How one small town in the Deep South fought back against HIV/AIDS

The following is an excerpt from the new book Small Town Rage: Fighting Back in the Deep South by Dr. David W. Hylan, out now, whichtells the untold story of ACT UP Shreveport, one of the smallest, fiercest AIDS activist chapters in America.

In the heart of Louisiana, far from the media centers of New York and San Francisco, a handful of ordinary citizens waged an extraordinary battle. They fought against hospitals that turned away patients, churches that preached judgment instead of mercy, and politicians who refused to listen. In a city that wasn’t supposed to have a movement, they created one anyway.

This powerful narrative weaves together personal testimonies, historical records, and first-hand interviews drawn from the award-winning documentary of the same name. Through these voices, Small Town Rage captures the courage, grief, humor, and resilience of those who dared to demand dignity in the Deep South.

Led by figures like Chuck Selber, Deborah Allen, Robert “Bobby” Darrow, Joe DeSantis, and others, ACT UP Shreveport’s defiance helped change the face of Southern HIV/AIDS response and gave birth to The Philadelphia Center, one of Louisiana’s most vital HIV service organizations.

How about we take this to the next level?

Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Dr. Hylan’s work honors their legacy while exposing the hypocrisy and hostility they faced. With unflinching honesty and lyrical storytelling, Small Town Rage reveals how a group of marginalized voices forced an entire region to confront its silence and, in doing so, helped change the national conversation about compassion, healthcare, and equality.

By the end of the 1980s, AIDS was no longer distant or abstract in Shreveport. It had settled into daily life through omission and delay—hospital corridors that learned avoidance, churches that learned moral distance, and public offices that practiced patience while people disappeared. Funerals multiplied. People got sick, then sicker, then were gone. What the city knew, it rarely said out loud. Quiet care and private grief became the default. By 1989, those strategies were failing, and the cost could no longer be ignored.

It was in that failure that it began, as many Southern reckonings do—with a late meal taken not for comfort but because nowhere else felt possible. George’s Grill, a twenty-four-hour diner on Kings Highway in Shreveport, sat wide open to the road, its plate-glass windows holding fluorescent light against the dark. Inside, the smell of bacon grease and burnt coffee clung to the air. Plates clattered. Waitresses called everyone “honey” without asking for names. When the queer bars closed, people drifted here, hungry for something steady after the music stopped. 

Chuck Selber, a playwright and creative force in Shreveport; Gary Cathey, a fashion designer recently returned from New York; and Joe DeSantis, an artist and actor, sat at a table pressed close to the window, traffic sliding past as if the city were moving on without them. All three men were thin—noticeably so—the kind of change that had become familiar, though it showed differently in each of them, most clearly in Chuck, where the loss had settled into his face even beneath his beard. Chuck spoke directly, his voice rising and falling with intensity but never breaking into a yell, his disbelief sharp as he described the indignity he was witnessing—medical staff refusing to treat, to help, to even enter the rooms of people with AIDS. Gary remained composed, but just as direct, focused on what needed to happen next, unwilling to waste time now that the truth was clear. Joe moved differently, expressive and irreverent even in anger, his frustration spilling out with theatrical force, a performance shaped as much by pain as by instinct. All three carried the weight of what they had seen and lost, not just for themselves, but for a community that had been left to absorb it in silence.

George’s Grill was not neutral ground, but it was forgiving ground. The noise gave cover; the windows offered visibility without exposure. At the table by the glass, grief and anger finally had somewhere to land—about hospitals that avoided them, government agencies that delayed, nonprofits that rationed care, and institutions that treated people living with HIV and AIDS as expendable.

That permission mattered because of who was sitting there. All three men were already shaped by the epidemic in different ways, carrying experience gathered far beyond Shreveport back into a city that had not yet named what it was facing. They had watched other cities move from rumor to denial to open catastrophe. They knew the pattern—how quickly hospitals filled, how families disappeared, how institutions stalled until the cost was counted in bodies. Gary spoke about it at length that night. He had seen enough in New York to understand that what was coming to Shreveport would not be mild or contained. It would be brutal. Even he underestimated how severe it would become here—how tightly silence would hold, how stubbornly local systems would resist, how many would be left to navigate illness without protection. 

They did not meet for introductions. They met because each carried the same accumulation of loss and frustration. Chuck arrived from Houston with sharpened impatience, forged by watching institutions delay while people disappeared. Gary Cathey brought organizing discipline learned in New York through his volunteer work with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Joe DeSantis, moving between coasts, had witnessed the same reckoning unfold elsewhere. What they shared that night was not novelty, but recognition—and the first pressure of something that would not stay contained.

It was late 1989. The year was closing, and the local death count was rising quietly, without ceremony. They did not arrive with a plan. They arrived carrying stories: hospital rooms no one would enter, bodies handled with gloves, funerals without families, churches that offered judgment instead of care. The conversation moved in circles at first, anger folding back on itself, grief finding no clean exit. They talked for hours until what had been unspoken finally settled between them. AIDS was not a future threat. It was already shaping daily life in Shreveport, whether the city named it or not.

This was not a meeting of strangers. Chuck, Gary, and Joe had known one another for years, their lives overlapping through shared friends, shared losses, and the small, migratory world of queer life that stretched between cities. Each had left Shreveport at different times, in different moments, chasing work, dreams, and the possibility of becoming someone else. Each had come back for reasons largely unspoken but deeply understood. By the fall of 1989, Chuck and Joe had both been diagnosed with AIDS, their illnesses already advanced. Gary believed he was sick as well, only learning much later that he was HIV-negative. All three returned home believing, in some measure, that they were coming back to die. Sitting together at George’s Grill, they did not need to explain what AIDS was. What mattered was that they were all back—and that waiting had already failed them.

Even then, the idea of action felt dangerous. Shreveport was not New York. Naming AIDS in public could cost a job, a family, a church. But as the night stretched on, danger began to feel less abstract than necessity itself. If refusal was possible elsewhere, why was silence still the only option here? Gary would later say it plainly: you didn’t have to be in New York to act up. You could act up anywhere. ACT UP was not a headquarters or a permission structure. It was a refusal to stay silent.

They did not leave George’s Grill with a manifesto. They left with an agreement. They would stop pretending silence was harmless. They would stop waiting for institutions that had already shown they would not act in time. They did not yet know what shape the work would take, or how visible it would need to become. They only knew that what they had been doing—grieving privately, helping quietly—was no longer enough. If people were going to die anyway, they would not die unseen.

Excerpt from the new book Small Town Rage: Fighting Back in the Deep South by Dr. David W. Hylan, out now.

Sign up for the Queerty newsletter to stay on top of the hottest stories in LGBTQ+ entertainment, politics, and culture.