(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - The first ever LGBTQ plus community center in Peoria is now open.

Derec Kimler is the Executive Director of Central Illinois Friends, a nonprofit offering health services, and now a whole lot more.

Hey, Derec, good to see you.

- Good to have you, or good to be on.

- Good to be had.

- Yeah, good to be had.

Thanks for having me.

- Well, I'll tell you what, you know, your organization has grown so much since, what, the '80s?

- Since 1990.

- '90, okay.

- Which, I mean, we were, you know, created in the late '80s, but as a 501c3, 1990.

- Tell us what your organization does and why it's important for the area.

- Yeah.

Well, to be able to tell you what it does, I kind of wanna share a little bit of the history about Central Illinois Friends.

- Sure.

- You know, a lot of folks have been around Peoria for a long time and have never even heard of us.

But that was actually by design.

So, Central Illinois Friends was founded in 1990 to be a center to help people be as comfortable as possible in their last days battling AIDS related complications.

You know, the interesting thing about Peoria versus other cities throughout the nation is infectious disease hits Peoria similarly to fashion.

And you might be thinking, "Where is this going?"

But it kind of hits on the coast and then slowly makes its way to the Midwest.

You could see that with COVID, and you see that with every bit of fashion or mainstream- - Trends.

- Trends, et cetera.

Well, HIV was the same thing.

In the early '80s, people were dying of AIDS related complications in Miami and San Francisco and LA and New York and Chicago, but it slowly made its way here.

And we had a trend in the late '80s of people moving back to this area, people who used to call this place home.

They were moving because they'd lost all their friends already.

And when they came home to die, they realized they had no one here either.

Not because the people here were gone, but because the people here bought into the stigma that the nation was saying about HIV/AIDS, and they slammed the door in their faces, our local faith-based hospitals, Methodist, Proctor, OSF, which were all three separate hospitals at the time.

Also, if they couldn't help you anymore, they were like, "There's nothing else for you."

And so a group of concerned individuals with no health background decided, "We gotta do something about this."

And so they got together and created Central Illinois Friends to be the friends of those who needed it the most, especially in that hard time.

- It sounds like, you know, what we think of now as a hospice, but also, being there just as a human.

- Correct.

- For support, knowing that, you know, these are your last days.

Thankfully, you know, we don't have as many of those stigmas now as we did back then.

But tell us how the organization has kind of evolved From where it was in 1990.

- Yeah, so in 1990, that's in a nutshell of who we were, right?

There was still a lot of misnomers.

But obviously, as we grew as an organization, in 1996, we started getting medications that were readily available that helped people live with HIV.

And don't get me wrong, people were still living, 'cause every body, and I say body as in the human body, reacts to every thing differently, medications, all that.

And so in 1996, though, more people started to live.

It was the first time in the nation that you saw death rates to AIDS related complications start to drop for the first time in 16 years.

Now, I do wanna make a point here.

From 1990 to 1996, at that time, more American citizens died of AIDS related complications than died in all wars combined, excluding World War II.

So if you take all wars that America's ever been a part of and you exclude World War II, we lost more American citizens in that span to AIDS related complications than we did in all wars combined.

So, with that being said, finally, people started living with HIV in 1996, and that rate, the death rate just kept going.

But obviously, the infection rate was still going up.

We needed to become a new organization.

So we went from helping people be as comfortable as possible to helping people live a long and healthy life.

And for years, we did everything we could to answer the social determinants of health, which at that time, we didn't have language for, but to help people be as successful as possible, so that way they can take care of their health and live a long, healthy life.

Because of the workings of University of Illinois College of Medicine and Central Illinois Friends, a lot of individuals were born in the Peoria area, parents that were living with HIV, but the children were born without, because of the work that we were doing along with the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Sharon Tier, who was doing amazing work at the time.

Now, that all changed in 2011.

There was another step in the right direction.

In 2011, the medications got so well, they weren't just helping people live a long and healthy life, they were getting to a point where you can actually have the virus be dormant in your body.

So there's this thing called U equals U, which means undetectable equals untransmittable.

So we started to learn at that time that if you're on your medications and you're living with HIV and you can achieve an undetectable status, I say if you can because not every body reacts to medications the same way, if you can achieve an undetectable status, then you can not, or you are not transmittable, right?

The virus is not transmittable at that point.

So, that's when our organization took a whole nother turn and said, "Okay, it's not enough for us to help people that are living with HIV in our area, we can put an end to this.

We can stop new HIV diagnoses."

And so that's when they brought me on, and Chris Wade and a few others, who worked to start working on prevention.

