Long after AIDS crisis peak, LGBTQ+ health care still limited in Everett

EVERETT — Every Monday morning, someone read aloud a list of names. Staff then moved blooming plants into the atrium, one for each person who had died of AIDS the previous week.

It was the 1990s, and then-29-year-old Dennis Worsham was new to the Snohomish Health District. He’d come out as gay in college and joined the public health sector to fight the disease killing gay men at a terrifying rate. At that time, gay and bisexual men made up about three-fourths of AIDS cases in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Patients often lived no more than two years after diagnosis.

Worsham, tasked with managing sexually transmitted diseases in Snohomish County, watched flowers fill the atrium in the Rucker Avenue building. He wondered if that was his destiny, too.

“You’re coming out as a gay man, and you see all these other men dying around you,” Worsham said. “It was a community that was very scared.”

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