Just a quick side note about one of the people Joyce mentions in this episode. I’m moved to tears when I think of Joyce’s courage and perseverance-and how against all odds she survived the kind of childhood she’s worked so hard in her adult life to make certain wasn’t the fate of other LGBT young people.

Joyce Hunter and MGH host Eric Marcus at Joyce’s apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, New York, April 24, 2017. Going through scores of photos, it was also impossible not to marvel over what a survivor Joyce is and how many lives she’s lived in her seventy-eight years-starting out as a newborn at a home for unwed mothers on Staten Island, spending much of her childhood in an orphanage, her eighteenth year at a psychiatric hospital, her twenties as a young married mother, her thirties as a budding LGBTQ rights activist, then college student, pioneering LGBT youth advocate, co-founder of the Harvey Milk High School, PhD research scientist, college professor, grandmother, and great-grandmother. So many of the people in the photos have since died, some of old age, but most of AIDS, that we couldn’t help but marvel that after nearly three decades, we were still here. Episode Notesįrom Eric Marcus: Twenty-nine years after I first sat down with Joyce Hunter on December 9, 1988, to interview her in the living room of her apartment in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens, New York, I returned to that same apartment to choose photos with Joyce for this episode.

Joyce Hunter in her office at the Hetrick-Martin Institute talking with two students from the Harvey Milk High School, 1986.

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