Thanks to Hank

Thanks to Hank is the story of a liberation movement, a plague, an unsung hero, and an approach to gay activism that puts poor people first.

In San Francisco in the 1970s, Hank Wilson was the Johnny Appleseed of gay liberation. Everywhere he went, new organizations sprouted and thrived. The gay film festival he hosted in 1977, with home movies and bedsheets push-pinned to the wall, became The San Francisco LGBT Film Festival. The AIDS Candlelight Vigil he spearheaded in 1983 is now the International AIDS Candlelight Memorial, held in 150 countries worldwide. All in all he founded or co-founded more than twenty organizations, including San Francisco's first AIDS activist organization, first gay cabaret (where Whoopi Goldberg and Lea DeLaria got their start), first anti-gay bashing street patrol, and much more.

Amazingly, Hank did all that in his spare time. For two decades, he managed the Ambassador Hotel, an enormous, 150-room SRO hotel in San Francisco's most impoverished neighborhood. He began this work in the 1970s, with the intention of providing a landing spot for the thousands of queers who were arriving in San Francisco each year in search of a safe haven. With the arrival of the AIDS epidemic, Hank switched course and ran the hotel as an unfunded, informal, queer-staffed refuge and hospice for poor people dying of AIDS. Many hundreds died in Hank's hotel.

Wilson's extraordinary humility and compassion continue to inspire all who imagine an equitable, just, and supportive queer community. Featuring the music of the multiple Grammy Award-winning Kronos Quartet, Tin Hat, and Carla Kihlstedt, and gorgeous hand-made animation by Jeremy Rourke.