By JT Santana | jtwb768

The distance between 1986 and 2026 is enormous. The organization now known as The Project traces its beginning to the Quad Cities AIDS Coalition, formed during a period when an AIDS diagnosis frequently carried a devastating prognosis and HIV itself had only recently received its standardized name. The Project’s anniversary history remembers some of its earliest work being conducted discreetly in the backs of bars and in hotel rooms where people felt safer receiving care and support. (TPQC, 2026b). (The Project of the Quad Cities)

Those locations tell us something about the epidemic that statistics cannot. People living with HIV or AIDS had medical needs, yet many faced another threat at the same time: being identified. A diagnosis could expose sexuality, drug use, sexual relationships, poverty, or other parts of a person’s life that family members, employers, landlords, churches, acquaintances, and even health-care workers might condemn.

The Quad Cities response grew inside that environment. It was built by organizations, but it was equally built by people whose names appeared only occasionally in newsletters and meeting minutes, if they were recorded at all. Volunteers drove people to appointments, cooked meals, raised money in gay bars, distributed condoms and lubricant, helped people find testing, found housing for people with AIDS, sat beside the dying, produced television reports, organized benefits, challenged discrimination, and tried to get accurate information into a community flooded with fear.

Forty years later, The Project is a substantial regional health organization providing HIV services, testing, PrEP and PEP, behavioral health care, hepatitis C services, LGBTQ+ primary care, harm reduction, case management, and pharmacy services. Its fiscal-year 2025 federal filing reported revenue exceeding $11.3 million. (ProPublica, 2026). (The Project of the Quad Cities)

That transformation deserves recognition. It should not eclipse the less formal history underneath it.

The fuller story of HIV in the Quad Cities is the story of how people created care before there was enough infrastructure to deliver it.

1986: A community responds to an epidemic

The Quad Cities AIDS Coalition emerged at an especially grim stage of the national epidemic. In January 1986, federal health officials reported that more people had been diagnosed with AIDS during 1985 than in all previous years combined. Fifty-one percent of adults diagnosed with AIDS to that point had died, and average survival after diagnosis was about fifteen months. In May 1986, the virus causing AIDS formally received the name human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. (HIV.gov, 2026). (HIV.gov)

Modern treatment did not exist. AZT would become the first medication approved specifically for HIV treatment in 1987. The highly effective combination therapies that radically changed survival would not arrive until the mid-1990s, and the first medication approved for PrEP would not reach the United States until 2012. (HIV.gov)

The people responding in 1986 could not promise someone newly diagnosed with HIV that medication would suppress the virus and allow that person to live a near-normal lifespan. Much of the work centered on education, support, basic care, advocacy, companionship, and helping people survive socially and economically for however long medicine allowed them to survive physically.

Augustana College Special Collections now holds an important portion of this history. Its collection, The Project of the Quad Cities records, 1981–2018 and undated, contains material related to programming, advocacy, fundraising, HIV/AIDS education, volunteers, the Buddy Program, We Care Weekend, Red Ribbon events, Pride activities, and regional and national HIV initiatives. The archive identifies the organization as beginning in 1986 and preserves records from the era when much of the work depended heavily on volunteers. (Augustana College Special Collections, 2026). (Augustana Special Collections)

The Buddy Program reveals what HIV care meant before institutions had developed the services people needed. Volunteers helped with transportation, meals, household work, companionship, and other daily needs. Those actions seem simple until they are placed inside the fear surrounding AIDS during the 1980s.

Entering the home of someone with AIDS contradicted the mythology that casual proximity was dangerous. Sharing a room, touching household objects, transporting someone in a car, preparing food, or simply remaining physically present could become quiet acts of resistance against misinformation.

Charles A. Crampton became one of the people associated with that sustained personal support. His family later credited him with assisting more than 140 people with AIDS between 1986 and 2011 through his work with The Project. That number deserves confirmation from organizational records if such records survive, but his long association with the organization places him across much of the local epidemic’s first quarter-century.

By 1995, the Quad Cities AIDS Coalition had become an identifiable part of the region’s social-service infrastructure. A federal housing plan reported 52 AIDS cases in Rock Island County from 1980 through 1994 and 73 HIV-positive cases reported countywide from June 1986 through December 1994. Those figures measure different categories and overlapping periods, so they should never be combined into a single case total. The same federal document stated that the Quad Cities AIDS Coalition in Davenport was the only organization in the Quad-City area then providing services specifically to people living with HIV/AIDS. (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD], 1995). (HUD Archives)

That federal record captures the significance of what local organizers had built in less than a decade. A community response had become a regional service provider.

