Gay Men's Health Crisis

The GMHC (formerly Gay Men's Health Crisis) is a New York City–based non-profit, volunteer-supported and community-based AIDS service organization whose mission statement is "end the AIDS epidemic and uplift the lives of all affected."

The organization was founded in January 1982 after reports began surfacing in San Francisco and New York City that a rare form of cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma was affecting young gay men. After the Centers for Disease Control declared the new disease an epidemic, Gay Men's Health Crisis was created when 80 men gathered in New York writer Larry Kramer's apartment to discuss the issue of "gay cancer" and to raise money for research. GMHC took its name from the fact that the earliest men who fell victim to AIDS in the early 1980s were gay.

The founders were Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Lawrence D. Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport and Edmund White. They organized the formal, tax-exempt entity. At the time it was the largest volunteer AIDS organization in the world. Paul Popham was chosen as the president.

Rodger McFarlane began a crisis counseling hotline that originated on his own home telephone, which ultimately became one of the organization's most effective tools for sharing information about AIDS. He was named as the director of GMHC in 1982, helping create a more formal structure for the nascent organization, which had no funding or offices when he took on the role. GMHC operated out of a couple of rooms for offices in a rooming house in Chelsea owned by Mel Cheren of West End Records.

Larry Kramer wrote that by the time of McFarlane's death, "the GMHC is essentially what he started: crisis counseling, legal aid, volunteers, the buddy system, social workers" as part of an organization that serves more than 15,000 people affected by HIV and AIDS. In an interview with The New York Times after McFarlane's death in May 2009, Kramer described how "single-handedly Rodger took this struggling ragtag group of really frightened and mostly young men, found us an office and set up all the programs."

...
Wikipedia