Transcription of Profiles of Resilience #188
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle. Recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Dr. T. Courtney: I consider myself a success when I say goodbye to my patients, when they no longer need to come and see me any longer. Almost all of my patients get better and we say goodbye and that is a good end.
Smith: This was a collective experience. It wasn’t just about dying and surviving. It was about living.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms and Bangor Savings Bank.
Dr. L. Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number one eighty-eight, Profiles of Resilience airing for the first time on Sunday, April 19, 2015. AIDS and HIV are very different entities than they once were, no longer an infection that leads inevitably to death. The human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome can be managed with long-term medications.
Today we speak with infectious disease specialist Dr. Thomas Courtney about the evolution of AIDS and HIV in Maine. We also speak with Smith Galtney who created Seeing ME: Profiles of Resilience a collaborative photography project with the Frannie Peabody House. Thank you joining us.
Here on Love Maine Radio we like to think about the impact of illness on community wellness. This is a subject that I know that our next guest has quite a lot to say about. This is Dr. Thomas Courtney who is the Chief of Infectious Disease at Southern Maine Healthcare. He is also the President of the medical staff at SMHC, raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire Dr. Courtney now resides in Saco having practiced medicine in the area since 1988.
He joined Frannie Peabody Center’s Board of Directors in July of 2012. Thanks so much for coming in and being with us.
Dr. T. Courtney: Yes, it’s my pleasure.
Dr. L. Belisle: Dr. Courtney infectious disease is something that not everybody understands all that well. I mean we know it could be anything from chickenpox to measles, but recently AIDS or [maybe recently 00:03:05] the last thirty years maybe AIDS and HIV have become a pretty important part of our society. It’s continued to evolve. Tell me what it was like when you first started practicing to now as to how we all viewed AIDS.
Dr. T. Courtney: The field of infectious diseases is indeed quite broad. I might go back to when I started medical school in the early 1980s because that’s when HIV became a recognized disease. I had the wonderful opportunity at the University of Texas Medical Center at Houston witnessing the evolution of HIV/AIDS in medical practice. I’ve grown up with it. It is a wonderful vantage point to see where we were at a time in a disease that uniformly was fatal to a disease now that is uniformly not fatal.
It’s been a very exciting journey to see that change over time. The tools that we now have with medications and medication regimens have become far more tolerable than they were in the late 1980s, far more tolerable and far more effective. It has been a great journey I guess.
Dr. L. Belisle: As you’re talking about your own training, I’m thinking about where I was in the 1980s and I was in high school and we were doing reports on this new disease that I’m not even sure everybody was calling AIDS at that point. We all thought it maybe came from Africa or Haiti and it seemed very scary because everybody was dying of it. It reminds me of what’s going on now with infectious diseases like Ebola. Do you think that the diseases we’re seeing now are going to have a similar evolution or is that something that it’s just too difficult to compare them?
Dr. T. Courtney: No, I think that there is some comparison but they definitely are not apples to apples, looking at HIV this was a disease that was initially very hard to make a diagnosis, hard to understand what was going on and it took many years to understand the virus that causes HIV/AIDS. The different also from a disease like Ebola in that untreated it takes a decade or more for a person to die from the illness, whereas in Ebola you either die quickly or you recover from the disease.
Certainly a different sort of a disease process. I guess in looking at Ebola where we have to act quickly and make sure that we have all the proper support to see a person through the illness takes a tremendous amount of resources at the very onset of the illness. HIV is a silent disease in many respects where many of those who have the illness are not aware of it. We can be walking around not knowing that we have the illness and the only way to know for sure is by testing.
Dr. L. Belisle: I’m remembering when I was a resident in the mid ’90s and at that point there was still a stigma attached to HIV testing. There’s all kinds of information out there about privacy laws and HIV testing. I think it has become less stigmatized, but I think there still is something very scary about HIV/AIDS.
Dr. T. Courtney: A lot of it has to do with what the education about the illness when people were quite obviously ill and dying from the disease that we were all afraid of it and afraid of acquiring it. In some ways, that has subsided because I go back to my last statement that we don’t know who has HIV/AIDS. There was a recent conversation I had with somebody at the Salt Institute. There was a nice photographic view of how HIV was affecting different people in the state of Maine.
