‘Juniper House’ that once provided end-of-life care for AIDS patients in Portland is now on National Register of Historic Places

An unassuming house in Southeast Portland’s Buckman neighborhood was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. Once known as “Juniper House,” the building served as one of the first end-of-life care homes for AIDS patients in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s. An OPB documentary at the time explored the lives of some of the patients in Juniper House and the neighboring Assisi House, which provided a range of care for patients with HIV/AIDS.

Jan Weyeneth is one of the co-founders of Juniper House. Cayla McGrail is a former associate project manager for Portland’s LGBTQ+ Historic Sites Project, which sponsored the house’s listing. They both join us to share more about Juniper House and the importance of documenting queer history in Portland.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. An unassuming house in Southeast Portland’s Buckman neighborhood was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. It was once known as “Juniper House.” In the late 1980s, it became the first end-of-life home for people dying of AIDS in the Pacific Northwest.

Jan Weyeneth was one of the co-founders of Juniper House. Cayla McGrail was the associate project manager for Portland’s LGBTQ+ Historic Sites Project, which got this house on the National Register. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Cayla McGrail: Thank you.

Miller: Jan, I’m wondering if you can first take us a little bit back in time and give us a sense for the level of fear, the level of stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS at this time. The house opened in 1987. This was some number of years before the HIV drug cocktail, the regimen that really changed everything, that started to effectively manage the virus … that was still years away. What was the societal feeling about HIV and AIDS like in the mid to late 1980s?

Jan Weyeneth: Well, there’s always been a stigma around gay folks. I can look at it from a nursing perspective cause that’s where I decided to work exclusively with AIDS patients. In the hospital, we hadn’t really had any patients with AIDS, and then all of a sudden we started getting some. And I was very, very upset with my fellow nurses. They would not want to care for that person. They would whisper “oh, he has AIDS,” stupid things like that which really annoyed me, because people are people.

People were alone, people who had been diagnosed with AIDS, they lost friends, of course they probably have been estranged from family. But being alone, being treated as lepers, nobody wanted to talk with them, fear of getting it just being proximity. It was really bad. It was really bad.

Miller: What kinds of gaps in care did you see?

Weyeneth: No care. People would come in with a condition, they couldn’t breathe, their lungs were affected with Kaposi sarcoma. The thing with AIDS is you got secondary illnesses, and those are what needed to be treated along with the AIDS itself.

Miller: All of these conditions that a healthy immune system would fight off and would mean nothing, they could be devastating and deadly, a whole variety of them?

Weyeneth: Oh yeah. Plus the fact that the age range of people that we were dealing with were young people, not retired. There were people of substance, and they couldn’t work anymore, so they lost insurance and they couldn’t get medication, died waiting for medication. They would go ahead and try to get on Social Security so they could get something. But I would say at least 75% of people could not get medication.

Miller: How did Juniper House get started?

Weyeneth: Well, Doug read an article in the Willamette Week about AIDS ...

Miller: This is the co-founder along with you.

Weyeneth: Yes, sorry. He read an article in the Willamette Week that said living with AIDS is worse than dying with AIDS, because there was nowhere to go. People were becoming homeless. There were the city motels downtown where they would try to stay, but horrible conditions, horrible conditions. And because of that, he decided, along with his friend John and then me, that we should start this house. And that’s basically just conversations and that’s how it started.

Miller: What types of services did you provide? What do you see now as the heart of what Juniper House was?

Weyeneth: Love and compassion. No barriers.

Miller: Love and compassion – that’s the first thing you mentioned, as opposed to medical care. That’s what you led with.

Weyeneth: That’s right, that’s right. Because once you give people hope, their whole lives can change. We had a patient come up from the San Francisco area. His sister was a nurse and she found out he was really, really sick – and he was. She found a doctor who would take over his care and she had them shipped up to us at Juniper House. And just with that family support and love, and of course medication, he lived for years. He may still be living, I don’t know.

Hope and that kind of compassion can really change lives. And that’s what we really tried to lead with. We did also do medical care, of course. But that was the main thing, giving people a place to be, love, hope, no stigma. We really tried to cut down barriers. That kind of thing.