So it was like our third set of evolution as an organization, where we started to really dive into the preventative aspect of HIV.

- I'm curious about, you know, we don't hear about HIV and AIDS as much now as we did in the '80s, early '90s.

I'm curious about these medications, because I've seen commercials for 'em on TV, just like any other medication.

Are they readily available to people, and are they affordable?

- So, that's the a good point.

Good question.

'Cause the reality is that if you didn't have any qualifiers, if we didn't have grants and support, it could cost up to $46,000 a year to live with HIV, between appointments and medications.

It's astronomical.

Nobody, hardly anybody can afford that, right?

But because of federal grants and programs that we rely heavily on, we are able to keep people living with HIV in care and undetectable, which means lowering our community's viral load, right?

So, those are the grants and that's kind of the working that we do as an organization, along with Positive Health Solutions, which is here in Peoria.

With that being said, there's the reality of the fact that there's so much more to that statement, and I'm gonna try to repeat what you said, the statement of, just like any other medication.

The reality is, living with HIV today is no different than living with any other chronic illness, period.

- It's not a death sentence.

- It's not a death sentence.

It is no different than living with any other chronic illness.

In fact, when you're on your medications, you could have side effects from the medications, but when the virus is dormant, there is nothing happening, right?

Well, the reality with that is when we started getting into prevention, we learned that Americans are dying of other sexually transmitted diseases and infections at a worse rate.

And what we're talking about is gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, et cetera, which are some of the leading causes of seven of the most common cancers that we have in our nation.

And that's where this final bit of evolution as an organization came in place.

When we started doing sexual health prevention, we learned that Peoria County was leading the entire state in STI rates.

And then we learned that Illinois at that time was ninth, we are now 12th, making progress, but ninth in the entire United States in STI rates.

And the United States leads the entire industrialized world in STI rates.

So you could say, Mark, that we're having this conversation in one of the hottest zones for STI rates in the entire industrialized world.

And if we don't get ahead of this and start talking about comprehensive sexual health education, that stigma that killed so many unnecessary lives from 1980 to 1996, it's still killing people today, because there's this stigma that if you have sex and you contract an STI, you did something bad, you did something wrong.

We can't talk about sex in the United States.

We can't have these conversations.

The reality is, it's the creation of life.

If we're not adult enough to have these conversations, who is?

- Yeah, nobody.

So, you know, with the STIs, we always talk about education when it comes to any issue, really.

In this particular instance, do you think it's education?

Do you think it's a lack of caring for some people?

What do you think is the big thing or the biggest things that are contributing to these numbers?

- Well, it's education access.

The reality is...

I'll give you a case study.

So, Central Illinois Friends does Get Yourself Tested Days in the Peoria Public Schools, where we go in the high schools and we provide a complete health fair, and it's a full health fair.

But throughout the health fair with 40 plus vendors of organizations in our community, we provide comprehensive sexual health education.

We explain how everything works, from consent, starting at consent, not just how to gain consent, but how to give consent.

We assume that just, "Oh, they'll figure it out."

Well, the problem is they're on their phones figuring it out, and that's unhealthy.

So, through this education, and while we're there at the Get Yourself Tested Days, we also do our testing.

And when we first started, our first year, we only test sexually active teens that consent for a test.

We provide everybody with an education moment.

When we first started, 21% of the students that we tested tested positive for something.

21%.

- An STI?

- An STI.

Gonorrhea, chlamydia, trichomoniasis, pregnancy, even.

They tested positive for something.

The next time we came, the next semester, it was 18%.

The next semester, it was 14%.

The next semester, it was 11%.

And then the academic year that we were heading into COVID, we had it down to 6%.

Now, COVID happened, we weren't able to be in the schools for a while, and guess what, we went right back up to 16%.

But we're seeing a positive decline again.

All we are doing is providing education and access.

And it's proven to work.

- That flies in the face of some people who say, "Ah, you know, they're teenagers.

They're not gonna listen to you at all."

It sounds like they were listening to this.

- Correct.

You know, I think the reality to that is I think a lot of parents get upset that their teens don't feel comfortable talking to them about it.

But it's not about the parent.

And I hear parents often say, "I just wish they would talk to me about this.

I wish that they would tell me that they were sexually active.

I could help them.

I could help them."

But they're not comfortable, and that's not a bad thing, it's just a reality of, again, the stigma that we have in our nation, that we must be puritans and not talk about this.

But studies have shown, the more you talk about sexual health, comprehensive sexual health, and consent, the longer people wait to become sexually active.

