On World AIDS Day 2025, West Hollywood will bring the stories back to the park.
STORIES: The AIDS Monument will host an evening of live readings from the APLA Health Writers Group, followed by a reception and art showing at ONE Gallery just up the street.
The evening embraces four important words: remember, mourn, resist, celebrate. The APLA Health Writers Group, which began in 1989 for HIV positive writers and their allies, will be reading work pulled from real life with HIV and AIDS. Former West Hollywood Poet Laureate Brian Sonia Wallace is putting the program together, so people can walk the space, stop, listen and move on when they are ready.
Stories at the Monument
The program at STORIES: The AIDS Monument is scheduled on World AIDS Day, December 1st, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in West Hollywood Park, 625 N. San Vicente Blvd. It’s early enough that you or a friend can leave work, head straight to the park and still arrive in time to experience the readings while they are in progress.
This is not a long formal presentation. It’s an hour to stand inside the Monument with other people who remember what the epidemic has done in their lives and in the city. Members of the APLA Health Writers Group will read pieces shaped over many years of living with HIV, looking after friends and partners, and trying to make sense of what they have seen.
If you have not been back to STORIES since it opened, this is a chance to see the Monument doing what it was built to do, holding voices and movement instead of only names.
From the park to ONE Gallery
Once the readings wrap up in the park, people can walk a few minutes up to ONE Gallery. The reception runs from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at ONE Gallery, 626 N. Robertson Blvd., a short walk from STORIES: The AIDS Monument.
Inside the gallery there will be light snacks, something to drink and time to look at the new Herb Ritts exhibition.
A writers group that started in 1989
The APLA Health Writers Group has been around since 1989. It started at a time when an HIV diagnosis felt very different than it does now. The group gave people living with HIV, and the friends and partners around them, a place to try putting that experience into words.
The group still meets. Treatment has changed, and so have some of the stories, but people are still using the workshop to talk straight about living with HIV. On World AIDS Day, that work steps out of the usual room and into public space, first at the Monument in the park, then over at the gallery.
The event is co-sponsored by APLA Health, ONE Institute and the Foundation for The AIDS Monument. All three have been in this work for a long time and are still in it now.
If you go
Organizers are asking people to RSVP here ahead of time. The night is free and open to anyone who wants to spend World AIDS Day listening to stories, seeing the art and being around other people who remember, mourn, resist, and celebrate why this day matters.