Miller: Is it fair to say though that because of the state of medical care and medicine for people with HIV or full blown AIDS at that time, that that young man you mentioned was the exception? That most of the people who came to Juniper House died there?

Weyeneth: Yes, that is true. Most of the people would come in and they would be really, really sick because they had no care and were not getting adequate food, things like that. So they did actually live longer than they thought they might or their doctors thought they might. And then when they did actually begin to turn the corner toward end of life, that went fairly quickly. So they did have a pretty good quality of life after they moved into the house, so to speak.

Miller: Cayla, how did you first learn or hear about Juniper House?

McGrail: I was doing research for my graduate degree in historic preservation and just came across a news article in the LGBTQ+ newspaper of the time, Just Out. One article was about a film festival that was raising funds for Juniper House and another blurb said that Juniper House needed volunteers. That led to this kind of multi-year investigation of what was Juniper House, and was able to find snippets here and there of this being the first HIV/AIDS end-of-life care facility in Oregon.

Miller: What made you say this needs to be on the National Register?

McGrail: A lot of things. That it was the first in Oregon to provide compassionate care, like Jan was saying. That it was featured in documentaries in the ’80s shortly after it opened.

Miller: Including one on OPB, there’s a link to it, it’s quite moving. From the historical perspective, that kind of thing helps your case?

McGrail: Yes, in the National Register, you have to make an argument of why it is significant, especially a resource so recent as Juniper House. And for me, a lot of this was, as Jan said, fighting a stigma. HIV and AIDS, often those narratives focus on the tragedy. But Juniper House is a moment to see this compassion, love, joy and community that Jan, Doug and the late co-founder John Trevitts was able to make, that continues to challenge the stigma. And I really wanted to have that on the National Register.

Miller: What does it actually take to make that happen?

McGrail: Yeah, that’s such a good question. A lot of research, going into the archives – Oregon Historical Society has the Cascade AIDS Project – materials, talking to community members, doing oral histories, because a lot of this history of queer history and underrepresented and historically excluded histories are not always in the archives. The consultants on the project did research into the permits to understand how Juniper House has changed. You write an architectural description, you do your research and the National Register has a set of criteria. So you have to meet these different arguments.

Miller: What went through your mind when you heard that indeed it had been accepted?

McGrail: Very amazing, that at a time when LGBTQ+ history is being targeted, and other historically and currently excluded histories and communities are being excluded, that this was elevated and accepted because it met criteria. It’s just an amazing, exceptional, significant property in Portland to tell more of Portland’s story. It’s really amazing to see it come full circle to find it in a newspaper and say this needs to be on the National Register – and now it is.

Miller: I do want to hear more about how you think about the current political moment in the context of this. But Jan, to go back a little bit to those years, 1987, 1988, 1989, was it almost exclusively or mainly men who were staying there at the time?

Weyeneth: Yeah, it was all men.

Miller: How many of them did have friends or family who came to visit after they came to live there?

Weyeneth: I would say most of them had at least a couple of people that were friends. Very, very few family members, if any. Probably 10 people, it was pretty minimal. But yeah, friends from the community.

We had one person who was in the arts and before he came to us he had been working on a musical play, “Billy Elliot.” And he actually performed in that. I didn’t know how he found the energy to do that because he was really ill.

Miller: Singing and dancing in a performance, and then he’d go back to what was essentially a hospice house where he was dying?

Weyeneth: Yes. But it was his love. He was one person who had his mom, and then a lot of cast members and friends in the community of course. And then there were some who just had a couple of friends and no family. So it varied.

Miller: What kind of community developed among the men who lived there?

Weyeneth: A lot of good. I actually would bring my kids with me – they were pretty young at the time – from time to time, not all the time. My mom came with me and she enjoyed [it]. They would play cards and games, and visit. They would watch movies, which they didn’t want me around for. [Laughter] But it became a very good community. People just really enjoyed being with other people they didn’t have to explain anything to. It was very comfortable like that.

Miller: You were a nurse, so I imagine that you were used to dying and to death, to being around that. That’s a part of many medical professions.

Weyeneth: That had been my focus the prior years to doing this. I worked pretty much all oncology and that was a lot of death.

