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BHS Hosts World AIDS Day Assembly

Berkeley High School hosted an assembly to honor World AIDS Day on December 1. Alan Miller, the BHS teacher who organized the event, said that the theme of this year’s assembly was activism.

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Berkeley High School (BHS) hosted an assembly to honor World AIDS Day on December 1. Alan Miller, the BHS teacher who organized the event, said that the theme of this year’s assembly was activism. Miller opened the assembly with a speech on the theme, focusing on the point that “it is never a convenient time for activism.”

Students who had volunteered to do so then performed a die-in, where they vocally protested silence surrounding AIDS and then acted out dying.

One BHS alumnus, Giuliani Alvarenga, a man kicked out by his family in his senior year of high school for being gay, talked about PrEP, a pill that reduces the risk of catching HIV before exposure to the virus, and PEP, which assists in preventing those who have been exposed to HIV from being infected. He also spoke about how AIDS disproportionately affects queer homeless youth of color.

Blackberri, another AIDS activist, sang “Eat the Rich” and spoke about the interconnectedness of different struggles.

A BHS alumnus named Piper shared her experience as a survivor of HIV after someone HIV positive raped her in high school. She said students need to support affordable health care, because without it, she would be dead due her lack of ability to pay for  medication that keeps her HIV from killing her.

Miller said, “Piper’s story has a really happy ending … [s]he’s a speaker, she’s lived a good life …When she started out, life expectancy was very [short] but [now] we’ve got medications.” The AIDS activist who closed the assembly, Rhonda Benin, sang an African American spiritual, modified for the occasion, with those assembled.

This is the seventh AIDS assembly Miller has organized at BHS, and each assembly has covered a different theme regarding AIDS. “I feel like there was this urgency when we were closer to the horror of [the AIDS epidemic] that I feel like people don’t have now … so World AIDS Day gives us an opportunity … to remind ourselves of that,” Miller said. In addition to activism, Miller said he also wanted students to learn about PrEP and PEP.

Nico Migdal, Tacy Prins Woodlief, and Maxime Hendrikse Liu, three students who participated in the die-in, said they felt positively about their role in the assembly.

They held signs that read statements such as “SILENCE = DEATH” while leading the assembled students and staff members in chants of the phrases on the signs. Migdal said she felt it was rude that “people laughed a lot” at the die-in, but that she felt consoled by the number of students in the crowd who chanted along.

Elam Dang-Richardson, a student who attended the assembly, said, “I really liked the assembly and I think it’s good that Mr. Miller was trying to raise awareness about AIDS with the assembly but I think some of the things at the assembly were a little confusing.”

Miller said he felt that by high school, one is likely to already have acquired a working knowledge of AIDS due to the mandatory sex education requirements in public elementary and middle schools in California.

Rather than teaching some of the basic knowledge surrounding the disease, he said that he wanted students to learn about HIV medications available to them, as well as the idea that AIDS affects everyone.