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Aging: For Albert Cunningham, The Glass Is Half Full

Jason A. Michael

Aging Series

Albert Cunningham III lived a comfortable life growing up.
"I was born in Chicago in 1952 to schoolteacher parents and grew up in the cookie cutter '50s," he recalled. "I was very fortunate that I came from a family that was very upwardly mobile. So I enjoyed a relatively idyllic childhood."
Cunningham was barely a teenager when he got his first writing gig. He wrote an advice column for young people for The Bulletin, his local paper on the south side of Chicago.
"My family said to me, 'You'll never make any money as a writer so if you want to become a writer, you need to be a lawyer,'" said Cunningham. "So for a long time that was my thought that I would. But then I decided I didn't want to be a lawyer."
Cunningham started his college career in Atlanta, at what was then known as Clark College.
"That was the year of the Kent State and Jackson State killings and I was in Atlanta and Lester Maddox was the governor of Georgia," Cunningham said. "He threatened to send the Georgia National Guard through the Atlanta university complex if there was any suggestion there was going to be any disturbance on those campuses. It was a very intense time for a while."
After a year, Cunningham switched to Talladega College, his mother's alma mater, in Alabama.
"I wrote for the Anniston Star newspaper, which is a pretty amazing thing when you consider the history of Anniston and all the racially motivated things that went on there only a few years before I got there," said Cunningham. "But that was my first real kind of cub reporter experience."
Soon enough, Cunningham moved on to a third college, the University of Illinois at Springfield, where after testing out of undergrad he went on to his get his master's degree.
His master's was in Communication in a Technological Society, "Which is really ironic since it was 1974 and state of the art was the IBM Selectric typewriter," Cunningham said. "Coming out of that master's program is when I kind of accepted OK, I'm gay. The year that I turned 21, 1973, was also the year that homosexuality came out of the (American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). So it all began to come together for me. But it wasn't until I moved back to Chicago and took a job with the city that I kind of came out. By then I was 24. I got very involved locally at that point in dealing with discrimination in the gay bars against black people and having to show all kinds of ID … just the kind of racism that was in Chicago."
For the city of Chicago, Cunningham found himself writing speeches and other work. But soon he felt a calling to work in entertainment and headed for California.
"I moved to L.A. in 1979 to become a part of the entertainment industry as a writer," said Cunningham. "That was certainly just at the cusp of everything – disco, Donna Summer. So it was quite an amazing time to be in L.A.
"I was very fortunate to get a chance to work in nationally syndicated radio, writing and producing for Anheuser-Busch," Cunningham continued. "Then I was even more fortunate to get the opportunity to principally write and produce a 24-hour radio special called the 'Music of Black America,' which was also sponsored by Anheuser-Busch and hosted by Lou Rawls and a very popular DJ from L.A. named J.J. Johnson. That was in 1982, and I left L.A. after that satisfied that I had done what I had come to do. I had never enjoyed living there."
Next it was onto New Orleans.
"I sort of got out of entertainment per se, although I eventually became the entertainment editor for the Louisiana Weekly newspaper," Cunningham said.
He spent four years in New Orleans before love led him to Washington, D.C.
"That's where I got involved in HIV related work," said Cunningham. "I was the first communication director for the National Minority AIDS Council. I had been the minority affairs writer for the National AIDS Network. I became the media coordinator for the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention then the media coordinator for the San Francisco Black Coalition on AIDS. And, ultimately, (I became) a consultant like everybody else who ends up without a job in that kind of work does."
Cunningham was passionate about his work in HIV, but soon opportunities dried up for him in Washington and he made another move.
"I moved to Newark, New Jersey, in 2002," he said. "I went to work first for Planned Parenthood and then as a manager of the Newark Technical Assistance Project, which provided information and assistance to organizations starting HIV programs. Then I became the manager of a homeless drop-in center – HIV related program. And in 2012 Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, defunded this program and a bunch of others and we transformed that program into the Newark LGBTQ Center, which is what we had wanted it to be anyway. But in the meantime, I didn't find any more work and in December 2013 Congress defunded extended unemployment benefits."
Cunningham found himself financially strapped and at a personal crossroads. He turned 62 in February of 2014 and, unable to find full time employment, elected to start receiving social security. But the cost of living in New Jersey was high.
"A cousin of mine suggested that Detroit would be a less expensive and decent place to live," said Cunningham. "So I moved here in May. Within a week, after having been on a waiting list for years in Newark, I found this apartment building."
It's a senior citizen's apartment building and perhaps not the hippest place for a gay man who looks much younger than his 63 years to live. But it affords him a lovely view of downtown Detroit and Windsor and he's happy to now be living in the Motor City.
"I'm thrilled with my living surroundings and I found a part-time job at Whole Foods in Midtown, which is not a bad place to work and gives me a little additional income to do things I like to do."
But Whole Foods is only a part-time job.
"I have a job at Whole Foods but my work is as a writer and multimedia producer and so I spend the most productive part of my time working on my various creative projects," Cunningham explained. "Most recently that has included making some strides on my story of my HIV involvement from the late '80s on and also my personal and professional career as a journalist."
Cunningham said he feels he owes something to today's LGBT youth.
"I think older people have an important responsibility to younger people to provide them with whatever informational and narrative history that will help them navigate the world that they are being left," he said. "I think it's important for older people to definitely reflect for the benefit for the younger people. At the same time I'm very much aware that my generation has been betrayed by the government, by the people who are supposed to be representing us, in terms of the economy and employment. I'm someone who was making upwards of $25 an hour and I'm happy to be making $10 an hour and that, I think, is not an isolated story. The greed factor in America is out of control.
"It's also important to agitate and protest and do what we can to change things," Cunningham continued. "The violence in America, the refusal to deal with issues around guns and so forth, makes me — as an older person — realize that it's really important for me to let younger people know … we're looking to them to be the future and my experience of a lot of them is that they're very fatalistic. They're almost suicidal, some of them, and that disturbs me greatly. I think we have to do whatever we can to help them feel a sense of if not optimism, at least a desire to survive."
As he gets older, Cunningham admits that there are challenges, such as dating.
"I feel that there's a challenge in meeting other people socially in my general age range," he said. "But I think the challenges, to be quite honest, are far outweighed by the benefits of having survived and if nothing else just appreciating what it means to have survived when so many people around you have fallen.
"That's the other thing that I really want to share with people," Cunningham continued. "Ultimately we're all going out of here the same way. But I think it's much more about how you can live in the meantime in spite of unfathomable grief over so many people whose lives touched mine and then just disappeared before my eyes. I've found a great deal of joy and that's something that I am also determined that no one can take from me, and I want to share that with other people, too."
So for Cunningham, the struggles of growing older are outweighed by the blessing of having survived.
"There are certainly physical and other kinds of issues that one becomes aware of," he said. "But I'm glad that I had my fun while I was young and spent money and did things that weren't considered prudent. Because, at this point, I have a lot of memories that make it much easier for me to live on much less and I think that's not a bad thing either."
Cunningham chooses to see the glass as half full.
"Given the way that I grew up and my expectations of life, I would have thought that I would have been much more financially successful at this point, and yet that's not the way that it has worked out," he said. "I could sit around and wring my hands or whatever and pretend that I'm still able to be a conspicuous consumer or something of that sort. But that's not what I choose. Instead I choose to spend my resources on living as healthily and as intelligently and consciously in this globally challenged ecological world that we're in and trying to model for other people what it means to not be so materialistically oriented."

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