Looking to AIDS to Aid the Homeless

Hillcrest residents recall activist past in addressing neighborhood crisis

Author

By Walter Mencken

Publish Date

Feb. 22, 2019

Updated version of ACT-UPs famous poster, which extrapolates from the iconic pink triangle to imagine one of the Little Pink Houses sung about by John Mellencamp, because as Cheek notes, “houses are what’s needed now if we’re going to make a better life for San Diego’s gay community.”

“The suffering has to end,” says local homosexual Augustus Cheek of Hillcrest’s enduring homelessness crisis. “You have people sleeping in doorways, on sidewalks, in the parts of Balboa Park that used to be reserved for hookups. People who are strung out on drugs, who are living on booze and cigarettes, who have nowhere to go home to. Well, we’ve had enough: they have to be given somewhere to go, and that somewhere has to be off the streets of Hillcrest. What kind of Pride parade has its Rawhide Revue Wrangling Routine broken up by some toothless tweaker yelling about how it’s Banana Hour on the planet Mousketeer? It’s time the LGBTQ crew did something about the homeless in their neighborhood. We are going to make ourselves heard, and we are going to get results. You can’t just pretend this is a gay problem. It’s a people problem. And most of them aren’t even gay.”