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Michael Anthony Petrelis (born January 26, 1959) is an American AIDS activist, LGBTQ rights activist, and blogger. He was diagnosed with Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in 1985 in New York City, New York. As a member of the Lavender Hill Mob, a forerunner to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), he was among the first AIDS activists to protest responses to the disease.〔 He was a co-founding member of ACT UP in New York City, New York,〔〔 and later helped organize ACT UP chapters in Portland, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and New Hampshire, as well as the ACT UP Presidential Project.〔 Petrelis was also a founding member of Queer Nation/National Capital,〔 the Washington D.C. chapter of the militant LGBTQ rights organization. In 1990, he organized a nationwide boycott of products manufactured by Philip Morris Companies, Inc. (now Altria Group, Inc.), including Marlboro cigarettes and Miller beer, to protest the company's support for Jesse Helms, a Republican senator from North Carolina whose rhetoric and policy positions Petrelis said were harmful to LGBTQ communities.〔 Petrelis was among several activists who disclosed, in 1989, that Mark Hatfield, a Republican senator from Oregon who supported anti-gay legislation, was secretly gay, the first such political outing of an elected official by American activists.〔 Over the next few years, Petrelis became an outspoken proponent of outing and one of its most prominent practitioners; at a 1990 press conference on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, he outed a dozen public figures, although no news outlets published the names, and he played a pivotal role in the 1991 outing of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Pete Williams by writer Michelangelo Signorile in ''The Advocate'', an American LGBT-interest magazine. When Terry M. Helvey and an accomplice murdered Helvey's shipmate, U.S. Navy Seaman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. in October 1992, because Schindler was gay, Petrelis traveled twice to Japan to press the Navy for justice on Schindler's behalf and to monitor the trial, while raising awareness of the hate crime in the U.S.〔〔 After relocating to San Francisco, California, in 1995, Petrelis successfully lobbied the city's Department of Public Health (SFDPH) to make the female condom available to gay men, and advocated reopening the gay bathhouses there. He also founded the AIDS Accountability Project, a watchdog organization that obtained IRS tax forms 990 from nonprofit AIDS service organizations, then published the financial information disclosed therein online. He currently lives with his partner of eighteen years, Mike Merrigan, and writes a blog called (The Petrelis Files ). On April 5, 2014, Petrelis announced his candidacy for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, running against incumbent Scott Wiener for the District 8 seat, representing the Castro, Noe Valley, Diamond Heights, and Glen Park neighborhoods of San Francisco. In January 1999, ''Out'' magazine included Petrelis in the ''Out'' 100, recognizing him, for creating the AIDS Accountability Project, as one of the "people who defined 1998". In August 1999, ''The Advocate'' named Petrelis among its "Best and Brightest Activists" citing the AIDS Accountability Project and other controversial causes. ==Early years and influences== Petrelis was born in Newark, New Jersey, where he lived for “four or five” years before his family moved to Caldwell, a nearby suburb.〔 According to a family legend, his maternal grandmother once created a scene when his mother failed to win a Shirley Temple look-alike contest in Newark, overturning the judges’ table and screaming, “This is a mafia-rigged beauty contest! My daughter’s the most beautiful one!” Petrelis said of the legend, “...of course, I wasn’t there, and you don’t necessarily inherit that kind of whatever it takes to do it, but sometimes, you’ve just got to overturn some tables and remember that, for me, I have a Mediterranean background and that anger is okay.”〔 Petrelis attended an alternative high school in East Orange, New Jersey, where he was openly gay. He remembers first becoming involved with the gay community as a teenager, traveling to the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, New York.〔 In the city, Petrelis discovered he could make money as a sex worker and engaged in “lots and lots of unsafe sex.”〔 After graduating high school in 1977, he spent the following summer hitchhiking across the United States to San Francisco, California, where he lived for the next three years.〔 In San Francisco, Petrelis witnessed the White Night riots at San Francisco City Hall, a reaction to the lenient sentencing of Dan White, convicted of killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk. Petrelis remembers feeling outrage on hearing the news of White’s sentence and said of the property destruction he had watched that night, “I remember feeling that was okay — that you had to have this destruction of personal property to send a message...to gay people here in San Francisco— (lenient sentence ) is not okay. And we had to look out for ourselves — even with the relative liberal attitudes of San Francisco.”〔 Petrelis moved to New York City, New York, in 1981, where he renewed his acquaintance with a male couple he knew from his teenage visits to the city. One of these men was the first of Petrelis’ friends to die of the disease that would later come to be known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Michael Petrelis」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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