HIV activists stage mock funeral to spotlight Trump’s deadly federal funding cuts

Pallbearers held black coffins on their shoulders and walked through the ballroom at a Virginia hotel on Monday afternoon. A large banner with a red ribbon reminded of the stakes of HIV, even in an era of medical advancement.

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This wasn’t a funeral for the already fallen, but for those living with HIV amid fears federal funding cuts could end their journeys too soon. Many took to the makeshift pulpit to read their own pre-death obituaries and warn of the consequences of starving efforts like PEPFAR and the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program of resources.

“The cuts to HIV funding are not just numbers. They represent lives at stake and potential to undo decades of progress,” said Vincent Crisostomo, director of aging services for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

The funeral, organized by the Save HIV Funding Campaign, took place at the Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel, the venue hosting AIDSWatch. That’s an annual event in the D.C. area that brings awareness to policy conversations about HIV funding. There, Crisostomo read his own eulogy, one of a 65-year-old queer San Franciscan who witnessed the devastation of his city as well as policy wins at the national and local levels.

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“His advocacy was being reinvigorated in 2025 when confronted by alarming cuts to crucial funding that provided life-sustaining health benefits to his community and programs like PEPFAR, knowing these cuts threatened not only his health but the well-being of countless individuals relying on these vital resources,” Crisostomo said in the third-person retelling of his own life. “He felt compelled to rise again and raise his voice.”

Activists called attention to the Trump administration's cuts to HIV funding.Shannon Finney/Getty Images for Save HIV Funding

So it went for a series of speakers, all living with HIV but as concerned about their community of peers as their own health.

The event was inspired by a living obituary from Kamaria Laffrey published in February in Positively Aware. A Black woman in Florida, first diagnosed in 2003, the single mother read that work at the start of the event. She set the tone, reminding the crowd she indeed still lives to fight the good fight right now.

“The woman described in this obituary is still alive before you today,” she said. “She’s still taking her medication. She’s on a mission, doing it despite the evil and inhumane treatment of people living with HIV, despite the cuts of public health, and in spite of anyone who thinks that this black woman living with HIV is going to go quietly, politely, or willingly, not today, not ever.”

The line-up of speakers represented the modern face of HIV, an epidemic touching LGBTQ+, minority, immigrant, and other patients.

The self-written reflections on life were framed in a religious ceremony, led by Rev. Elder Carmarion D. Anderson, minister for Congregational Leadership for the United Church of Christ National Ministries.

“This is about dignity, and together, we are here not to mourn, but to warn,” Anderson said. “When HIV funding is cut, lives are being lost.”

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Advocates note the programs at stake reach millions. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, supports lifesaving HIV treatment for about 20.6 million people worldwide and has saved more than 26 million lives since 2003. In the United States, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program provides care and medication to nearly 602,000 people, more than half of those diagnosed with HIV nationally.

Groups participating in AIDSWatch said the funeral served to illustrate the stakes as the Trump administration cruelly dismantles budgets for organizations serving HIV and AIDS patients.

“We’re going to make sure that our policy makers hear us loud and clear,” said Jeremiah Johnson, executive director of PrEP For All (and billed as the event’s “funeral director.”) “Do we invest in life, or do we invest in death? Do we invest in care or do we invest in bombs? I know my answer, and I believe you share it with me.”

Throughout the event, an updated version of the classic ACT UP “Silence=Death” logo hung on a large banner with the new phrase “Cuts=Death.” Throughout the event, call-and-response chants drilled in messages like “Cuts kill, funding saves.”

But the conversation didn’t exclusively touch on health care programs. Aubrianna Escalera Naranjo, President and Chief Operating Officer of Poder Unides in Georgia, highlighted how even the administration’s immigration policies could worsen a public health crisis. She told the story of a young girl born with HIV but unable to access support.

“She says, I'm living in a world where I am scared every day, scared to go to school because my family might get deported,” Escalera Naranjo said.

But she also discussed the impact on those in custody and also in fear of being kicked out of the country, losing any access to U.S. programs, whether they get funded or not.

It all served as a reminder that while the Ronald Reagan era times of AIDS deaths, ignored by the federal government, gave way to public health improvements, the virus continues to threaten communities.

Malcolm Reid, Co-Chair of U.S. People Living with HIV Caucus discussed the increasingly unaffordable medications keeping HIV patients, including himself, alive.

“Malcolm did not die because HIV outsmarted Science,” he said in his imagined testament to hypothetically lost life. “He died because the medicine became harder to reach.”

Barb Cardell, program director for the Positive Women’s Network-USA in Colorado, said that’s why AIDS activists still fight for support in a Washington growing eerily indifferent to the disease.

“We do not mistake longevity for liberation,” she said.