25 faces: Leaders fighting HIV/AIDS in Colorado

25 Phil Price

When the AIDS crisis was first reported in 1981, most Americans were oblivious or unconcerned. The first knowledge of AIDS came when dozens of gay men in major U.S. cities developed a little-understood syndrome associated with weight loss and rare cancers – many of them dying. But recognized cases of the still-unnamed syndrome soon rose to the hundreds, thousands, then tens of thousands, across the nation and world and beyond gay men.

Both the mainstream media and the government were criticized for a slow response to a disease mainly affecting communities thought of as deviant, but in the gay community there was panic: AIDS, as the syndrome came to be known, completely transformed the culture. The task fell to community efforts and gay publications like Out Front to inform, educate and organize, and most importantly to provide those at risk with frank and non-sensationalized information about resources and how to stay safe.

Much credit goes to Phil Price, who founded Out Front in 1976 time for it to become well-recognized and established in Colorado before the task of reporting AIDS arose.

Price’s original vision was for a serious, credible gay news source. In his founding statement, the then 21-year-old Price wrote, “we do not deal in trivia, gossip, rumor or plagiarism.” That’s something to be thankful for, because trivia, gossip and rumor have been constant in the community’s experience with AIDS.

Price went on to found Out Front L.A. in 1981, which he sold the next year and is still covering Los Angeles gay news now as Fronteirs Magazine.

By the time mainstream media coverage of HIV/AIDS spiked dramatically in 1986, known AIDS cases had already been occurring for 5 years, and it is estimated that more than 300,000 Americans were already infected with HIV.had been reporting the crisis for years, covering new developments, fundraisers and memorials in nearly every issue. For the rest of the decade mainstream media coverage waned, though new HIV infections continued rising and new diagnoses peaked in 1992 and 1993.

Again, it was spaces that the LGBT community could call its own that provided a platform for continued attention and good-faith outreach efforts to reach those who most needed to know about HIV.

On July 28, 1993, Price died of HIV-related illnesses at the age of 38. “He wasn’t a huge self-promoter,” said Greg Montoya, Price’s partner until Price’s death and co-publisher of Out Front from then to 2011. “He wanted it to be a vehicle for the community,” Montoya said.

Price’s creation lives on today as the longest-running LGBT publication in the Rocky Mountain West.

Holly Hatch, Kelsea Lindsey, Matthew Pizzuti and Terrell Wallin contributed to this feature.