Presentation [1]
Towards the end of the 1980s Curtis Price, a social worker involved in an association to support people with HIV, was trying to expand his activities beyond the gay community so as too reach another population which had been hit hard by HIV, drug users.
He started putting together a support group made up of HIV-positive drug users. His next step was to launch the project of a regular publication which would give out basic practical information and allow people who tend to be isolated to remain in contact with one another.
As a member of different leftist groups he had come in contact with factory bulletins, somewhat confidential newspapers which circulated in the region’s companies during the period when steelmaking made Baltimore a union and worker stronghold. He offered this militant model to a hardcore group of junkies and homeless people who participated in the association in view of distributing a free newspaper in the very shadows of the ghetto. That’s how Street Voice got started back in December 1990. The paper received some meager subsidies from the state of Maryland under the auspices of AIDS prevention. The first issue was widely distributed thanks to an informal activism. This brought on some inner disagreements as did the question of getting financed by official sources. Curtis Price took advantage of a undreamed of opportunity. The town hall had decided to turn a fire station into a homeless shelter in order to put an end to the stormy quarrels within the city council over budget cuts and real estate speculation. The Street Voice group was chosen to run the shelter which was exclusively for homeless men. The Eutaw Center, as it was named, was to be open only in the winter but in the end it was opened all year long. The rules were different from what you’d find in traditional charity spaces. For example, they did not exclude drug users. The opening hours as well as the length of one’s stay were both as flexible as was materially possible. That’s what explained why this zone of disinterested mutual aid remained so immensely popular for so many years. No humiliation. No segregation. No repression.
The Street Voice bulletin was growing in substance. In addition to practical information you could read personal accounts, rants, people telling their own stories, the very best of the letters to the editor column. In the middle of the nineties the paper changed its tone, becoming increasingly provocative and subversive. Curtis and the rest of the group even went on to organize some demonstrations (against the price hike on methadone for example) and got involved in the local ACT UP demonstrations. In 1997 the paper changed formats, becoming a four-page tabloid with five thousand copies per issue. The demands of organizing the Eutaw Center, the difficulty in keeping such a project going in the long run, and especially the deaths caused by AIDS and overdoses among most of the Street Voice founders all proved to be formidable challenges. Yet the paper continued without mediation, without representation, to give a space for these voices from another world up until 2004.
[1] Translated from an article in French by Yves Pagès on how Street Voice and the TV show The Wire portray the underside of Baltimore. The original French text was first published on April 11th 2013 and can be found at the following address:
http://www.archyves.net/html/Blog/?p=4646