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Sister Mary Elizabeth: Rebel With A Cause

By Shirley Bushenll

Los Angeles
October 8, 1998

THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY TRANSGENDER TASK FORCE OUTSTANDING SERVICE AWARD

TRIBUTE BY Shirley Bushenll

Today, I will tell you about a person who is a role model for me. I would like for each one of us here to take on the role of a parent. Imagine yourself with a male child 8 years old. He says "Mom, Dad, I really need to talk to you. You know what I want to be when I grow up?" As parents you listen intently. Your son then says; "Mom, Dad; I want to be a Nun when I grow up." After careful consideration as parents, and making sure you have "family values" in mind; you promptly put your son into the Baptist church.

So today it is my honor to tell you more about this individual who did grow up and become a Nun. She has the distinction of having served in the U.S. military as both a man and a woman. She began her military career as a man Michael Clark, a stalwart Cold War-generation Southern Baptist in 1957. She was in Navy for 17 years, and you could find her flying missions into Vietnam in 1968.

Shortly after leaving the Navy in 1974, she underwent a sex-change operation and became Joanna M. Clark. In 1976 she enlisted in the U. S. Army Reserves as sergeant first class and served for 22 months. She disclosed her medical history to local recruiters and her enlistment was voided by the Army. She sued the Army in 1978 alleging that her dismissal was a violation of her right to due process and equal protection. After a series of appeals, she was given credit for military time served and a honorable discharge.

In 1976 she helped to found the Gender Dysphoria Program of Orange County. From 1980-1983 she served as founding Chairperson of the American Civil Liberties Union's Transsexual Rights Committee, and she was responsible for the enactment of California's Transsexual birth certification legislation and the defeat of SB-2200, which would have prohibited MEDICAL funds from being used for sex reassignment surgery. In 1986 she took over the Janus Information's Facility's worldwide information/referral service for gender dysphorics and helping professionals.

In December of 1987, she co-founded the Sisters of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. At a candlelight service at St. Clemente's By-the-Sea Episcopal Church in San Clemente, California, Joanna Clark took the veil and vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; becoming Sister Mary Elizabeth. The Episcopalian Church never recognized her officially. However, this year on Easter Sunday the American Catholic Church ordained Sister Mary Elizabeth as the Reverend Mother.

The Sisters of St. Elizabeth of Hungary inherited a herd of Blank Angus cows from a charitable farmer in Stover, Missouri. Sister Mary Elizabeth was lucky enough to draw the straw and went of to herd the cows. I want each one of us now to place ourselves in a town of 1,014 people and you are out numbered by the cows. The telephone system used old-fashioned party lines~where up to five people shared one phone line. The nearest hospital was 40 miles away, and you could barely get TV signals from the national networks. Can you see yourself in that town? You live in that town and you are HIV-positive, and you wanted information. But if anybody in the town found out, you knew it was a quick way to get your farm burned to the ground.

Sister Mary Elizabeth met two people who were HIV-positive in that town and they were desperate for information. She realized that an electronic bulletin board could provide up-to-date HIV information and could do it privately. So in 1990 from the bathroom of her parents trailer in San Juan Capistrano she went on-line with AIDS Education General Information BBS, So began her vision of having a free access bulletin board with anonymous logon providing HIV information.

Sister Mary Elizabeth wanted to publicize, for free, the gossip, trends and breaking scientific discoveries from thousands of AIDS research institutions and community groups. This idea met with resistance from the AIDS establishments. For a year, the National Library of Medicine charged Sister Mary Elizabeth $18 an hour to search its AIDS drug database, a bill that quickly added up to hundreds of dollars. She posted this information and soon discovered that government agencies were tying up her lines, downloading information for free instead of paying the National Library of Medicine. So she fired off a letter to Vice President Al Gore saying: "This is ridiculous. I'm paying for this stuff, so they can get it for free.....The (National Library of Medicine Information's belongs to us anyway ~ it was purchased with our tax dollars ~ and is being sold back to us." Vice President Al Gore's office resolved the problem and she was granted a free "access code", and later free access was granted to the general public.

Today Sister Mary Elizabeth runs the worlds largest and most comprehensive interactive computer library on HIV and AIDS ~ AIDS Education Global Information System, or AEGIS. I want you to step into Sister Mary Elizabeth's parents home, where for years there has been no sofa in this San Juan Capistrano living room. It had to go to make way for the bank of computers, so that Sister Mary Elizabeth can do her chosen work among the afflicted, the curious, the dying. Updating the AEGIS website can take Sister Mary up to 18 hours a day as she researches articles and rewrites them into the language of the Internet. Can anyone in this room today say that they handle routinely 40 to 307 visitors an hour, many whom stay for hours to search the latest medical bulletins?

Let me relate to you what James Allan Maytum, who logs on daily from Valencia, Spain says. In 1992 he found out he was HIV-positive, and his drug therapy produced toxic reactions that nearly killed him in 1995. A new mix of drugs restored his health, but another toxic episode sent him scrambling to the computer, where he found AEGIS. Ten days later, he received a large package of information on drug therapies from Sister Mary Elizabeth that he brought to his doctor. The new drug combination worked. He says "What can I say, than I sort of feel that I owe my life to AEGIS and Sister Mary. She's truly God's messenger. She's achieved what really is the largest and best HIV-AIDS database in the world."

Sister Mary Elizabeth often says don't write about me ~ I'm not the story. My work is the story. Today we all know the story and work of Sister Mary Elizabeth. It is with pride, honor, and love, that as the Co-Chair of the Educational Resources Committee of The Los Angeles County Transgender Task Force I present this Outstanding Service Award to the Reverend Mother, Sister Mary Elizabeth.

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