Prevention meant going where people actually were

Institutional histories tend to preserve office addresses, executive directors, board memberships, grants, budgets, and program names. HIV prevention on the street looked different.

My own involvement in this history did not begin when I moved to Davenport. I had already been involved in HIV/AIDS advocacy through ICARE, the Iowa Center for AIDS/ARC Resources and Education, in Iowa City. When I relocated to Davenport, I maintained those relationships and continued the work rather than starting from scratch.

The move gave me a way to carry lessons and contacts from one Iowa HIV network into another. I began looking for an agency and local partners through which I could continue prevention and advocacy work in the Quad Cities.

Brad Daehn was one of those people.

Brad and I were involved in early condom and lubricant distribution, including outreach through adult bookstores. The purpose was straightforward: prevention supplies needed to be available where people who might use them could obtain them, and people who did not have a relationship with a clinic or AIDS-service organization still needed routes into testing and other services.

Adult bookstores were logical outreach locations, but logic did not automatically translate into cooperation. Brad and I faced resistance trying to get condoms into some of those businesses.

That resistance illustrates a recurring problem in HIV prevention. Public officials could tell people to practice safer sex, yet effective prevention required acknowledging where sexual contact occurred, where people sought partners, and which environments were actually accessible to populations at risk. Moral discomfort could interfere with a very practical public-health goal.

The work was never simply about leaving condoms somewhere and walking away. Outreach created opportunities to talk with people, answer questions, reduce misinformation, identify someone who might need testing, and help connect that person to services.

Sometimes the most important intervention was knowing where to send someone.

A person who would never voluntarily walk through the door of an AIDS organization might talk to someone in a bookstore or bar. Another might be frightened that entering an HIV agency would reveal something about his sexuality. Someone else might not identify with the populations represented in public HIV campaigns and assume services were meant for other people.

Meeting people where they already were could get around some of those barriers.

Brad’s wider participation in Quad Cities LGBTQ advocacy is independently documented. The Putnam Museum’s Quad Citians Affirming Diversity archive includes correspondence sent by Joyce Wiley to Clayton C. Peterson and Brad Daehn regarding legislative action on a gay-rights bill. The material appears within records associated with the Civil Rights Alliance and Equality Quad Cities, placing Brad within the region’s documented LGBTQ civil-rights network. (Putnam Museum)

The condom-and-lubricant outreach Brad and I conducted has not yet surfaced in the institutional archives I have reviewed. I include it here as firsthand history.

That distinction deserves to remain visible.

An archive can prove that an organization held a board meeting on a Tuesday night. It may never record two advocates trying to persuade an adult bookstore owner to accept condoms.

Both can be history.

One simply leaves a much easier paper trail.

Money, bars, community, and We Care Weekend

The Quad Cities gay community became a major part of the financial and social infrastructure supporting AIDS work. Bars and nightclubs did far more than provide entertainment during the epidemic.

We Care Weekend began in 1989. By 2002 it was in its 14th year, which confirms that origin date. The River Cities’ Reader reported that the first We Care Weekend raised approximately $6,000 for the Quad Cities AIDS Coalition. By 2002, the annual event was generating about $40,000 for AIDS Project Quad Cities. (Ignatius, 2002). (River Cities’ Reader)

The 2002 event included a candlelight walk and activities at Mary’s, Liquid, Augie’s, and J.R.’s. Those locations were commercial businesses, but during the AIDS crisis gay bars frequently performed civic functions that were difficult to separate from public health.

They were communication networks. They were fundraising sites. They were places where people learned who was sick, who had died, who needed help, which benefit was happening next, and what services were available.

For people who had experienced rejection elsewhere, the bar could serve as one of the few places where they knew someone would recognize them.

The fundraising became increasingly important as HIV treatment changed. In 2002, AIDS Project Quad Cities reportedly had about 160 active clients and served roughly 180 to 200 people during a year across 28 counties in Iowa and Illinois. Its annual budget was approximately $330,000, with government funding covering part of the operation and private donations and fundraising helping fill other needs. (River Cities’ Reader)

Steve Stickle, then executive director, described a new challenge. People with HIV were living longer as treatment improved, yet the public’s sense of urgency was fading. The success of HIV medicine was beginning to make the epidemic less visible even as clients still needed services. (River Cities’ Reader)

The Red Ribbon Dinner became another major source of community support. A 2008 account of the 15th annual Red Ribbon Dinner & Great Art Auction reported a record $109,000 raised before expenses. The fundraiser relied heavily on volunteer labor and had become one of AIDS Project Quad Cities’ signature events. (Iowa Stater)

Individual volunteers linked nightlife, fundraising, and advocacy in ways that formal histories can miss. Rohn Rich, for example, volunteered for AIDS Project Quad Cities, served on the Red Ribbon Dinner fundraising committee, and prepared meals for fundraising activities held at Connections Night Club in Davenport. His obituary records his later involvement in QC Pride as well, illustrating how HIV work and broader LGBTQ civic organizing frequently overlapped. (Dignity Memorial)

The region’s HIV response was never housed in a single building. It moved through bars, churches, homes, health departments, nonprofit offices, restaurants, television studios, social-service organizations, and wherever else people could be reached.

Robb Dussliere put a human face on AIDS

Few local stories demonstrate the struggle against HIV stigma more clearly than Robb’s Life.

In April 1995, Robb Dussliere and AIDS Project Quad Cities Executive Director Beth Wehrman approached WHBF-TV in Rock Island with an unusual proposal. They wanted the station to document Robb’s life with AIDS through recurring television reports.

WHBF accepted.

The series followed Robb from April 21, 1995 until his death on April 19, 1996. An archival copy later deposited with the GLBT Historical Society describes an approximately 82-minute edited compilation of the broadcasts and credits journalist Ken Gullette with the production. (Calisphere)

The project did something statistics could not do. It allowed Quad Cities viewers to watch one person live with AIDS over time.

Robb became visibly sicker. Viewers saw his family, relationships, medical care, fears, humor, advocacy, and eventually his final days. The approach gave the audience sustained exposure to a man with AIDS rather than the fleeting images and frightening headlines that had characterized much early epidemic coverage.

The series carried another story beneath the one viewers saw. Robb had a partner named Kevin whose identity was intentionally protected. Gullette later explained that Kevin served in the Army National Guard and feared the consequences of being publicly identified as gay. His family did not accept his sexual orientation either. (Robb’s Life)

That circumstance captures the layered nature of the epidemic. Robb could appear openly on television discussing AIDS, yet protecting his partner required concealment.

The danger did not come from HIV transmission.

It came from discrimination.

Robb spent part of his final period advocating for housing for people living with HIV/AIDS. His name later became attached to Robb’s House, opened by DeLaCerda House in 1996 as the first of three Rock Island properties serving people affected by HIV and homelessness. (Quad Cities Business Journal)

Housing was a critical extension of HIV care. Medication does little good if a person has nowhere safe to keep it. Medical appointments become harder to maintain when someone is moving between couches, shelters, vehicles, and the street.

DeLaCerda House, established in 1994, developed specialized housing for people living with HIV/AIDS who were homeless or faced homelessness. Robb’s House was followed by Steven’s Place, named for Steven Rosen, who died of AIDS in 1993. Properties acquired in 2002 became eight one-bedroom supportive-housing apartments after renovation. Longview Place opened in 2009 to provide housing for families with dependent children living with HIV/AIDS. (Quad Cities Business Journal)

Those buildings tell part of the story through their names. Memorialization and service became intertwined.

People who died from AIDS became part of the infrastructure helping others live.

From AIDS service organization to regional health provider

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, AIDS Project Quad Cities had developed far beyond its early volunteer structure. Augustana’s records document an organization with paid staff, formal services, advocacy work, fundraising systems, client support, and a growing regional role. (Augustana Special Collections)

HIV itself had changed in the eyes of the public. Effective medications meant that many people diagnosed with HIV could anticipate years or decades rather than months. That medical achievement created new service demands around long-term health, housing, employment, mental health, substance use, insurance, aging, medication adherence, and chronic disease.

Prevention changed as well.