A person came up. I was one of those pictures because I am a board member at Frannie Peabody Center and this individual was saying to me do all of these people have HIV/AIDS and they said, “I know you don’t have HIV/AIDS.” I said, “How do you know I don’t have HIV/AIDS [today 00:08:09]?” He set back again and I didn’t tell him because it wasn’t important that anybody could have HIV/AIDS. We just don’t know.
In a way, the illness has become very silent that we don’t think about it because the medications that people are taking make them well and they are active community members, that they are fully productive and this HIV has become a chronic illness not unlike diabetes or some other chronic disease that can be well controlled with medications.
Dr. L. Belisle: What must it be like and I’m guessing you to guess so I don’t even know if you know the answer to this, but I think about the generation of men and to a lesser extent women who lost partners, friends to HIV and AIDS back when we weren’t able to treat it well. I’m wondering what it must be like to be living now seeing all this availability of medicine and resources and people living with this to know that all of these people died.
Dr. T. Courtney: Well, that’s true. That’s the nature of medicine. We learn things over time and we’re better at taking care of illnesses, allowing people to live longer. Sad for the losses that have been there. The only benefit is that it was all of those losses that really demanded the research into the illness, demanded the development of new drugs to come with it. Those lives more in the loss of those lives were by no means meaningless, very, very important that got the drug industry and the medical community out there to find how to take care of this illness. They’ve done a fantastic job.
Dr. L. Belisle: Do you think that in some ways the HIV/AIDs problem actually created maybe a more positive way for people who had been marginalized before, maybe people who are gay for example, a more positive way for them to be out in the community?
Dr. T. Courtney: Certainly, the communities of people that have come together involved in the care of HIV, in particular the LGBT community who have rallied together and provided support have advanced that principle you’re speaking of well over time. When it does become more common to know that people with HIV are in the community. They are interacting with us daily even though we don’t know it, but also put a positive face on an illness and the great amount of talent that people with HIV/AIDS are able to contribute. That I personally see a lot and witness the great contributions, the color to the world that the HIV/AIDS community brings.
Dr. L. Belisle: Tell me about your work with the Frannie Peabody House. I understand that this is an organization that has also evolved over time. From early on, I believe there was more work that was being done within house care of patients, more like a hospice model and now it’s really providing resources and connections for people who are working and living in the world today. How does that look to you?
Dr. T. Courtney: Frannie Peabody had to change over time. It was established by Frannie Peabody and her son who had HIV/AIDS and ultimately passed from that disease. She provided a resource, a place where people could come with the intent to die with the illness. That became an outdated model when people stopped dying of HIV. It doesn’t happen any longer. If people don’t want to die of the illness, they wish to [take care 00:12:55] of their medications, they don’t die from this illness any longer. They die from heart disease or cancer or something else that we all have to face in our later lives.
Frannie Peabody gave up that model of being directly caring for people with advanced HIV to a more forward looking model trying to identify people early in the course of their illness so that they can be put on appropriate medications. They have helped people who are in need, socioeconomic need or are challenged in some other manner providing that individual to interface with, to help them get the things they need to survive whether that is food or housing or medication or testing or transportation, so many different facets to Frannie Peabody Center and they do a fantastic job.
I have interacted with the case workers at Frannie Peabody Center for many years as they would come in to my office with patients, bringing them there, often times coming in to the appointment with them so that they can help interpret what’s going on there in those who needed it and that this was clearly a wonderful organization. I was asked to become a member two, three years ago and I thought a wonderful opportunity for me to contribute to that effort. These are dedicated people who try very hard on sometimes limited budget to accomplish a tremendous amount and just thank God that they’re there. They do a great job.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Bangor Savings Bank. For over a hundred and fifty years, Bangor Savings has believed in the innate ability of the people of Maine to achieve their goals and dreams, whether it’s personal finance, business banking or wealth management assistance you’re looking for, at Bangor Savings Bank you matter more. For more information visit, www.bangor.com.
Dr. L. Belisle: We at Love Maine Radio enjoy a special relationship with Apothecary by Design. Join us in the offices of Maine Magazine for Seeing ME: Profiles of Resilience which features photography by Smith Galtney capturing the story, struggles, and victories that form the changing face of HIV and AIDS in Maine. This photography exhibit will be available from March 27th to April 24th at 75 Market Street, the offices of Maine Magazine. We hope you take the time to stop by.
