Kiyoshi means “to make clear”
“Kiyoshi was a fighter for social justice all his life and he followed the trajectory of the movement in our generation through the civil rights and antiwar movements, gay liberation ethnic identity and ACT UP. Yet his work was uniquely propelled by one common theme: Kiyoshi believed that information is power- and therefore information should be freely available to anyone who needed it — and by freely I mean both uncensored and for free, and as much as anyone else he worked in the AIDS community for nearly 20 years to give people free, uncensored information – clear, accurate and comprehensive information… AND to give people the tools, the power, to use it.”
Jane Shull’s remarks at Kiyoshi’s Memorial Service, May 23, 2000
More Information on Kiyoshi Kuromiya
“I was a born felon. I was born in a U.S. concentration camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans. And not because of any crime, but because of race.”
In a 1994 Philadelphia Inquirer profile, the paper described him as “the city’s most knowledgeable layman about HIV.”
A personal assistant to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he was also one of the founders of Gay Liberation Front/Philadelphia and served as an openly gay delegate to the Black Panther Convention that endorsed the gay liberation struggle. He was involved with ACT-UP/Philadelphia; PWA empowerment; We The People Living with HIV/AIDS; national and international research advocacy; and loving and compassionate mentorship and care for hundreds of people living with HIV.
