Utah AIDS Foundation

Becky Moss has been at the forefront of the war against AIDS since the very beginning. A prominent lesbian activist since she began hosting KRCL's Concerning Gays and Lesbians in 1979, Becky had lost more than 50 friends to the disease by December 1985. She said on-air in 1987 that "this thing called AIDS is going to touch every single one of you, intimately, by the year 2000." Only a few years into the plague then, she didn't think it could get any more personal than it already had. "Here I'm telling people how intimately it can touch you, and I didn't know that my sister had already gone through sero-conversion," Becky says. "She became HIV+ in November 1985." Nearly ten years later, Becky lost her sister, Peggy Tingey, and Peggy's son Chance, to AIDS. "I cursed God," she says. "I cursed God. The male Christian God, the female God, I cursed them all I was so angry."

In 1982, Becky was one of the first people in the country to mention HIV on the radio. For more than 20 years she and her various co-hosts talked about AIDS and its effects on the entire community - straight or gay. Becky was adamant that this disease should not be called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) and that anyone, of any sexuality, could become infected. "In 1985, the newest publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves had come out and there was one short paragraph about AIDS and it said 'This is primarily a gay man's disease; women don't have to worry about it,'" she says. "I found exception with that at the time because I did think women had to worry about it. I didn't see how it could affect only one sex, and I knew it was touching us because I was grieving. We, as activists, were all grieving. When we found out as lesbians that our likelihood of acquiring HIV was very low, even then we didn't really believe it. We knew a lesbian couple where one of the women was a sex worker and they shared needles; they were both drug users. So, we were disagreeing with everybody saying we were the second safest population. Nuns being the safest, of course."

Becky was the oldest daughter in a family of six girls and one boy. Peggy, the middle child, possessed "a wit you couldn't believe," Becky laughs. "People who met her would just die; she was quick as could be. The woman never missed an opportunity. I loved when people would meet her because they'd have to run and tell me the stories. She would say the most evil things, but they were so funny. Our first stepmother . . . she'd call me up to say, 'I'm laughing at something nobody should be laughing at!' and Peggy had said it."

In the mid-80s Peggy met a man Becky didn't like. "I hated him immediately, on sight. I just was not polite. I even said to her, 'This son-of-a-bitch will give you AIDS.' He just struck me as someone who didn't tell the truth and I recognized the signs of intravenous drug use. I recognized the signs of somebody . . . who had sex with men for money."

Becky didn't tell Peggy specifically why she disliked this man. "I'd been seeing so much, I assumed to myself I was being mean to my sister and I was seeing that in everybody," she says. So at 23, Peggy moved to Chicago with her new boyfriend. When Peggy returned to Utah, she wasn't well. "She was really thin, and sickly-looking," Becky says. "My mother got her back on her feet."

In the late '80s, Peggy met "a really incredible guy" named Bill Tingey. They were married in 1989 and immediately found themselves pregnant. On March 7, 1990, Peggy gave birth to a little boy. The family was ecstatic. "This was the first boy in our family in 35 years," Becky says.

But the baby boy, named Chance, was not well. Just before giving birth, Peggy found out that the current girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend had just died of AIDS. He was HIV positive and was telling everyone that the girlfriend gave it to him, but Peggy suspected it was really the other way around. "She started to figure out he was lying," Becky says. Peggy thought she might be positive, too, but she hadn't been tested.

"Peggy has this little boy who's sick, and they're telling us back in 1989 and 1990 that children aren't born with AIDS, that maybe they're positive for the virus, but they don't have AIDS, that they're not sick with it, that it's not happening," Becky says. "And of course the only babies that they're really paying attention to at the time are in Africa and nobody's paying attention to the African mothers saying, 'My baby's sick.' People are biased and rude and if you're a person of color they don't listen to you. But Peggy was white and she's pushing the envelope. Her baby's really sick and we finally get the answer. My father calls me up at work, and he says, 'They know why the baby's sick, and Peggy's going to be sick, too, and I can't tell you any more.' And I said, 'Dad, it's AIDS, isn't it?' Every one of his children, her siblings, every one of us knew. We'd seen Peggy come back. We saw what she looked like three years before when she came back. We saw what it was. None of us are stupid."

