‘Although I cannot see myself writing another full-length book, I am eager to start working on a book of short stories.’

Dale Bratter, Sea Cliff

“As a new social worker in 1995, I found myself swept up in the turbulence created by the AIDS virus, a disease unlike any other because everything about it was cloaked in secrecy and fraught with stigma, misinformation and the overwhelming public fear of AIDS. I spent a decade in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, doing social work and supporting marginalized African American women and children with HIV/AIDS during the height of the epidemic. I was deeply affected by being in the presence of these brave women and children, and also by working alongside my dedicated co-workers, including the doctors and nurses in our clinic. In 2023, 18 years after leaving my job, I wrote and published ‘In Their Presence: Untold Stories of Women and Children During the AIDS Epidemic.’ It took me five years to write this book.

Their lives, their deaths and their stories of survival deserve to be recognized as missing chapters in the early history of the AIDS epidemic in America.

“Embedded in the chapters are never-before-told stories of intimacies, heroic acts, joys and failures – my clients’ as well as my own. These women and children received the same terrifying diagnosis as gay men but had no powerful advocates fighting for them, little media recognition and no celebrity attention. Their lives, their deaths and their stories of survival deserve to be recognized as missing chapters in the early history of the AIDS epidemic in America.

“A memorable experience that occurred while working with a pregnant client with HIV was not only that she asked me to be her birthing partner for a Caesarean section, but, when seated next to her in the operating room, she extended a hand to me – indicating, I thought, that she was feeling anxious and in need of emotional support. But that wasn’t the reason. She placed a camera in my hand and asked me to take photographs of the delivery – which I did!

“Although I cannot see myself writing another full-length book, I am eager to start working on a book of short stories. When you have lived a life of nearly eight decades – I’m 78 – if you’ve been brave enough to step out of your comfort zone from time to time, been lucky enough to have encountered people vastly different from yourself and learned from them, been able to see humor in what others see as mundane, and are open to finding love at the same time you start receiving Social Security, then, for me, it is imperative to write these stories.”

Interviewed by Saul Schachter