Just who is the intriguing Sister Mary Elizabeth behind AEGiS.com?
Chris O'Connor set out to find out about the trans-gendered nun whose hugely popular website has literally saved lives
Aids activist and Broadway playwright Larry Kramer once wrote: "A few years ago, I had my curiosity tickled. I realised I was using one website every single day of my life but had no idea who was responsible for it. So I wrote an email to aegis.com and asked bluntly: "Who are you?"
Step forward Sister Mary Elizabeth Clark, former Episcopalian nun. Then take a quick peep behind her veil. If you need human interest, Sister Mary Elizabeth's got it in spades. A Vietnam veteran, married twice with a son, she established her own religious order and had a stint in Missouri raising cattle to feed the homeless. Oh, and she's the first person to serve in the US Navy as a man and the US Army as a woman: Top Gun meets the Sound of Music. As a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence though, Mary Elizabeth is a bit of a let-down. For the last 14 years she has shared a trailer in California with her 92- year-old blind father and a room full of computer servers. Her health's on the blink, and she works 16-hour days. Sister Mary Elizabeth is a 65-year-old trans-gendered nun on a mission.
In the Navy Born into Southern Baptist conservatism, Michael Clark joined the Navy at 17. She eventually taught electronics at the Naval Air Training Centre, Memphis, Tennessee, where she saw racial segregation and the birth of the civil rights movement. Enough to turn her away from her Southern Baptist beliefs, she says. In the early '70s, having risen to the rank of chief petty officer, she dropped her own bombshell in terms of her sexual identity: she didn't shirk from facing the realisation that her true gender identity was as a woman. She informed her superiors and was honourably discharged. In 1975 Michael Clark was accepted onto the Stanford University gender reassignment programme, went for the op and came around as Joanna M Clark.
Sometimes though you can't keep a girl out of uniform, and the army wanted her for a new recruit. "I was invited to enlist in the Army Reserve. My immediate chain of command knew from day one I was transgendered," she recalled. She served two years before an officer in the Pentagon became aware of her history and started proceedings against her. This eventually ended her enlistment in the Army. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union she brought a successful lawsuit defending her rights as a transsexual to be honourably discharged from the military and won a $25,000 settlement.
From cold war warrior to nun on the run, exactly how did Sister Mary Elizabeth get to this point? Rather blithely she says: "I decided rather than going around blowing up the world it was better to try to help people." In 1988 she made her vows of chastity, poverty and obedience as an Episcopalian nun. This move placed her at the heart of a sexual politics scandal that nearly capsized the order she co-founded, the Sisters of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. A media storm broke when the story was leaked to the press. "The church accepted my past until it became public; then they abandoned ship quickly. But I made my vows to God, not to the church, and I stuck it out." In a swish of a habit she went to Missouri in 1990 to ranch cows left to the order. The plan (hair-brained she now admits) was to raise the beef and donate a proportion to homeless shelters. It never happened. What did happen sowed the seeds for the AEGiS project. "While in Missouri I met a man with, what I now know to be, Karposi Sarcoma lesions, coming out of the Wal-Mart. I walked over and introduced myself. I scared him half to death, I think, but I told him that I'd help him if he needed anything. It was so rural and isolated out there - they didn¹t even have private phone lines, just party lines. I kept thinking about that."
Sister Mary Elizabeth returned to her parents' trailer in California, and set up an online bulletin board for HIV positive people to exchange information and support each other. So AEGiS began. No stranger to bigotry and an outsider for most of her life, she strongly identifies with those isolated and unaware of their options. Some say God moves in mysterious ways, or that we are all looking for our own groove. But for Sister Mary Elizabeth her rollercoaster ride ended and finally made sense with the birth of AEGiS. (Even the computer technology training from the Navy found a purpose.) At the helm, the good sister has forced government and business to relinquish control of information vital to people living with HIV/Aids. She successfully challenged the proposed Communications Decency Act which aimed to make it felony to place 'indecent' material on a computer if a minor could obtain it. "You cannot talk about Aids and intelligent manner without bringing sex into it," she says. Sister Mary has also locked horns with Reuters who tried to charge her $1,500 a month for posting three stories a day. They finally relented when PLWHA e-mail-blitzed the news agency in protest. She also persuaded the Clinton administration to drop charges for information to people living with HIV by writing personally to vice president Al Gore. "I don't understand how we, as individuals created in the image of a loving God, could simply stand by in the face of this epidemic and do nothing," she says. In 1997, finally, Sister Mary Elizabeth was invited to join the American Catholic Church (no relation to the Roman Catholic Church ) which ordains women and casts no judgement about the gay, lesbian and transgendered community. We are told we live in an age of spin. Stories need to be juiced up, twisted and tweaked. This one doesn't. Sister Mary Elizabeth runs the best Aids information service on the web, bar none. It is a major gift to us all. Now that¹s a story.
The Aids Education Global Information System, (AEGiS) is thought to be the largest Aids/HIV knowledge base in the world. It was set up in 1991 and was one of the first dedicated Aids sites on the web. Sister Mary says: "Most are run by Aids support organisations, so the focus tends to be on that, prevention and treatment. I see AEGiS as a potent combination of a Wal-Mart and a Smithsonian Institute for the HIV/Aids online world." From 1990 to 1999 the site was essentially run by Sister Mary Elizabeth alone. She has since recruited a six-strong team to support the site. AEGiS' biggest funders are Boehringer Ingelheim, the National Library of Medicine and more recently the Elton John Aids Foundation.
AEGiS has:
AEGiS is planning to translate more articles into as many languages as possible and act as an archive for the epidemic. Early drug trials, the conference squabbles, the weird and the wonderful theories, the heartbreaking trail - and the hope - are all currently being catalogued.
Apart from www.aegis.com the net provides many paths to knowledge. These are just a few:
Aidsmap - www.aidsmap.com
Gay Men Fighting Aids - www.metromate.org.uk/amm/gmfa
HIV Treatment Bulletin - www.i-base.org.uk
UK Coalition - www.ukcoalition.org
Positive Nation - www.positivenation.co.uk
Terrence Higgins Trust - www.tht.org.uk