Right after she was diagnosed, Peggy decided that she had to make sure it didn't happen to somebody else. For the next four and half years she and Chance became prominent advocates for AIDS education. "They became very vocal and visible," Becky says. "They ended up with their photographs on the billboards and buses with Barb Barnhardt and some of those wonderful guys. They all showed their faces. You know, now I don't see faces like I did then. They were part of the faces of AIDS campaign."

Throughout her illness, Peggy remained her light-hearted, funny self. "She could tell - and make up - dirty jokes you couldn't believe," Becky says. "One of the companies I worked for was among the first to get voicemail. Peggy thought voicemail was there purely for her entertainment. These poor guys I worked with were getting calls from these different 'sex companies,' and she'd do this off the top of her head."

As part of their AIDS education work, Peggy and Chance traveled the intermountain region speaking to media and school & community groups. "One of the places they loved to go was Richfield. Afterwards, they'd go to the Richfield K-mart and the police officers would hang out in front and open the door for Peggy and Chance," Becky laughs. "Chance grew up believing that everybody opened doors for him."

Even though it cut her life short, Peggy told Becky not to grieve because of AIDS. "She said it made her immortal," Becky says, in tears. "She told me that she was envious of my activism status, but because of AIDS she got to shine on her own. And she outshone me. She did more than I ever did, and she and Chance were more effective at it."

So effective, in fact, that even people too young to understand all that "AIDS" meant - kids Chance's age - responded to him and his mom intrinsically. "One of my foster kids, Tina, got a hold of me one day," Becky says. "She said, 'Listen, my little nephew, he saw your nephew on TV last night and he thinks that Chance is supposed to be his best friend; can he meet Chance?'"

Chance wasn't dangerous to other kids, of course, but Peggy and Becky were concerned that with all germs kids usually carry, they could be dangerous to Chance. But they decided to let the two four year-old boys meet. "We put the two of them together and Chance had his feeding tube in his nose," Becky says. "And Tina's nephew, first thing he says, 'Is that an owie?' and Chance says, 'No, that's not an owie.' And Chance showed some microscopic little cut on his finger - you know how little people are - and said, here, this is an owie, and the little boys took off, chatting like crazy. That little boy is 15 years old now and he still tells people that Chance was his best friend."

When Chance was born, Peggy, Bill, and their families where told that Chance wouldn't make it 4½ months. When he died on July 23, 1994, he was 4½ years old.  "Peggy refused medication after that," Becky says. "She felt that she'd killed her son. Peggy died of guilt. She let AIDS kill her." Nine months after Chance, Peggy Tingey died at the age of 35.

Peggy's husband Bill is not HIV positive. Becky says he will not marry again, nor will he have children again. "He's this gorgeous, fantastic young man, a father you couldn't believe, and he can't allow himself to love like that again," Becky says, tears in her eyes. "I lost my little sister and her son. Bill lost a wife and child. My father had to watch his grandchild and his daughter die. My whole family had to watch this. We told Peggy we'd never forget her and we wouldn't let anybody else forget her."

After more than 20 years fighting a virus that continues to devastate, Becky Moss has had to take a break. She says, "In 2001, I stopped doing the radio show, stopped doing some other things at the Center. I couldn't do it anymore; it all caught up with me. I grieve now."

Despite the pain, Becky agreed to be interviewed for the Utah AIDS Foundation's 20th year because she thought there was something in Peggy and Chance's story that could help other people. Becky says, crying now, "I still remember how we believed that we were going to close down the doors of the Foundation one day. That we were going to have this huge celebration and the disease was going to be over. And I think I stopped believing. I think that's why I stopped doing everything, because I stopped believing, and I have to turn it over to people who still believe because I can't believe anymore. I'm worn out. Let the people with energy . . . I've had too much. I'm so scarred by my history with HIV. Early mornings I drive to work, and I remember. I can't forget any of them. In the last few years I dream a lot about them, and they're all alive. Every one of them."