By 2016, Tim Kelly was serving as outreach program manager for The Project’s Viral for Your Survival program. The initiative focused on homeless young people ages 13 to 20 in Scott County, Iowa, and Rock Island County, Illinois. Kelly described outreach built around HIV testing, food, transportation, medical access, service navigation, housing needs, and personally accompanying young people to appointments when distrust or previous mistreatment made navigating institutions difficult. (HIVPlusMag.com)

At the time, Kelly said The Project was conducting roughly 350 to 600 HIV tests annually. His account makes clear that prevention had retained one principle from the earlier epidemic: handing someone information was often insufficient. People needed somebody willing to help them get through the door. (HIVPlusMag.com)

That principle connects several generations of Quad Cities HIV work.

The Buddy Program brought support directly into people’s homes.

Brad Daehn and I put condoms and lubricant into environments where prevention supplies were needed.

Tim Kelly described going into the community to reach homeless youth and helping people navigate services.

The tools changed. The population being targeted changed. The underlying idea remained recognizable: waiting in an office for everyone to arrive voluntarily leaves people behind.

The organization continued broadening its services. In 2023, The Project announced a move to 4101 John Deere Road in Moline, a former medical facility offering examination rooms, behavioral-health offices, group spaces, and room for an adjoining pharmacy. At the time, TPQC described its programs as including HIV care, case management, HIV and STI testing, PrEP and PEP, hepatitis C treatment, behavioral health, harm reduction, and LGBTQ+ health care. (The Project of the Quad Cities)

The scale of the modern organization would have been almost impossible to predict from the improvised response of 1986. Federal tax filings show fiscal-year 2019 revenue of about $4.95 million and fiscal-year 2025 revenue of approximately $11.32 million. (ProPublica)

The financial growth is significant, yet the most revealing comparison is physical.

The Project remembers some of its first care being delivered quietly behind bars and in hotel rooms.

It now operates from a former medical complex.

That is what institutionalization of a community response can look like.

HIV history is larger than the institutions that survived

Organizations provide the easiest framework for telling history. They leave records.

People do not always leave records.

That creates a risk when looking backward at AIDS. The story can gradually become a chronology of agencies, executive directors, grants, buildings, fundraisers, and programs rather than a history of the people who made those systems necessary.

The epidemic in the Quad Cities was never confined to gay white men, even though gay men suffered enormous losses and created much of the visible early infrastructure. Women lived with HIV here. Black and Latino residents lived with HIV. People who injected drugs lived with HIV. Heterosexual people contracted HIV. Parents raised children affected by HIV. People experiencing homelessness navigated HIV. People in prisons and jails did as well.

Poverty changed the course of illness. Racism affected access to care. Homophobia influenced whether someone sought testing. Fear of disclosure affected relationships with physicians, employers, families, and landlords.

The record needs those stories.

The Putnam’s Quad Citians Affirming Diversity collection provides one route into the larger LGBTQ history surrounding the epidemic. It contains material connected with civil-rights campaigns, Equality Quad Cities, local organizing, marriage equality, school safety, and other struggles. Brad Daehn’s appearance in that collection is one example of how advocates could move through overlapping HIV, LGBTQ, political, and community networks. (Putnam Museum)

Augustana’s Project collection offers another route. Its subject files date back to 1981 and include research, education materials, correspondence, publications, clippings, and documentation related to local, regional, and national HIV efforts. Its general collection contains Buddy Program material and photographs from We Care Weekends, Red Ribbon Dinners, and Pride festivals. (Augustana Special Collections)

Robb’s Life preserves something altogether different: one person’s experience recorded over time.

Oral history must fill many of the remaining spaces.

Who staffed the earliest hotline?

Which nurses cared for people with AIDS?

Which doctors refused?

Which funeral homes treated surviving partners as family?

Which bars hosted the first benefits?

Who carried condoms into adult bookstores?

Who made the local AIDS Quilt panels?

Who sat beside someone dying when relatives would not?

Who drove people to Iowa City or Chicago for treatment?

Who remembers the first person they knew with AIDS?

Who never told anyone?

Those questions cannot wait indefinitely. Many of the people who lived the first two decades of the epidemic are aging, and some have already died.

