are newly infected
with the AIDS virus every year, & AIDS kills up to:

162 THOUSAND BLACK BABIES EVERY SINGLE YEAR

444 BLACK BABIES EVERY SINGLE DAY

18 BLACK BABIES EVERY HOUR



The vast majority of the 580 plaques on the Village AIDS Memorial in the Church
of Saint Veronica honors members of the LGBTQ community who led private lives.
Unfortunately, many of these gay men and women were rejected by religion and the
religious in life, and were only able to call a Roman Catholic Church their home
in death. The Church of Saint Veronica, because it sits at the center of the gay
community in New York City, was the exception to this rule, it was an anomaly.
It opened its doors to a community besieged by a plague, when other churches
turned them away. Apart from hundreds of gay men and women, the Village AIDS
Memorial also honors some of the famous martyrs of the AIDS pandemic, including
the boy from Kokomo Indiana who changed the world:



Click here to find out more about Ryan White, Peabody Award-winning Black
filmmaker Marlon Riggs, the first openly gay journalist Randy Shilts,
ground-breaking AIDS activist Elizabeth Glaser, and the other martyrs of the
AIDS pandemic who are honored on the Village AIDS Memorial.



Check out the first interfaith AIDS Memorial Service in history at the Church of
Saint Veronica which occurred in June 1992 and features never before seen
footage of Marsha P. Johnson:





Thank you for supporting the Village AIDS Memorial!

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Sign up to the email list to become a Caretaker of the Village AIDS Memorial,
and stay up-to-date on all the latest happenings with the campaign to preserve
this historic and sacred memorial.

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A special thanks to the following organizations who give this cause life with
their support, love and encouragement: