2024
Kiyoshi

Photograph of Kiyoshi Kuromiya. AIDS LIbrary of Philadelphia photographs, Ms. Coll. 85, John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, PΑ.
On one of the days I visit the William Way Community Center in Philadelphia to look through the materials its archive holds pertaining to Kiyoshi Kuromiya, the prodigious local HIV/AIDS activist, it is his birthday. I follow the sweet archivist John downstairs to the first floor, where a thin crowd has assembled to the side of the reception desk in front of the heavily varnished staircase leading to the ballroom above. Everyone there looks above 40, men and women, in formal-casual slacks and sneakers, a long-pleated skirt on one older woman who later takes the dais to introduce herself as one of “Kiyoshi’s colleagues”. A three-man documentary crew is present with a Steadicam and a boom mic, while a butch in suspenders takes photographs for the local gay newspaper, in itself a bit of a relic. The executive director of the community centre, a modestly polished and gelled white man of 50 or so, introduces the event and invites a city councilman to read the proclamation the centre has plainly drafted on his behalf, honouring Kiyoshi and aligning his life of agitation with the city’s tradition of liberty. “WHEREAS, Kiyoshi Kuromiya was born on May 9, 1943, at the Heart Mountain Internment Camp for Japanese Americans during World War 2. The injustice of this action was the driving force of Kiyoshi’s life and laid the groundwork for his participation in the various civil rights struggles in his lifetime. WHEREAS, Kiyoshi Kuromiya was brutally beaten by police at a demonstration during the Freedom Summer of 1964…” It goes on in this vein.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya and lover Bruce Hamilton, The Gay Dealer, Philadelphia, 1970. John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, PΑ.
The “colleague”, Jane, is a lively veteran of ACT UP Philly’s transition into non-profit health services provision and speaks about her long friendship with Kiyoshi, which began in legend: she was attending a college elsewhere on the East Coast in the 1960s and word got around that an anti-war action had taken place at the University of Pennsylvania involving flyers announcing the planned napalming of a dog in front of the library. When an angry crowd arrived to stop the atrocity, they were greeted with new flyers: “Congratulations on your anti-napalm protest. You saved the life of a dog. How about the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese that have been burned alive? What are you going to do about it?” This was Kiyoshi’s doing. He’d conceived and printed the flyers in his basement, an indignant, cheeky deployment of his keen sense for information and feelings’ circulation through the social body.
Jane shares how, in later years, she had to convince him to accept an arrangement that would get him health insurance through the AIDS service organisation she ran, in which he played a pivotal role himself, having founded the activist medical journal Critical Path, for which this organisation had assumed fiscal responsibility. He initially refused, unwilling to accept treatment or resources that weren’t freely available to others. But she pushed on his sense of duty: “You won’t be much help if you aren’t around”. She prevailed, allowing him a measure of comfort and a thicker blanket of care as his complications progressed. In an interview with Time magazine last year, she noted that early in the epidemic, Kiyoshi had provided ad-hoc hospice care to people with AIDS before there were any treatments, and she ventured that his work in writing ACT UP’s first standard of care document may have had a greater impact on people’s experience of the disease than anything else he had done. By the end of his life, his works returned to him. In closing her remarks, she invites us all to make Kiyoshi an ancestor. He would have turned 80 that day. We turn to slice a somewhat dry cake.
Everyone wants a piece of Kiyoshi, it seems. I return to the archive upstairs with a handful of truer devotees. One is the president of the local chapter of the Japanese American Citizen League. He asks after images the archive holds of Kiyoshi’s time at Heart Mountain, the concentration camp in Wyoming where he was born, exactly 80 years ago, in 1943. The Kuromiya family had been living in Monrovia, CA, an orange grove suburb outside of Los Angeles, before what he calls their “evacuation” to Wyoming by Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. In the 1990s, Kiyoshi might have participated in a return visit to Heart Mountain with other Japanese Americans who had been “relocated”, in the state’s euphemism. The survivors received an official apology and monetary reparations, though a failed Supreme Court challenge to the constitutionality of the executive order conspicuously left it available for future use.
His uncle Yosh Kuromiya was a draft resister who spent time in prison, as I learn from the chapter president, and was an inspiration for Kiyoshi’s own activism. A short film about him, directed by Robert Shoji, was released in 2021, A Hero’s Hero, its title referring to the role Yosh played in Kiyoshi’s own life. A professor is up for the day from DC, having come to look through the same archive boxes I have been paging through for the past few days. She is seeking a line of contact between Kuromiya’s HIV/AIDS work in the 80s and 90s and the simultaneous national mobilisation around disability, which culminated in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. I recall reading in one of the folders of printed-out email correspondence from the mid-90s that Kiyoshi had collected a number of in-depth directions for people who had recently seroconverted to apply and receive a designation of disability in order to qualify for free medical and housing services. But it’s true I hadn’t come across much that had to do explicitly with this other political lineage. Perhaps not everyone gets to claim him as an ancestor.

Photograph of Kiyoshi Kuromiya. AIDS LIbrary of Philadelphia photographs, Ms. Coll. 85, John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, PA.
Still, his impact is widely felt. Kuromiya would call himself the “Forrest Gump of activism”, according to his biographer, Che Gossett, because he was improbably present at so many historical actions. Just to take the Civil Rights movement alone: on stage at the “March on Washington”, a hundred or so feet away from Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he met for the first time that night. Following the violence on the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, he flew to Montgomery with money raised by Duke Ellington (apparently the musician’s first time funding any civil rights action) and was himself “clubbed down” so severely and egregiously that it was announced he had died. He and King drafted a statement for the sheriff to deliver, what King called “the very first time a southern sheriff had apologised for injuring a civil rights worker”. After King’s assassination, Kiyoshi travelled to Atlanta to take care of King’s two young sons during the week of the funeral.
Then there was the rest of his life: he helped found the Philadelphia chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, then served as the delegate to the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention sponsored by the Black Panthers in 1970, drafting the historic Third World Gay Revolution “16 Point Platform”. He co-founded the Philadelphia chapter of ACT UP and co-wrote its first document outlining a standard of care for AIDS treatment. He started the medical information journal Critical Path for people living with HIV/AIDS. He turned it into an early free internet service, ingesting and redistributing thousands of documents pertaining to clinical trials, state and federal benefits, conferences and meetings, and resources of all kinds. He ran a marijuana buyers’ club and agitated for legalisation, taking a case to the US Supreme Court. Another Supreme Court case in which he was a plaintiff struck down portions of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 law that still governs how the US government may regulate the internet, and thus the internet’s architecture worldwide. Meanwhile, he co-wrote the final four publications of R. Buckminster Fuller, the unorthodox architect and systems philosopher. Alongside Fuller, Kiyoshi is credited not as a co-author or through the ghostwriter’s euphemism “with” but as an adjuvant, a term from immunology that indicates a biological element whose corporeal presence provokes a heightened or enhanced immune response.

Photograph of Kiyoshi Kuromiya. AIDS LIbrary of Philadelphia photographs, Ms. Coll. 85, John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, PA.
Such a kaleidoscopic career is hard to make sense of if you don’t recognise the type, though Kiyoshi is plainly a rare specimen. His life trajectory functions as a kind of plumb line for the entire post-war US New Left in the 20th century. In an interview with fellow Philadelphia gay liberationist Tommi Avicolli Mecca, he explains how he understood his basic orientation: he had been interested in “humanism, and in making it possible to enjoy a full life” – not “politics”. His commitments were to live the kind of freedom he felt the US promised, despite his own life beginning behind “barbed wire fences and machine gun towers” in the Heart Mountain concentration camp. He recounts an early encounter with state repression after his family’s return from Wyoming. He had been sexually active with older boys from a young age and, at about ten, was caught in a sting operation at a local park known for cruising. The police brought him back to his parents and warned them about the danger Kiyoshi was in of leading a “lewd and immoral life”, then sent him to juvenile hall for three days and on to court-ordered testosterone treatment, a kind of forced masculinisation as punishment for his sexual deviance. He recalls being warned it would increase his sexual drive, the whole experience a traumatic memory because he didn’t understand what was going on.
In Kiyoshi’s telling, information or its lack is a causal element of a situation, at least as weighty as sex or politics. He explains how he came to be out to his parents with the following preamble: “I had pubic hair by nine years old, and my voice had changed by the time I was ten. And […] there was not very much literature at the time.” He felt compelled to search out, first at the Monrovia and then at the Duarte County library, a copy of the Kinsey report in order to give a name to the kind of activity for which he’d already gained a taste. And at age nine, still in southern California, he began to study Philadelphia, in part drawn in by the fraternal erotic promise in its etymological nickname: the City of Brotherly Love. “Much of my thinking and feeling at the time was oriented towards finding out what that was all about because there wasn’t much available at that time in terms of information.” This compulsion to discover and seek out others, to find and connect via a search for knowledge about himself, would be repeated and give shape to the rest of his life.
The most decisive expression of this mode is his publication, Critical Path. This took the form of a photocopied and stapled on 22×17 white paper newsletter compiling information and research about the state of HIV/AIDS medicine and treatment programs. Its first issue was released in November 1989. The inaugural editorial made note of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which had in the weeks previous jolted the San Francisco Bay Area, disrupting an already portentous World Series baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics, shattering a waterfront elevated motorway, and demolishing numerous buildings. Given the number of people with AIDS and organisations responding to it concentrated in the Bay, this event bears on the course of the disease, Kiyoshi writes. But the earthquake, an act of god in actuarial tables, rips through the social terrain in a very different way than another natural event, the worldwide spread of the human immunodeficiency virus. To illustrate this disparity, Kiyoshi points to an AIDS service organisation whose building was completely flattened. Its insurance policy will pay out to recover the lost value. But you can’t purchase a catastrophic insurance policy against HIV/AIDS.

Cover of Critical Path AIDS Project, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 1989), William Way. LGBT Community Center periodicals collection, 1940-present, Ms. Coll. 37, John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, PA.
And so, you have to organise. Kiyoshi brought his considerable powers to the question of how to respond to this novel disease. Critical Path ran highly technical discussions of the latest molecular compounds being studied, new etiological theories, reports from conferences and actions, advice on navigating state welfare systems, political analysis, and contact information for hundreds of service groups nationally and internationally. In its ravenous collection of minute biomedical and political detail, Critical Path soberly compiles a dramatic historical document of the terrifying moment in which Kiyoshi and his comrades found themselves having to intervene, using all their creative and organisational genius, to save their own lives. It was a moment of remarkable technological transition as well, illustrated by the alert one issue carries about a retrospectively quaint computer virus: someone had been mailing corrupted CD-ROMs to AIDS researchers around the world, which, when loaded in a lab’s computer, wiped the system’s data clean. This person must have gained (or already had) access to the same international network Critical Path had been mailing, and so the anti-virus warning it carried was precisely targeted at their prospective victims. In this environment, you can see why media studies scholars and English professors of the time were tempted to make inconsiderate analogies out of the topically redolent concepts of autoimmunity, virality, and the like.
As the project progressed, Kiyoshi adapted it to meet evolving technological opportunities. It began online as a bulletin board system to collect and distribute AIDS-related information; the newsletter was, in a sense, a print digest of what had already been assembled and communicated. There was also a 24-hour hotline staffed by volunteers who could answer questions about treatment, food, support groups, and fears. Through his activity, Kiyoshi bound the collective knowledge and capacities of a global community together into something palliative, if not lifesaving. He used his talent at sewing publication and activity together to materially redistribute the chances of survival, wresting the most advanced biomedical knowledge at the time from the hands of its supposedly disinterested practitioners and demanding that pharmaceutical development dispense with its usual cautious, glacial pathway through animal testing before moving onto human subjects. It represented something of a response to his own provocation back in the anti-war movement: “Congratulations, you saved the life of a dog. What about millions of fellow humans? What are you going to do about it?”
The Critical Path newsletter was printed with the logo of the Earth’s continents arranged contiguously but horizontally, as if a titan had unpeeled the Earth like a tangerine. This was the stamp of his one-time collaborator Buckminster Fuller: his famous Dymaxion map of the globe took the same form. But the first book for which Kiyoshi served as an adjuvant was also called Critical Path. Critical path modelling or analysis is a way of planning out complex, multipart technical-social projects, famously put to use in the Apollo moon landing race. Fuller wanted to deploy it as a metaphor for how the material human-planetary relation was to be transcended if there were any chance of survival from capitalist civilisation. In the Critical Path newsletter’s first issue, Kiyoshi describes it as “the strategy that recognizes in any complex task many smaller tasks that must be performed in an orchestrated manner – some tasks must precede others, some can be implemented at the same time”. He announces the establishment of such a programme in Philadelphia “to render state-of-the-art, PWA1-considerate services for our peers as a demonstration of self-empowerment within the PWA community”. But the term was lifted from corporate project management, having been coined by industrial and chemical engineers in the 1950s based on processes the Du Pont chemical company used to develop plutonium enrichment techniques for the Manhattan Project. If Kiyoshi felt any hesitation about naming the project to save his own life after the methods refined for the war, which placed his birth under the sights of a machine gun tower, it didn’t stop him.
