Andrée Loisel Collection
Loisel Family HIV/AIDS Collection
After contracting HIV in 1988, a New Orleans–born artist and musician returned home to become one of the earliest public faces of the AIDS crisis.
Andrée Loisel (1964–1992) was a New Orleans–born artist and musician who contracted HIV while attending college in New York. She was first diagnosed in 1988 and died of AIDS just four years later, at the age of 27. In the intervening years, after moving back to New Orleans, she became an active part of the local movement to support people living with HIV/AIDS. She was a vocal proponent of safe sex, appearing on television and giving public talks to warn young men and women of the danger presented by HIV/AIDS, which, at the time, was still little understood by the medical community and even less by the public at large.
When Loisel was first diagnosed, the US was only just beginning to take serious action to address the AIDS epidemic, despite years of urgent efforts among LGBT activists. It wasn’t until late 1989 that Congress formed the National Commission on AIDS. The same year, the US Health Resources and Services Commission made the first substantial allocation of federal dollars to help states provide treatment for the disease. In such a climate, it was exceedingly rare for HIV patients to discuss their diagnosis publicly.
Loisel made the decision to not only fight the disease but also help prevent others from getting it by speaking out. “At first, she was angry, but Andrée came to understand that being angry wasn’t enough,” wrote Times-Picayune columnist Sheila Stroup in 1994, covering an event held in Loisel’s memory. “Even when she was afraid, she’d do it anyway,” her mother, Delores Loisel, was quoted as saying in the same article.
The Collection recently acquired a small collection of materials related to Loisel’s AIDS activism. Included is a poster for a charity walk hosted by the NO/AIDS Task Force in 1992, which Loisel and her mother participated in shortly before her death. Loisel also served as a board member of the New Orleans People with AIDS Coalition (NOPWAC), a group that first incorporated in 1990 and appears to only have been active through the mid-1990s. The newly accessioned collection features seven buttons related to HIV/ AIDS activism, including one representing NOPWAC.
HNOC acquired the collection from Victor Loisel, who kindly supplied information about the work of his mother and sister and their fight to support those living with HIV/AIDS.
By Aimee Everrett, curator, and Molly Reid Cleaver, senior editor
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