Infectious disease is a very as we said when we started this whole conservation, it’s been an evolving specialty. At some point, you had to make that decision. You had to decide I’m going to be an infectious disease specialist. We’re lucky because in Maine we have some very good infectious disease specialists, but there aren’t a lot of you. Why did you decide that this was going to be your path?
Dr. T. Courtney: I like talking about this because in my training at UT Medical School in Houston there were some tremendous infectious diseases specialists there. When leaving medical school, you don’t necessarily know exactly where you’re going to be but as an internist coming to Maine, to Maine Medical Center where I did my internship and residency and then again meeting such well qualified doctors who love the field of infectious diseases and seeing how it inspires them, seeing how we can make a tremendous difference in the lives of people, ID, infectious diseases is in some ways different from a lot of other fields of medicine where it is often an acute problem, a problem that is here and now that needs to be treated.
I consider myself a success when I say goodbye to my patients, when they no longer need to come and see me any longer. Although I do have seen some HIV patients for twenty years that almost all of my patients get better and we say goodbye and that is a good end.
Dr. L. Belisle: When I get to the point as a primary care doctor, as a family doctor where I need to send somebody to an infectious disease specialist, it’s either one of two things. One something came up on a lab test that I was not expecting and I don’t know how to deal with it so can you please help me with this. Another is I’ve checked all of these labs, I’ve checked all of these tests, this person still has all of these symptoms could it be infectious and can you help me rule this out.
That’s an interesting in one you have to be the specialist, in one you have to be the detective/specialist. That’s an interesting set of skills to need.
Dr. T. Courtney: Absolutely. That’s the beauty of having such a broad education in internal medicine so being aware of all of the other possibilities that exist for a complaint that comes in and with a narrower vision that it would be easy to attribute a certain complaint to something or this illness or that illness that when you can see it in a broader perspective you can take a look at laboratories and the presenting complaints that people have in the exam that you do on them and tell them sometimes this is not an infection that is causing it, but I think there might be a problem here.
I think that sometimes it comes down to mental illness, to depression and anxiety that people have about their well being and getting them to see the proper professional can make a big difference in their lives or there might be a medical reason for their other complaints and being able to refer them to the proper specialist is an important part of that job.
Dr. L. Belisle: It is an interesting quandary because by the time you see people, many people, they’ve seen me, they’ve seen maybe orthopedic doctor, they’ve maybe seen a joint specialist, a rheumatologist, they’ve seen lots of other people so by that time they probably are fairly frustrated.
Dr. T. Courtney: Often times that is true and you need to deal with that. I would say that in the field of infectious diseases, thankfully it’s not always that way that more often than not we do have a pretty clear and convincing diagnosis and can set about to treating that particular problem, but there are chronic illnesses that people have that become much more frustrating especially when we [can’t 00:20:33] attach a specific diagnosis to that.
Dr. L. Belisle: I’m enjoying this conversation because I think that the older that I get, the longer I’ve been in medicine, the more history I have behind me the more I’ve actually participated in the history of medicine. I think sometimes we would all do well no matter what our age to have some sort of historical perspective on medicine and to understand why we are vaccinating kids, what happens when we don’t vaccinate our children or what happens when you have a disease like HIV/AIDS that hasn’t really been well defined, we don’t know how to treat it and how it can evolve over time.
I think this is a really important thing for people to always be aware of just that things do evolve and there are sometimes very good reasons for why things are being done now based on the past.
Dr. T. Courtney: Yes, there are a lot of illnesses that we don’t see in the United States anymore. Take for example malaria, malaria used to be endemic in the United States and I heard a nice bit on [NPR radio 00:21:36] about yellow fever yesterday and the area of Missouri and that these are illnesses that we’ve been able to get rid of. We don’t have any real sense of how dangerous these illness that still exists in other countries and in Africa and South America and whatnot and the tremendous effect that it has particularly on children. Malaria for example and the half million or more lives that are lost a year to this disease.
The good work by the Gates Foundation to try to figure this out and provide ways to prevent malaria in children and vaccines that work well. I think maybe in some other countries they are far more aware of all of the problems that can exist that we don’t see any longer in the United States. Still our issues and when you travel another part of our business through Southern Maine Healthcare Travel Well we do see people before they travel to various countries and are able to provide them with the appropriate immunizations and medications to prevent illness in their travels.