The scholar Cait McKinney describes the direct lineage from Fullerian information philosophy to Kiyoshi’s activism: the first Critical Path files were shared on the Fuller Information Exchange Bulletin Board System (the FIX BBS), an early electronic network for publishing and remotely viewing files, for which Kiyoshi served as a sysadmin, before setting up a dedicated Critical Path BBS, which predated the paper publication. In this way, Fuller’s influence on Kiyoshi’s life came to exercise decisive form, in McKinney’s words, “shaping Critical Path’s approach to HIV as a media problem”. In another paper, they write about his litigation against the Communications Decency Act, which attempted to set out the first regulatory regime for the new realm of the internet that maintained, among other things, a fantasised sexual geography excluding minors from the supposed harm of exposure to sexual knowledge. Arguing that the AIDS information he was disseminating through his website was and had to be explicit in order to be effective – “I’m not sure how to interpret that law. I do not know what indecent means”, he testified – Kiyoshi disarmed the state’s valuation of decency above life, making it clear that “materials that might be ‘obscene’ or ‘patently offensive’ to some had clear public utility that justified deregulating sexual expression online”.

Item from “Return to Sender – Deceased” file, Kiyoshi Kuromiya subject files on HIV/AIDS, 1990-2000, Ms. Coll. 18, John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, PA.
Another side of this activity resides in a manila folder in the archive marked “Obituaries”. Kiyoshi saved clippings of news reports of AIDS-related deaths, some clearly of ACT UP comrades, others of prominent (or closeted) gays. But the most punishing folio consists of Critical Path envelopes marked “Return to Sender”. This is his directory of subscribers whose lives hadn’t been saved. Some simply bear an impersonal stamp from the post office and then Kiyoshi’s script: “deceased”; others disclose the hand of mourning (or relieved) next of kin. “My son Jeffrey passed away last June, and I am writing to ask that you take his name from your mailing list(s).” “Please cancel subscription. Jim passed away on March 4, 1994.” He kept them for organisational purposes, surely. But the devastation of such compressed witnessing seeps through the scraps.

Item from “Return to Sender – Deceased” file, Kiyoshi Kuromiya subject files on HIV/AIDS, 1990-2000, Ms. Coll. 18, John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, PA.
At the end of his own life, Kiyoshi’s friends and comrades arrange for 24-hour care for him. They compile their own log, keeping a distributed watch over him through a notebook in which they detail his heartbeat, blood pressure, medication dosage, what level of pain he is in, blood or bile in his vomit, and his deliriums. They rub his feet and ask him what he’s dreaming about. His mother comes to stay with him, in and out, as often as the nurse. Kiyoshi is still sharp, reminiscing about the time he ran into immunologist Anthony Fauci, then Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), at one of the conferences Kiyoshi attended to hector the medical authorities for a stronger response. They were at adjacent urinals, and Fauci asked Kiyoshi what he thought of the conference. His friend records his response: “I told him if he really wanted to know, he’d better watch out for his shoes”.
Friends begin to stop by in denser numbers. His breathing is noted as more laboured, and the pain begins to sharpen. They administer Demerol and Fentanyl to ease it. It is his birthday, 9th May of 2000. He acknowledges it and celebrates by going back to sleep. The caring techniques he developed for people with AIDS as they are dying return to him through the hands of the friends he has woven together into a loose unity. The pathway he followed was eclectic, but its trace persists in the world. Despite Fuller’s enthusiastic prediction, he may not have arrived at the stars. But as an example, if not an ancestor, his life still exerts force on our own. I close the folder and walk downstairs into the world, now more unpeeled before me.
People With AIDS acronym
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Fox is a writer, translator, and a founding editor of Pinko magazine. He co-wrote fag/hag (2024), published by Rosa Press, and edited Christopher Chitty’s posthumous monograph Sexual Hegemony Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System (2020), published by Duke University Press.