Susan Cowell, AIDS Rochester founder and LGBTQ community pioneer, dies at 71
Susan Cowell, LGBTQ organizer and anti-AIDS activist, dies at 71 Democrat & Chronicle
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Susan Cowell: Leader in the Rochester LGBTQ community
- Cowell ran political campaigns for Tim Mains, Susan Johns and Louise Slaughter.
- Funeral plans have not been announced.
- Cowell served as president of the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley, among other leadership positions.
Susan Cowell, a politically savvy leader in the Rochester LGBTQ community who spearheaded the early local response to AIDS in the 1980s, died Saturday at age 71 after a long period of illness.
Cowell was a nurse, a political advisor, and a small business owner. But the advocacy work for which she is best remembered got its start on the front porch of her Harper Street home in 1983.
HIV and AIDS had surfaced in the gay community a few years before that and already represented a public health concern in Rochester, but stigma around homosexuality had prevented a full response.
Cowell, then a nurse at the University of Rochester, gathered some fellow gay and lesbian leaders at her house to discuss what should be done.
Their concern was not only medical but also social and political: How could they best organize and provide resources and support to those who needed them?
“We had the vision that this was just the beginning,” she said in a 2012 oral history. “It’s not like this is going to get better overnight. So you kind of had to realize that the sooner you can start building this network, the more prepared you’re going to be.”
The organization that emerged from those front porch sessions was AIDS Rochester, which later merged into what is now Trillium Health. Cowell was a crucial leader and asset for the organization, both in her role with UR and later as Monroe County’s AIDS coordinator.
“Somebody needed to do it,” she said. “And I happened to be in a perfect position.”
Susan Cowell: Leader in the Rochester LGBTQ community
Cowell was born in Jamaica, New York, in 1952 and grew up on Long Island, where she earned a degree in psychology from SUNY New Paltz.
Already as a college student she suspected she was a lesbian, but her friends assured her it couldn’t be true: after all, she had hair like Joni Mitchell.
Her true coming out did not happen until the summer after graduation when she was working as a waitress at an all-night diner.
“I was doing the night shift at the diner and this group of women came in,” she said in 2012. “And it’s like: ‘There there actually be could be others like me around here.’ …
“And so I just somehow hooked up with one of them. And then it was obvious to me that that’s what was missing.”
Video Interview, Sue Cowell, April 11, 2012
Cowell went on to get a degree in nursing from Pace University and came to Rochester along with her partner in 1977.
At first she was dismayed to have arrived in what she considered the middle of nowhere. While in town for an interview, though, she turned on the television and saw members of the Gay Alliance protesting over exclusion from funding. Immediately she got involved and within two years had been elected president.
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