Harley McMillen, 70, former executive director of Chicago's Howard Brown Health Center, died March 23 in Viroqua, Wisc. He lived in nearby Viola for the past 10 years before moving into an assisted living facility.
Allen McMillen, 31, said his uncle suffered a massive stroke and passed away just a couple of hours later. Allen said there is no service planned. Donations can be made in his name to Howard Brown Health Center or Tree House Humane Society.
In addition to Allen his survivors are: his brother Jack McMillen, 67, of Kansas City, Mo., and his sister Janis McMillen, 75, of Overland Park, Kan.
McMillen was an important pioneer in the early gay men's health movement, on issues of sexual health, hepatitis and AIDS. He was also very involved in the leather community, and bartended for gay bars. He was also part of the Pride Chicago Motorcycle Club, and bartended at clubs owned by Jim Flint and Chuck Renslow. He also worked for Renslow at GayLife newspaper in the early 1980s.
"He was really helpful on men's health issues, and in growing Howard Brown clinic," Renslow said, remembering his longtime friend, part of his Renslow "family." Jim Flint posted on Facebook that McMillen "will be missed by many."
McMillen was interviewed at length for the Windy City Times AIDS series Oct. 12, 2011. See www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/AIDS-Harley-McMillen-An-early-champion-in-fight-against-HIV/34185.html .
During the early fear-stricken days of the AIDS epidemic, McMillen stood out as a voice of reason. His strong Midwestern values and commitment to community service led him to become a focal point for the coordinated response to AIDS in Chicago, which included holding discussion forums on the disease, starting an AIDS hotline, founding the AIDS Action Project to provide direct outreach and social services, and helping to start the first Brown Elephant thrift store to fund their efforts, all while managing a clinic with a staff of more than 400 employees and volunteers.
"People back then were scared. You could see it in their questions and their eyes," McMillen told Windy City times in 2011. He was former executive director of HBHC (then known as Howard Brown Memorial Clinic) at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, in the early 1980s.
Sarah Puccia, former Director of the AIDS Action Project, commented that "[Harley] saw the big picture of any one decision and how it might reverberate in different ways, and I think he provided, really, the leadership style that allowed a lot of people to do some incredible work."
Most of McMillen's adult life has been spent helping communities in need. Fresh out of graduate school in 1971, he worked as a field representative at the State of Missouri's Office of Aging. He then served as Program Development Director of a $2.4 million Department of Health and Human Services study on integrating social services to meal sites for the elderly in Florida. Immediately preceding his start at the clinic in 1980, McMillen worked for two years with the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, helping them extend their brand to urban environments.
McMillen recalled the infamous day of June 5, 1981 when the medical director of Howard Brown, Dr. Raymond DiPhilips, came into his office and laid the first report on deaths down on his desk. DiPhillips said, "Something out there is killing gay men, and we don't know what it is. We've got to do something." This marked the beginning of a struggle that would consume McMillen's life for the next three years.
McMillen had already helped Howard Brown Memorial Clinic transition from being a small, volunteer-based operation to a more structured medical facility with rigidly defined administrative processes. He began to prepare the clinic for its next role as the main source of education and diagnosis of this new deadly disease.
Within months of that initial report, Howard Brown led their first community meeting about the epidemic at Illinois Masonic Hospital. McMillen described the experience as tense, due to the inconclusive nature of the data they had at the time. Officially there was no known cause of the disease, and certainly no treatment that was remotely effective while people were dying and many more were getting sick.
"The gay community would come with all their questions, and we would present the facts of what we [knew]," McMillen recounted. "Unfortunately, most of the questions they asked we [didn't] know [the answers to] , like, 'Well, what can I not do?' or 'Is all sex okay and not anal sex?' You know, it was very difficult, because you went away feeling very badly because you couldn't give what you wanted to."
One of the first reported cases of AIDS in Chicago was one of McMillen's close friends, Glynn "Sudsy" Sudbery.
"[I went] to visit [Glen] at Presbyterian St. Luke's and [had] to completely go into isolation," McMillen said. "I had to follow complete isolation proceduresthe mask, gloves, the yellow outfit I had to put over myselfbecause the hospital did not know how to protect me or how to keep Sudsy alive. It still brings tears to my eyes when I envision that moment, trying to comfort him and show strength at the same time. He and I had been friends for many years, and we were in the leather community together."
During this period, McMillen was in frequent contact with the city of Chicago to seek assistance and to keep them informed on the progression of the disease. It was not until federal money was granted to Howard Brown that the city of Chicago began to devote any real funds to fighting the disease.
The clinic's main source of funding at the time came from Chicago's bar community. Nearly every night, McMillen was at a fundraiser at one bar or another. "We did drag shows, [I] had pies tossed in my face at Big Red's (a since-closed bar) , anything that was possible that people would give us money for," said McMillen. "It was never enough, but people were generous."
McMillen knew that the only hope of getting funding was from the federal government. He structured the clinic so that it would be attractive to grant committees, instructing his accountant to develop an indirect cost stream and ensuring the administrative processes of Howard Brown were sharply defined.
In 1983, federal funding finally arrived from the National Institutes of Health in the form of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study. McMillen again braced for another major change at the clinic. Howard Brown was the only LGBT-focused facility to receive funds, largely due to the administrative processes McMillen put in place. The clinic was audited, but their financials held strong. Participants in the study began enrolling at Howard Brown, and soon, even the city of Chicago began offering educational materials and funds to the AIDS hotline.
During one of the darkest times in recent LGBT history, when gay men and women struggled to find any source of hope, McMillen was concerned with the more personal effects of the AIDS crisis. At a speech he gave after the Pride Parade in 1983, McMillen offered a piece of advice, which still holds true today: "No matter what happens, what we cannot do is lose the ability to love each other."