Dr. L. Belisle: I’m assuming that people who are interesting in learning more about travel medicine, HIV/AIDS, the work you do with infectious disease or Southern Maine Healthcare can go to the Southern Maine Healthcare website.
Dr. T. Courtney: Absolutely.
Dr. L. Belisle: Also can Google the Frannie Peabody Center’s website as well.
Dr. T. Courtney: Yes.
Dr. L. Belisle: We’ve been speaking with Dr. Thomas Courtney who is the Chief of Infectious Diseases at Southern Maine Healthcare and also President of the medical staff and on the board of directors with the Frannie Peabody Center. It’s really been a pleasure to speak with you about all the work that you’re doing and keep it up.
Dr. T. Courtney: Thank you very much. I appreciate our conversation.
Dr. L. Belisle: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk and just looked up. I know that during the course of my days I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe, but when I do I feel energized because in those moments I’m able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow, sometimes those are the aha moments.
If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can in fact come true. I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, boothmaine.com.
Speaker 1: This segment of Love Maine Radio is brought to you by the following generous sponsors: Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine honesty and integrity can take you home. With RE/MAX Heritage it’s your move. Learn more at ourheritage.com.
Dr. L. Belisle: I always enjoy spending time speaking with people that I have some sort of history with that I have met before. Today I’m speaking with Smith Galtney who I have known for a few years off and on. He is a recent graduate of the General Studies Program at the International Center for Photography. He also studied photography at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland. His recent exhibition Seeing ME: Profiles of Resilience is on display at Maine Magazine’s offices in Portland through the end of April. It’s really great to see you again.
Smith: Great to see you Lisa.
Dr. L. Belisle: I think that we first met at a baby shower.
Smith: We did.
Dr. L. Belisle: I think that child is somewhere around twoish so this must have been two and halfish, three years ago.
Smith: Two yes, yes. Yes. Cleo daughter of Rebecca Falzano. Yes, I remember that very, very well.
Dr. L. Belisle: Yes and you were telling me at that time I think I met both you and your partner and you were telling me about your experiences in Raymond, what it was like to move from New York City to Raymond, Maine which it sounds like it was pretty great at the time and you still feel pretty great about it, but that was a big shift for you.
Smith: It’s fantastic now and I completely consider Raymond to be my home. I can easily imagine living there for the rest of my life. The first year however was horrible. It was absolutely horrible. I had lived in New York City for twenty years. He had lived there for ten and we both were pushing forty and our neighbors were getting a lot younger and a lot louder and suddenly I had become that older neighbor that was just like, “Keep it down. Keep it down.” Usually whenever people did that to me when I was in my twenties, the first thing I would yell was like, “If you don’t like it, get out of New York.” As I was banging on the wall I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to get out of New York.”
Luckily, we had bought a place in Raymond a couple of years before that. My sister’s husband’s family has had a house on Panther Pond in Raymond for decades and decades. One weekend we went up to visit them and it was just a total I mean there’s something about it. It just clicked. We had been looking at places in upstate New York and we didn’t like the idea of the benefit was that it was maybe an hour and a half, two hours outside of away from where we lived.
Then there was that idea of getting on a train with the exact same people, all these New Yorkers and then suddenly being amongst trees, but in the same kind of New York State of mind. There was something remote almost doesn’t, I don’t know I don’t like the way that sounds, but there was something very different about Maine and just so not like what I had come to really loathe over twenty years of living in New York.
Yeah, but the first year was awful. It was terrible. It was people warned me. They were like, “Okay this is going to be a serious transition here. Are you prepared for this?” We were both a little bit like, “Oh, we’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. We’ll just figure it out as we go along.” Because I guess one thing that we didn’t really want to do was go live … New York spoils you as far as cities go we didn’t really want to go live in Boston or even Chicago because as far as I’m concerned New York is the greatest city in the world. I mean even we were lucky enough to take a trip to Sydney once and even in Sydney I was looking around like “Well it’s not really New York.”
The idea of living in a lesser version of New York was not appealing. The idea of just going somewhere that was completely different from it felt like the only way to really go about anything but it was awful. It was awful. We lived these parallel lives in New York that I wasn’t really aware of how parallel they were. John works in finance so there would be long stretches where he would come home and go to work after and before I had gotten up. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I would go to bed and then wake up and he would have come home and gone to work so I would wake up and I would be like, “I sense that someone or something has been here,” but I just wouldn’t see him.
