The organizers of the Red High Heels Party don’t want to stop at just their partying. Feeling that awareness should never be just relegated to the hours of the night and cocktail glasses, they opted to make an all-day event that is geared towards including more family-friendly fair, art, and communal feelings.
And that event is the HIV Health & Wellness Fair.
“The idea of having [the Red High Heel Party and the HIV Wellness Fair] co-located didn’t quite work out,” said organizer Tommy Crow. “So initially the idea was dropped. However, a month and a half before the date of the party, we proposed the idea of meeting in the park earlier that day, collaborating with the different organizations and agencies, in a fair-like community outreach event.”
The fact that, according to Crowe, many intelligent people approach him lacking a knowledge on where or how to get HIV services was perturbing. What Crowe thought to be truthful was indeed only partially so: despite the extensive outreach through posters and websites, the community itself wasn’t being reached at the level it should.
“Somewhere down the line,” he said emphatically, “we lost the ability to interact with one another, and everything has become digital. Human interaction makes much more of an impact than just directing someone to an automated phone line or website. When in doubt, and serious despair, the last thing you want is an automated message that’s cold and heartless, even with the best intent.”
And so he pressed. Presses his friends and pressed his team members to search for a solution instead of waiting for outside groups to stumble upon one. As he stated, he’d rather “ask for forgiveness than permission,” and with that, they took things into their own hands with the organization of the fair. “Our adopted motto was, either you’re in on this, or thanks for listening, buh-bye. I’m not interested in excuses as to why you can’t do something; I’d respect you more if you plainly stated you weren’t interested. The truth, that’s all I ask for.”
The HIV Health & Wellness fair, to occur in Bixby Park tomorrow, will help usher in the Red High Heel Party fundraiser later that night as well as attempt to bridge the void that Crowe recognizes within community outreach—in both its apathy and lack of appealing to broader audiences. The point is not just about HIV prevention but also reaching out to those who have been diagnosed with HIV and relaying to them that their lives are indeed rich, active, and worth healthy living—and not through lecture, but via conversation about the tools one has within the community.
“We understand the community isn’t ignorant of the problem of HIV infection and mortality rates, but we do believe there is a slight disconnect in community knowledge of how HIV programs work and the availability of services,” Crowe continued. “Knowing your status, and protecting yourself are two major talking points we’ve heard for years, but as a community, we need to take it one step further. While knowing your status is indeed a primary goal, we need to also protect others around us. People are going to drink, do drugs, perform risky behavior, and it cannot be completely stopped.
“It’s not our goal to finger wag; it’s our goal to educate. We don’t want Long Beach to be known as the city with a high HIV infection rate because Long Beach has so much more to offer.”
Being proactive instead of reactive is, indeed, a beautiful motto to go by.
The HIV Health & Wellness Fair will occur at Bixby Park, located between Ocean Boulevard and Broadway along Junipero and Cherry Avenues. The free event will take place from 12:00pm to 4:00pm.