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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