From secrecy to the Putnam Museum

The Project created We Are Still Here to preserve some of that history. The documentary includes voices ranging from someone who survived the Chicago epidemic of the 1980s to a woman diagnosed in her twenties, public-health workers who treated people with HIV, and a daughter determined to preserve her mother’s legacy. TPQC describes the film as an effort to connect the past, present, and future of HIV through lived experience. (The Project of the Quad Cities)

On October 18, 2026, the film became part of The Project’s LGBTQ+ History Month program at the Putnam Museum. TPQC advertised exhibits, community tabling, the documentary screening, and recognition of forty years of care. (The Project of the Quad Cities)

The wording deserves precision. Based on available public information, this was a Putnam-hosted historical program with exhibits rather than evidence of a permanent museum exhibition devoted exclusively to forty years of The Project.

The symbolic significance does not depend on that distinction.

In the earliest years, discretion was part of HIV care.

People met where it felt safe.

Some did not want anyone to see them entering an AIDS organization.

Advocates tried to put condoms in adult bookstores.

Gay bars raised money to care for people other institutions had abandoned.

A man dying from AIDS allowed a television station to document his final year.

Volunteers walked into homes carrying food, companionship, information, and whatever else people needed.

Housing programs were named after people lost to AIDS.

Years later, outreach workers were still meeting people outside conventional medical systems and helping them find a path into care.

Now that history is entering archives, documentaries, libraries, museums, and public conversations.

That transition should be celebrated, but celebration alone is insufficient.

The Quad Cities has an opportunity to preserve a history that is still recoverable.

The early organizational files exist. Television footage survives. Photographs survive. Newspaper archives survive. LGBTQ civil-rights records survive. People who staffed programs, tended bars, organized benefits, delivered condoms, provided nursing care, housed people with AIDS, raised money, accompanied clients to appointments, and buried friends are still here.

Their memories can explain things the official records never will.

Forty years of HIV in the Quad Cities is not primarily a story about an organization reaching its fortieth birthday.

It is a story about people who refused to disappear when fear told them to hide.

It is about volunteers who entered homes when others were frightened to enter them.

It is about bartenders and nightclub owners helping finance AIDS care.

It is about condoms carried into adult bookstores despite resistance.

It is about advocates connecting strangers to services before smartphones could instantly produce a clinic address.

It is about television cameras following a dying man who wanted his life to teach people something.

It is about houses carrying the names of people the epidemic took.

It is about surviving long enough for HIV care to move from improvised rooms into a medical facility.

And it is about remembering that the history now being displayed publicly was once lived very privately.

The Quad Cities spent forty years building an HIV response.

The work before us now is to make sure we remember how it was built, who built it, who was lost along the way, and whose story has still not been recorded.

References

Augustana College Special Collections. (2026). The Project of the Quad Cities records, 1981–2018 and undated (MSS 421). (Augustana Special Collections)

HIV.gov. (2026). A timeline of HIV and AIDS. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (HIV.gov)

Ignatius, J. (2002, May 21). We Care Weekend puts spotlight on AIDS. River Cities’ Reader. (River Cities’ Reader)

Iowa Stater. (2008, January 25). Mark Sorenson: 15th Annual Red Ribbon Dinner. (Iowa Stater)

Plus. (2016, October 27). Helping the Quad Cities battle HIV among homeless youth. (HIVPlusMag.com)

ProPublica. (2026). The Project of the Quad Cities. Nonprofit Explorer. (ProPublica)

Putnam Museum and Science Center. Archive inventory: Quad Citians Affirming Diversity. (Putnam Museum)

Quad Cities Regional Business Journal. (2023, June 21). Project NOW joins area’s fight against HIV/AIDS homelessness. (Quad Cities Business Journal)

The Project of the Quad Cities. (2023, August 30). Project announces move to new location on John Deere Road in Moline. (The Project of the Quad Cities)

The Project of the Quad Cities. (2026a). LGBTQ+ History Event at The Putnam. (The Project of the Quad Cities)

The Project of the Quad Cities. (2026b). Our story: 40th anniversary. (The Project of the Quad Cities)

The Project of the Quad Cities. We Are Still Here: The past & present of HIV in our country and community. (The Project of the Quad Cities)

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. (1995). Rock Island Consolidated Plan for 1995: Executive summary. (HUD Archives)

Robb’s Life. (2016). Ken Gullette retrospective archive of the 1995–1996 WHBF-TV series documenting Robb Dussliere’s life with AIDS. (Robb’s Life)