Really our only day to spend together was Saturdays because he would work on Sundays. We went from this parallel life to literally living on top of each other and not having any friends and spending every minute of every day together. It would get to the point where the end of a day would come and we’d like we need some things from Hannaford and I’d be like, “Oh I’ll go get them. I’ll go get them.” He’d be like, “No let me go get them.” He’d be like, “Well maybe we should go together.” I’d be like, “No, I don’t know how to say this, but I just need to be alone, don’t come.”
It was tough because living in New York I didn’t realize how many opportunities I had just to be like, “I’m going to go for a walk,” or “I’m just going to go to the Barnes & Noble and look around,” and the reason I did that was because I needed a little space, but I didn’t actually have to be so blunt and be like, “I need space.” When suddenly we were living in this town that in the off season is about four thousand people and neither of us … I mean that was the other thing was that we would sit there and we’d be like, “Oh we need to find friends.”
We were almost forty. I couldn’t even remember a time that I had been at a point where I needed to go out and find friends. I thought maybe college. In college, they put me in a dormitory and gave me a roommate and you were living in a hall with a bunch of people so friendships just happened. I mean we actually googled how to make friends because I did it as a joke. My partner is even less outgoing than I am. I actually googled how to find friends. Then we found this I think it was about.com or something like that. It was just list of go to social functions. If you’re in the market, say hello to someone.
We were reading it and we were almost fascinated. We were like, “This is actually really helpful.”
Dr. L. Belisle: Is this why I met you at that baby shower?
Smith: Yes. Yes.
Dr. L. Belisle: You were looking for friends.
Smith: We were looking for … Actually at the baby shower, we had made a great deal of progress. It’s funny Rebecca Falzano, the managing editor of Maine Home and Design she was the first person who I had met. I mean when we came up here in Maine in the summer, I had my sister here, my brother-in-law, their kids so it was we had this couple of months buffer time of Maine as we knew it which was summer and people and fires outside and good times.
Then in the middle of August, suddenly my sister left and then it was just us. At night I’d be going to bed and looking at John and I was like, “We’re not leaving are we? We’re here.” I also had to find work and that’s how I found Rebecca because I started to cold email people and look at [mastheads 00:33:46] and social network people and whatnot and Rebecca and responded and so we actually met for a coffee. I remember inviting she and her husband Steve, this is before they had Cleo, their baby, and invited them over for dinner.
We were so nervous all day before they arrived because I mean this was in March of 2010 and we had been in Maine about nine months and this was an entire fall and most of a winter of not really seeing anyone but each other. Our first Maine winter and I remember the doorbell rang and we had never heard the doorbell ring before. We were like, “Oh my God we have a doorbell.” I still want to ask Rebecca what we looked like when we opened the door because I’m sure that we probably looked a little frightening because we were just like, “Hi,” like, “Come in human beings. I’ve heard about you people.”
Dr. L. Belisle: I’m laughing at almost everything that you’re saying because I think anyone who has moved to a new place but specifically a more remote place like Maine can relate.
Smith: Yeah.
Dr. L. Belisle: Just this idea that you’re out in the middle of nowhere. You have your one friend who is the guy that you live with and then you have to go out there and connect with other creatures. It does something interesting to your head.
Smith: No, absolutely. It did something to my head and it didn’t do what I thought it was going to do. I moved to New York. I went to NYU when I was eighteen years old. I basically went there because I was dying to go to New York City, but also I knew that I was gay and I had heard that New York University was right in the heart of Greenwich Village and judging from certain movies that I had seen at the time I was like, “Oh I think that that’s where it’s all happening.” I knew it was a good school. I grew up in New Orleans, so I didn’t want to go to LSU. All my brothers and sisters went to Ole Miss and it’s very fraternity oriented, that kind of scene.
I knew that wasn’t for me so I did really want to get away, but I also went to New York because I wanted to be gay and I felt that that was a place where I could do it. I didn’t realize that I had spent these twenty years of living in this urban metropolitan bubble of feeling like I mean in a lot of ways it opened up my mind to a lot of new experiences. I was able to come out. I was able to live my adult life as a very open gay man, but I was also very protected in New York and in feeling like “Oh my mind is so open because I’m this gay guy who’s open to this. I’m so alternative and I’ve been through all of these alternative experiences,” that in the process of going through that my world view was pretty slim as far as say people who lived in not urban settings, in smaller towns.