Miller: I’m wondering how in this home you all dealt with death communally?

Weyeneth: When somebody died?

Miller: Yeah.

Weyeneth: It was sad. We would talk, we would have a little service. Not religious, but just coming together and remembering that person. We would not ignore it. It’s a fact of what happens. And some people felt worse than others because they’d been closer to that person than others. But we tried to address it as a community, just us, remembering that person and what they meant to us.

Miller: Cayla, I’m curious about the generational piece here. I asked you before we went live how old you were. You said you’re 27, meaning that you came of age, became sort of conscious of the world at a time when HIV and AIDS were very different than they were in the mid-’80s, when I was a teenager, and very different than Jan, who was working at that time, had already had her professional life going as a nurse. I’m curious how you think about the changes in what AIDS and HIV have meant over the years and what you’ve learned in doing this?

McGrail: I try not to get emotional because it’s truly … I have so many community members that lived through this and I feel really proud to be a steward of this history. I look back to this time because it’s such an amazing moment of activism and community, and changing and being organized. There are a lot of threads of that happening today. As you mentioned, I didn’t live through this. But knowing that I can elevate these stories of the people who aren’t here, who are here, who have shaped Portland for the better, like Jan, Doug and John, and Cascade AIDS Project, and all these amazing political and community organizations. That’s one of my greatest joys.

Jan was saying the stigma, and certainly there still is stigma around HIV and AIDS, but to use preservation to combat that and say that these histories are important and these stories are significant, and we will continue to document those.

Miller: Jan, you said something earlier that I wanted to come back to because I hadn’t realized this – you said that you would take your kids there sometimes. Why? What would you do with your kids there?

Weyeneth: I would go there needing to do something there or just to visit with the guys, and bring my kids with me. I would bring them when I didn’t have a lot of things to do, so I could keep an eye on them, because they were young and running around.

But I gotta say, all the guys were very aware, of course, how AIDS was contracted. And they were all very, very watchful; to my kids, to volunteers, to family members, whoever came through the doors, they were very careful, very watchful to make sure nobody would be exposed. They wouldn’t be anyway, but if my kids are crawling up on somebody’s bed and getting rambunctious, they would let me know and I would let my kids know “you can’t be doing that.” It was not a scary place at all. It was a comfortable place and my kids enjoyed it.

Miller: What do you see as the legacy of Juniper House?

Weyeneth: I am so grateful to Cayla – now I’m gonna cry – that she and her coworkers have come up with this historical register. I am thrilled. That alone is a legacy. And I think the only thing we can say is what we try to do, to educate the public, show no barriers. You can only show and be who you are, and by that way you can, hopefully, induce change. And whether that happens or not, I think one by one, if you can make one person a little bit less homophobic, a little bit more caring and aware … a lot of people are only homophobic or pushed away by somebody with HIV because somebody said something in a conversation. They don’t really have an opinion, they just go along with what somebody else said. Education helps with that and people do change their minds. And that, to me, this whole thing is what I hope for as time goes on.

Miller: Cayla, I did want to return back to the present moment. We’re talking at a time when, under the new administration, there are very clear efforts at the federal level to either cover over or to erase aspects of this history, [and] separately, but arguably relatedly, efforts to pull money back from HIV and AIDS protections globally and in this country as well. How do you think about this work given the federal picture?

McGrail: That’s such a great question. I think it really shows that this work will not stop, that there continues to be community and city of Portland-led efforts to continue documenting this. Juniper House is part of a larger project on LGBTQ+ historic preservation in Portland. I just keep coming back to that. They can try and erase us, stop us and cut funding. But as HIV and AIDS history shows and Juniper House shows, there are always going to be grassroots community efforts to continue important work, build community and organize to make change.

Miller: Cayla and Jan, thanks very much.

McGrail / Weyeneth: Thank you.

Miller: Cayla McGrail now works in the equity and engagement team for Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. They were instrumental in getting Juniper House onto the National Register of Historic Places. Juniper House, in the late 1980s, was the first end-of-life home for people dying of AIDS in the Pacific Northwest. Jan Weyeneth was one of its co-founders.

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