Jim Eigo
Background: Jim is a 37 year old white, gay man. Jim spent his childhood in the Bronx and his high school years in a suburb of Philadelphia. He got a partial scholarship to study playwriting at the California Institute of the Arts, then went to graduate school for playwriting at University of California, Davis. He then became the playwright writing for a theater collective associated with the University of Maryland in Baltimore for two years. He then moved to New York. He was often involved in activist groups (anti-Vietnam, New Mobilization for Survival, Amnesty International). In the early 1980s he started writing fiction. Jim came out in his late 20s/early 30s. Most of his sexual experiences were at gay movie houses. When Jim first came to ACT UP, he heard Vito Russo express to the Floor that Iris Long had extremely important information to share about virology and the drug development process. This made Jim go to a Treatment and Data Committee meeting, where he quickly develop a working relationship with Iris Long.
Role in ACT UP: Jim is on the Treatment and Data Committee. Though Jim has no medical background, he has developed a specialty for understanding drug approval in the United States, and complements Iris Long (a knowledgeable virologist, but not a great public speaker) as the main writer and speaker on behalf of the Treatment and Data Committee. Jim is also in the affinity group Wave 3.
Groups/friends at the meeting: Treatment and Data Committee, Wave 3
Specific tasks at the March 13, 1989 meeting: Jim is on the agenda to make the Treatment and Data report:
The National Committee to Review Current Procedures for Approval of New Drugs for Cancer and AIDS (the Lasagna Committee, so named because it is a committee headed by Dr. Louis Lasagna) is advising that Medicare and Medicaid make no payments for investigational drugs.
This discriminates against poorer PWAs (people with AIDS), since people with more money can afford to pay for the drugs out of pocket.
This also undermines the battle against AIDS. Since there are so few approved drugs to combat AIDS, experimental treatments are the only avenue, and the data that can be obtained can be highly valuable, even if the data is not as pristine as in trials that the FDA would run (but is not running).
Treatment and Data is preparing a document with demands and questions for the Lasagna Committee.
Additional information: https://actuporalhistory.org/numerical-interviews/047-jim-eigo