When we arrived in Raymond, I didn’t realize how absolutely petrified I was of my neighbors. I was expecting them to be judgmental. I was expecting them to be homophobic, fundamentalists like Christians. I was expecting them to just be like, “We don’t want you in this neighborhood.” What happened was that they threw us a barbecue. They basically rolled out the welcome mat and they were like, “Welcome guys.” It was like they pretty much put two and two together very quickly.
Dr. L. Belisle: They didn’t think you were just good friends.
Smith: Well a couple of people I think thought we were brothers which I always find very interesting considering that we …
Dr. L. Belisle: You don’t look alike.
Smith: … don’t look anything alike and why there would be these two brothers, I mean actually at the time I was like why would two brothers be living together and buy a small little lake house together. I’ve actually seen people, there’s actually three brothers who live together down the road so since then I’ve been like, “Okay well maybe it’s possible.” I mean there was one time where at this barbecue where a guy across the street, older guy, elderly guy he shook John’s hand and he said, “Oh, well welcome.” John motioned to me and said, “This is Smith,” and then the older man shook my hand and he just looked at us and went, “Oh so you two live together.”
I was just bracing myself for here it comes, here it comes. All he did was just go, you could see him turn it over in his brain and then he just went all right and that was that. That’s pretty much if I could embody our experience in Maine at all and I actually feel like people in Maine have this evolved level of this just totally low key. It’s not even acceptance. They just don’t really care which is really cool. I mean sometimes I find it annoying when people try to be overly accepting and be like “Oh you should come over and we can watch Desperate Housewives together or something.” I’m like, “I don’t like that show.”
It’s just nice when people are just like, “Okay, fine. I don’t care.” The gay thing aside there was also this idea of me and this was the worst part, this was the part I wasn’t expecting was this idea of me as a New Yorker. This heightened sense of self that I had as this culturally superior New Yorker, this person who had decided to venture to New York City and leave home and live there for so long and I was on some sort of … I had decided to now leave New York because it was time for me to be elsewhere.
I met a lot of [peo- 00:40:52]. The first dearest, dearest friend I’ve made in Maine I became friends with her and I said, “Oh where are you from?” Because in twenty years of living in New York City that’s what you ask because so few people in New York are from New York. I said, “Where are you from?” She said, “I’m from here.” She was like, “I’ve been living in Raymond all my life.” This is going to sound awful, but I’m pretty sure that the look on my face was like, “Oh I’m sorry.” That’s not something in retrospect, that’s not a reaction I’m proud of, but it’s where I was coming from.
It was at the end of the first year I was smacked in the face which probably sounds a little dramatic, but I was blown away by the fact that okay wait a minute, wait a minute, when did I become the most homophobic person I know, everybody has been nothing but welcoming and then I am so full of myself. I have got to get over this idea of who I think I am and just chill out. I was a snob. I mean that wraps up the first year of just this feeling of okay nobody is acting the way I thought that they were going to be. I’m acting in a way that I never thought I was so why don’t I just spend some time just grounding myself and getting situated here. Yeah, I feel like I didn’t bring that to a …
Dr. L. Belisle: Well it actually does for me because I have wondered since I knew that you were the one who shot the photography for Profiles of Resilience. I have wondered how it felt to be the gay man who was asked to do the photography exhibit on the HIV and AIDS as if somehow because you’re a gay man you have some heightened knowledge of this. I mean I don’t know. I don’t know. I have wondered that though.
Smith: It did feel like a good fit. Donna Galluzzo from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies got in touch with me and she said, “I think you’d be perfect for this.” The best way to answer that I would say would I think they were looking for someone to approach this subject in a way that wasn’t [mottling 00:43:38] that’s not too overreaching of a word, that wasn’t tugging too specifically at the [heart 00:43:47] strings, wasn’t too sentimental, stark, someone who could possibly approach these people just as people and not as necessarily case subjects.
