This podcast wraps up the 2024 incubator-style programming on the early days of HIV | AIDS.

This series is brought to you in support of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.

Most productions in this series are short, mini-podcasts, five to seven minutes long. This podcast takes longer to wrap up a difficult and emotional topic.

It comprises Sims's experience in Los Angeles, ca. 1990s, as director of the second AIDS hospice facility in the country.

Sims talks, in a straightforward manner about AIDS, hospice, and dying. Interjecting levity, and, where appropriate, humor.

The recording was created in two parts. The original interview with Sims was performed by Nancy Sharon Collins, Letters Read director. The second, narrative part is Collins again. The podcasts circles back to other Letters Read subjects Stewart Butler, Noel Twilbeck, and Mark Gonzalez.

Stay tuned to Letters Read for more compelling programming in 2025.

This podcast, and one or two more before year’s end, wrap-up the 2024 incubator-style mini-series on the early days of HIV | AIDS. Brought to you in support of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.

The recording is about Pierre Rene “Peter”, as he was known, DeLancey. A sad story with a bittersweet ending. He was queer. At a time when being gay or homosexual or light in one’s loafers was not okay in most polite societies.

Peter's story brings together two previous Letters Read subjects, Stewart Butler of The Faerie Playhouse and Skip Ward. Both produced, and broadcast, at the beginning of the COVID epidemic in 2020.

The featured image is a portrait of Peter from Burt Harter's "Encounters with the Nude Male" self published by Harter in 1997. The image was included in a Doug McCash, Times-Picayune article published June 25, 2002 entitled "The Life and Death of a Painter in Legacy and Limbo".

October 29 at 7:00 pm CDT
Newcomb Institute
Diboll Gallery, room 300
3rd floor of the Commons
43 Newcomb Place
Tulane University campus.

A second reading from the archives of Josephine Louise Newcomb. This one performed, live, at Newcomb Institute.

Emcee and Readers: Nick Slie, Lisa Shattuck, Shadow Angelina Starkey, and Robert Valley

H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College was established by Josephine Louise Monnier Newcomb (“Jo”) as she was called, 1816 to 1901) as a memorial to her daughter Sophie who died at the age of 15. At a time when women were discouraged from education, an institution devoted to higher learning for women was a revolutionary idea.

Ladies of Mrs. Newcomb’s privileged class were instead taught to have “accomplishments”. Such as parlor entertainments like piano playing and polite conversation. For the lower classes—who had to hire themselves out as domestic help to survive—cooking, cleaning, sewing, nursing, and caregiving for other people’s families were their lot. For them, education, such as it were, was learned scrubbing pots on the job.

Until its post-Katrina consolidation into Tulane University, Newcomb College was a separate, four-year, baccalaureate-giving institution. Entirely – for – women.

Through Josephine Louise Newcomb’s letters, this reading tells that tale. It was created in grateful partnership with Susan Tucker and Beth Willinger. In great part, this presentation relies on their scholarship, insights, and their project of the same name, The Letters of Josephine Louise Newcomb.