If you don't talk about it, it's like, "I have to figure it out."

- Yeah, I mean, you know, those parents would say, "I wish my kid would feel comfortable."

I'm sure they didn't feel comfortable when they were kids talking to their parents about it.

- No.

And it's natural.

It's natural.

- Sure.

It sure is.

Well, talking about all these different things, I'm curious too, you know, we talk about evolution and we talk about the evolution of your group from 1990, and we talk about stigmas, how are we doing locally in terms of being... You're smirking.

Being open-minded, being supportive, not assuming that because someone has HIV, that they got it through a homosexual act, where are we at with that?

- Yeah, well, that's subjective, right?

That's very subjective.

And it's subjective, and what I mean by that is we listen to the loud people.

So, we notice support by those who are willing to stand up and support, and we notice, hey, by those who are willing to stand up and firebomb our local Planned Parenthood, which happened not too long ago.

I wish there was an easy answer for you.

But I'll say this.

Since January 20th, the amount of threats that we've received as an organization have increased.

And I think what you are seeing is people who naturally already have false narratives in their minds becoming emboldened by a bunch of lies and false information that's being fed to them, whether it's from media or the behind the podium of the presidents of the United States, it doesn't matter, the reality is they're emboldened and they're starting to get louder again.

I will say this though.

If you clear all that clutter out, there's a more important message here.

Heterosexual people still don't think that they're at risk of HIV.

And I'm pleading to anyone who's ever been sexually active and does not know their status or has never been tested, it is imperative to be tested.

Because what we think is that if I have sex, if I contract something, I'm gonna have a symptom, and then I can get tested and then I get treated or cured, right?

But the reality is, a large majority of individuals will contract gonorrhea or chlamydia, and I'm talking over 50%, never show signs or symptoms.

And that's what leads to cervical cancer and ovarian cancer and testicular cancer and throat cancer.

The other side of that is one in seven people living with HIV don't know they are.

One in seven people living with HIV don't know they are in the United States.

We have to get everyone tested, and we have to get everyone in care, and that is the only way we're going to curb these epidemics.

- I wanna go back to what you were talking about with threats.

What are people saying, and are they explaining themselves in a way... (laughs) I mean, I'm laughing, it's not funny, but I can just imagine somebody, you know, yelling into a voicemail just a bunch of gibberish.

But I mean, they want you guys outta business?

They want you to move to another town?

What is it that they're saying?

- Yeah.

Well, let me explain how we got here.

- Okay.

- So I explained how we started and how we got to where I got on board and how we started the sexual health clinic.

But the last bit of evolution is what you described right at the beginning of the show, is that we opened up Peoria's first LGBTQ Plus community center.

How awesome is that?

But I want you to know that it was not an easy decision to make, because as an organization, we did not wanna further stigmatize the LGBTQ plus community with sexual health.

Because people think that all LGBTQ plus people are just these sexual deviants that need all these sexual health services, which that's not true.

The other side of that is there's a lot of people living with HIV that are not a part of the LGBTQ plus community, and they get stigmatized as being a part of that community.

But through a lot of dialogue and conversation and public surveys, we realized that this community center is exactly what I just said, a community center for all.

But for equitable purposes, we're putting LGBTQ plus on it because there's very few spaces and places that represent and do not shame LGBTQ plus people.

And the reality is, to all the people that are living in our community that are living with HIV, when they go to our local hospitals, if they have nurses or staff that are not educated, which you'd be surprised, they know what it's like to seek medical care and be treated as a LGBTQ plus person, which is not well.

If you're an LGBTQ plus person and you've gone to seek medical care in this community, you know what it feels like to be treated as someone who's living with HIV.

Our communities, we deny ourselves the ability to see one another based off of the most simplistic boxes we check, I.e., our race, our gender, our names, our size, our chronic illnesses, if you will.

But if you ask a group of people, that are the most diverse groups of people that you can possibly get in Peoria, questions about certain situations in their lives that they've dealt with, and say, "Hey, I want anyone who's ever survived cancer to stand over here, I want anyone who's ever been bullied to stand over here, I want anybody who's ever standed up to a bully to stand over here, I want class clowns to stand over here," you're gonna realize that every single one of those situations are more and more diverse than ever.

And those situations and commonalities that we have, those are shared experiences that make us more alike than all the other boxes that we just lump each other in all the time.

I say that to say that we learn to hate somebody that we could be complete best friends with, that we could love, just because I don't understand one aspect of them.