I’ve certainly had friends who I have had an old boyfriend pass away. I’ve had friends who have lived with it since the early ’80s who were some of the first people to get diagnosed and absolute qualify as long-term survivors, so I would say maybe I have a broader perspective about how living with HIV/AIDS isn’t just a condition. I’ve lived and spent many times and have great relationships where I’m not constantly thinking like, “Oh you’ve got it and we need to spend time together.” It’s been around long enough that it’s just a part of life and I always feel like I have to be careful sometimes when I am talking about this because we were so careful to not use words like disease and illness and stuff and instead just plainly saying HIV/AIDS, not referring to it as an epidemic.
I mean it certainly had days when it was a death sentence and when it was not good news to receive, but it’s been around long enough that it’s like everybody seems to know somebody who’s had it or died from it or living with it and unfortunately it’s been around long enough and it’s been treated effectively enough that now people are assuming that there’s a cure for it and regressing to older, not necessarily practicing safe sex like they used to. The alarming thing is since this show I have had two friends who have [seroconverted 00:46:08] which just disturbs me because I guess I feel like we’ve gotten to a … I don’t know. I guess I feel like at this point in my life I mean I’m in my mid forties now. When I first realized I was gay in my head when I was like, “Yeah I probably think I’m gay,” was right when the first news item started to surface about it.
When I imagine the future, I imagine a cure and people not dealing with this anymore, so it’s a little weird in the last few months to know that there’s friends of mine who are still contacting it. That’s a little unsettling and why it makes me think a show like this is important because well there are people in the show who live with it. They take medications and this is not necessarily something that you want to live with. It’s not like, “Oh I’ll just take some Advil in the morning and it will be fine.” I mean these are really intense medications they have.
Some of them are new and they have side effects and long-term effects that don’t necessarily … You still want to be careful. You really, really still want to be careful.
Speaker 1: There was a time when the apothecary was a place where you could get safe, reliable medicines carefully prepared by experienced professionals coupled with care and attention focused on you and your unique health concerns. Apothecary by Design is built around the forgotten notion that you don’t just need your prescriptions filled, you need attention, advice and individual care. Visit their website apothecarybydesign.com or drop by the store at 84 Marginal Way in Portland and experience pharmacy care the way it was meant to be.
Experienced chef and owner Harding Lee Smith’s newest hit restaurant Boone’s Fish House and Oyster Room, Maine’s seafood at its finest. Joining sister restaurants The Front Room, The Grill Room, and The Corner Room. This newly renovated two story restaurant at 86 Commercial Street on Custom House Wharf overlooks scenic Portland Harbor. Watch lobster men bring in the daily catch as you enjoy baked stuffed lobster, raw bar and wood fired flat breads. For more information, visit www.theroomsportland.com.
Dr. L. Belisle: What I’m hearing is that you took this when they asked you to be the photographer, you took this as entirely a good thing, that not only as a gay male you had friends, people that you knew in your background that had HIV and AIDS that you had that, but also you as a person they were saying Smith you have the wherewithal to present these people in a way that is more them, in a way that’s less our filter of what we believe people should look like when they have a chronic disease.
Smith: Sure. Sure. Yeah, I think so. I mean one of the things certainly in the time I was studying at Salt was one of the greatest things, the best things I learned in my photography itself is that when you’re photographing someone it’s very intimate and this is going to sound really cheesy, but I noticed that if I just showed up and started snapping pictures of someone, the pictures almost always sucked. If I spent time with them and got to know them as people and then I said, “Oh would you like to take some pictures,” I always came back and when I showed pictures in class I didn’t just respond to the pictures but the people in the class who didn’t necessarily know the difference between the different kinds of time I had spent with them but they immediately could see in the pictures that they were like, “These are so much better I like this person.”
There was one time where I was working with this one woman. I met her time and time and time again and I really still hadn’t felt like I had gotten to know her yet. One time I hung out with her and we just had this really cool talk and this is the part that sounds a little cheesy, but I actually was like it’s that similar feeling of when you fall in love with someone and you just see the person and just suddenly I wasn’t so obsessed with schoolwork and I’ve got to get her, I’ve got to get her, I’ve got to get her and I just suddenly relaxed and I was like, “I really like this woman.”
I started taking pictures and then everybody was like “These are great.” Everybody really felt the same thing I was feeling. I think Donna knew I had had that experience in Salt and so I was really able to apply that to each of these subjects and not just make it a sob story and coming from the other way and so I’m not putting them on a pedestal, not putting them up and being like, “Oh you’re such an inspiration. You’re story is so triumphant and I get so much from it.”
