Public defender As the AIDS epidemic tore through Arkansas in the 1990s, educating the public and fighting for the sick became the life’s work of Eric Camp and his fellow activists in the Regional AIDS Interfaith Network.
BRIAN CHILSON
BY BENJAMIN HARDY
The year was 1990 and Eric Camp was 26 years old when one evening he ran into an old lover — a one-night stand, really — at Discovery, the Little Rock nightclub. “It was a fundraiser — an AIDS benefit,” Camp recalled recently. “And this guy, this one-night stand, as I call him, he came and hugged me and said, ‘I have AIDS, and I didn’t know.’ ” Camp got tested for HIV; it came up positive. These were
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nly a couple of weeks after his diagnosis, a clock ticking in his head, Camp determined to sound the alarm to as many young people as possible while he still had the strength to do so. He approached a local group called the Regional AIDS Interfaith Network, or RAIN, which had organized a small cadre of fiercely committed HIV-positive Arkansans to speak to teenagers about the epidemic’s toll. Although the state legislature had recently mandated sex education in Arkansas — the result of Dr. Joycelyn Elders’ pioneering work as director of the state Health Department under then-Gov. Bill Clinton — most schools were woefully unequipped
the years in which there was no medically sanctioned treatment for the disease and essentially no hope of long-term survival. An HIV diagnosis could take years to develop into full-blown AIDS, but once that occurred, the average life expectancy was around 11 months. By 1992, AIDS would become the No. 1 cause of death for U.S. men ages 25 to 44, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
to educate kids about the disease. At the time, public misconceptions ran rampant, from the belief that HIV could be spread through water fountains and handshakes to the myth that heterosexual transmission was impossible. As the death count rose nationwide (and in Arkansas), so did the urgency of the RAIN volunteers’ mission. Camp and others visited over a hundred school districts around the state in the early ’90s, reaching tens of thousands of junior high and high school students in mass assemblies. “We were going into schools at a time when they didn’t have the curriculum and were kind of hitting the panic
ERIC CAMP: For a decade and a half, he was on the front lines of the fight against HIV/ AIDS in Arkansas.
button,” Camp said. “Early on, you could hear a pin drop. Kids faced their fears. They could look somebody in the eye and see what they were afraid of. Because you had people with lifethreatening illnesses talking to them in a school assembly, they knew that something was up, that you needed to pay attention. So the reception was pretty good.” Camp was a natural fit. Young, articulate and charismatic, he could captivate a high school audience. He had a background in journalism (before he became too sick to hold a full-time job, he worked at KARNFM and the Arkansas Radio Network), which gave him an edge in www.arktimes.com
MAY 12, 2016
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