- Would it be fair to say that the people who are against your organization, against your community center, are anti-gay, or is that too broad of a brush?

- So, that's the reality.

I'll say this.

Yes and no.

I mean, yeah, you have anti LGBTQ plus people who are hiding behind religion to do so, right?

And multiple types of religions.

I'm not just saying one.

But there are people who are anti-gay, anti-lesbian, because they believe that heterosexuality is the only way.

But most of the hate we receive is towards trans and non-binary individuals.

Most of the hate that we receive, and that is where we get accused of creating gay and transgender people, which I hate to tell everybody at home, the reality is, you can't create a gay or transgender individual.

That is who they are.

We are creating safe places for LGBTQ plus individuals.

But most of the hate is their ignorance towards the difference between sex and gender.

So, a lot of folks don't realize that transgender, or cisgender, cisgender meaning that I identify as the sex assigned at birth, transgender, which means the opposite of in Latin word, which is an old, old term, it's not new, means that I identify as the sex opposite that I was assigned at birth.

- Interesting.

Well, let's switch to a happier topic, the new community center.

Tell us how, again, you said it's for everyone, but tell us what goes on there.

And I know that you have associated groups that are in that building.

Give us the whole rundown.

- Yeah.

So, when I say it's for everybody, it's for everybody.

I wanna talk about, first and foremost, that we are doing counseling and psychiatric care.

We have a program that provides counseling services to LGBTQ plus people and parents of LGBTQ plus individuals, siblings, significant others, et cetera, anyone who's struggling with the stigma and don't quite understands how to deal with that.

That room is actually named after an individual, Alex Bartholomew, who was a huge advocate, but unfortunately is no longer with us anymore.

Alex and his parents both have talked about if they received... Well, Alex's parents talked about, if they received this type of care, their relationship with their son might've been completely different.

And they wanna make sure that more people have access to that.

We have community spaces that anyone can book out for free, so long that they aren't being utilized by anyone else.

You know, you gotta schedule it, and if it's open, you can have it for free.

Birthdays, meetings, gatherings, it doesn't matter.

That doesn't matter what kind of event it is, it is what it is.

We have office space there.

We have a clinic space there.

We have exam rooms to provide general health screenings, sexual health services, general health services, all that.

We also have the partnership room, which has Peoria Proud, Acorn Equality, the PFLAG Peoria, which is parents of the LGBTQ plus community, and the ACLU of Peoria.

And those organizations are all volunteer-based organizations that needed a home to be able to get mail at and apply for grants, et cetera.

So, the community space is already making our entire community better because our local organizations that support this community and bring tens of thousands of dollars in every year, they can get stronger and better and have a home and not have to worry about looking over their shoulder at a local coffee shop, having to whisper when they say, "Gay," et cetera.

And now they have a more safe home.

But the other big part, the vision that I have for this organization, or this space, is it's going to be a safe space for people to fail.

We wanna create a space where people can fail forward.

We want people to come, that say, "I just don't get it.

I can't talk to my gay brother or my transgender daughter or my non-binary friend about these questions I have because I feel I'm going to offend them."

Great.

Come to us.

We can provide some education, talk through this.

We're not gonna shame you.

We're gonna meet you where you're at, and we're going to be able to talk about, what is getting hung up in your head that is getting in the way of this friendship that you have?

Because we wanna bring the community together.

And there's small, little nuances that I think so many folks are afraid to offend people or to be offended that they shy away from healthy conversations they should be having.

- Sure, yep.

Well, again, your organization has grown quite a bit, and now this community center, first of its kind, I don't know, anywhere outside of Chicago, I guess, in Illinois?

- Of the kind in terms of the grand scheme of things, yes.

There is a LGBTQ plus clinic in Quad Cities, and then there's a community center in Springfield, but to bring it together, never.

- All right.

How can people find out more?

- Go to centralillinoisfriends.org or friendsofcentralillinois.org.

We're launching a new website.

We're gonna be getting a new logo.

A lot of good things happening.

But we did open up a location in Bloomington and in Galesburg as well.

Those are clinics.

- Okay.

- And so if you're viewing this and you're in Bloomington-Normal area or closer to Bloomington-Normal or Galesburg, we have options for you as well.

- All right.

Unfortunately, we're outta time.

I wish we had another half an hour, Derec, but we don't.

Hopefully you'll come back, and we'll have some more questions for you.

- Would love to.

- All right, congratulations.

- Thank you.

- And thank you for joining us.

We appreciate it.

You can check us out anytime at wtvp.org and on Facebook and Instagram.

Have a great night.

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