The way I put it once is that I’m not going to put these people under a microscope and I’m not going to put them on a pedestal. They’re just people and just this mundane level of living with HIV/AIDS, just the day to day of it, not the I was on my deathbed or I was leading the town in the AIDS walk uplifting kind of element that people often attach to. For instance, there was this one guy named Jimmy who lives in Ogunquit and he’s been living with it since the early ’90s. He had done a lot. His credentials were amazing. I mean he’s basically one of the [may- 00:52:29]. I mean I know there’s many mayors of Ogunquit. I’ve met probably four of them, but he is definitely a pied piper character in Ogunquit.
He raises a ton of money for the AIDS walk. He’s inspired many, many men in that town of all ages with his frankness about his status and everything and just the life he leads. It was a pleasure to be in his company, to get to know him. One thing he told me was that when he was first diagnosed, he immediately went into this mindset of I have to enjoy every day. It was the big picture plans were like “That doesn’t matter right now. What I’m going to do is sink my money into a motorcycle and I’m going to ride around the country. It’s all day to day and it’s going to be enjoying life while I have it.”
That was over twenty years ago, so now he’s sitting here now in 2015 he is looking back and thinking, “Oh but those big picture plans.” He never invested in a house. He didn’t pursue his education like he wanted to. He didn’t get to have that big picture plan, didn’t get to commit to it the way a lot of us do. He did say he felt a little cheated by that, but not bitter at all. I mean just still a person who is just so happy to be here and just has an infectious kind of energy to him, but I never thought about that was that it was like these people who just anytime that they got a common cold that they’d be like, “Oh okay maybe I shouldn’t go to school,” or “Maybe I shouldn’t … ” Is that helpful?
Dr. L. Belisle: It is helpful and it’s helpful to hear these stories. I had the chance to look at the photographs that you took when they first were on display I believe at the Salt Institute and now we have them at the offices of Maine Magazine and I went around and looked at them again. What I liked about them is that there’s not really a delineation. You don’t have the people who sick versus the people who look well versus the people that you think might have AIDS because they look like the sort of people who might have AIDS versus the people who you don’t think that they would have AIDS because they don’t look like the kind of people who would have AIDS.
It’s just a very, I don’t know, nondenominational. It’s just here’s a community. All of these people could be living next to you. They could be in your life and you don’t even really know. You specifically did not label this person has AIDS. This person is an AIDS doctor. This person worked at the Frannie Peabody house. They are all just people.
Smith: Yeah, when it came time to doing the text panels. There’s photos and then there’s the text panels that basically is a short paragraph first person account, first person quote from them detailing their experience and we didn’t when it came time to putting their name I was like, “Oh should we include what town they’re from or what they do or whatever?” We were like, “No, just put their names and that seemed to be the right way to go because it really emphasized that this was a collectively experience and it wasn’t just about dying and surviving. It was about living.
Dr. L. Belisle: Smith do you have a website that people could go to learn more about the work that you’re doing?
Smith: Absolutely smithgaltney.com.
Dr. L. Belisle: Smith I’m glad that you were able to come in and talk with me today and it’s good to hear some background not only about your experience with working on Profiles of Resilience but also your experience living in Raymond especially that first year and coming to Maine from New York City. As somebody who has lived in Maine largely for the bulk of her life and gone away for a few years for education, I can relate to the story of the person who’s been here the whole time. It’s been good to talk to you and I appreciate the work you’ve done on this.
We’ve been speaking with Smith Galtney. He’s a recent graduate of the General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography. He’s also studies photography at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of your work. Thank you Smith.
Smith: I certainly hope so. Thank you Lisa very much.
Dr. L. Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio show umber one eighty-eight, Profiles of Resilience. Our guests have included Dr. Thomas Courtney and Smith Galtney. For more information on our guests and extended interviews visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We’d love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Profiles of Resilience show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX heritage, Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms and Bangor Savings Bank.
Love Maine Radio is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Susan Grisanti, Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our content producer is Kelly Clinton. Our online producer is Andrew [Cantillo 00:58:48]. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See www.lovemaineradio.com or the Love Maine Radio Facebook page for details.