# Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) Founded in **August 1982** in [[Larry Kramer]]'s Manhattan apartment, **the first AIDS service organization in the United States**. The founding meeting included Kramer, Paul Popham, Larry Mass, Paul Rapoport, [[Edmund White]], and Nathan Fain — at the time, all six knew at least one young gay man who had recently died of what would later be named HIV/AIDS, and no governmental agency was offering meaningful response or information. ## What GMHC Built In the absence of federal action, GMHC built the **first complete community-response infrastructure** for AIDS in the United States: - **The first AIDS hotline** (1982) — answering thousands of calls a week within its first year - **The "buddy" volunteer system** — pairing PWAs (people with AIDS) with volunteers who provided companionship, meal delivery, medical-appointment escort, and end-of-life care - **Medical referrals and treatment-information distribution** — at a time when most physicians knew nothing about the disease - **Legal services** — particularly around housing, employment discrimination, and end-of-life planning - **Educational outreach** — including the controversial 1985 *Safer Sex Comix* publications, which advocated condom use and were attacked by the Reagan administration as obscene - **Fundraising scale** — GMHC's 1983 "Showers" benefit at Madison Square Garden (with Leonard Bernstein and others) was the first major public-cultural-figure AIDS fundraiser ## The Kramer Departure and ACT UP [[Larry Kramer]] resigned from the GMHC board in 1983 in frustration with the organization's increasingly service-oriented and politically cautious posture — the same frustration that, four years later, would lead him to found [[ACT UP]]. GMHC's relatively cautious public profile (it focused on direct service rather than confrontational politics) became the institutional counterweight to ACT UP's direct-action posture; the two organizations were complementary rather than competing through the late 1980s and early 1990s. ## GMHC Today GMHC remains in operation in 2026 — providing HIV testing, treatment navigation, mental health services, food security programs, and policy advocacy. It is the **oldest continuously operating AIDS service organization in the world**. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[AIDS Crisis]] - [[ACT UP]]