Spotlight Conversation: OG badass feminist activist Virg Parks (Part 1 of 2)

As Texas goes deeper red, and abortion remains the hot-button issue of American electoral politics, Parks is rediscovering the activist fire that sparked in ACT UP and keeps her going.

Dec 12, 2022

Virg Parks, standing tall for abortion rights and reproductive freedome in Texas. Photo: Virg Parks personal archive.

On a late Wednesday call last week, I caught up with my friend and activist pal, Virg Parks. I was in Medellin, weirdly jet-lagged despite being in the same time zone as New York, and she was collapsing back into her new home in a new big city that shall not be named, located outside of her home state, Texas, but close enough to it that she can be useful. Virg—short for Virginia-- is, and has been, a longtime HIV and reproductive health activist. That includes fighting for safe and legal abortion, a right which that outlawed in Texas, following the reversal of Roe V. Wade by a Supreme Court ruling on June 24, 2022.

Overnight, Virg found herself a potential outlaw if she continued doing the work that remains her passion – one of them, anyway. Instead, she hopped across the state line, and is freshly engaged in cutting-edge work, legally delivering abortion pills and reproductive care to women there and from Texas and other states who have newly criminalized abortion. At the time I interviewed, they were still figuring it out, Virg says of her new job and the team that’s assembled to respond to the political moment. We’re putting the wheels on the bus as we drive it…there is a huge demand to be met.

Virg found her first political home in ACT UP. Photo: Virg Parks personal archive.

I can’t recall exactly when I met Virg, but it was in ACT UP, and it could have been in New York, which she visited in the 90s, or in Berlin, where we both ended up at the International AIDS Conference in 1992, or in San Francisco, where I’d gone for an earlier global HIV conference. We were both out lesbians as well as treatment activists then. She was West Coast; I was East Coast. Born in Houston, she speaks with a light Southern drawl, slipping easily back into her hey y’all hellos like I can, having grown up in northern Florida. Over the years, I’d see her name on documents and minutes related to ACT UP Golden Gate actions and materials. She was smart, outspoken, and cocks her head when she listens. That’s something I noticed about her right away: she’s thoughtful, she thinks strategically, she asks good questions. And she isn’t afraid of calling out bullshit. I’m not afraid of pissing people off, she admits. I’m just gonna say what needs to be said.

Last year, when Covid was still smacking our collective butts (which it still is, but we’ve adjusted), Virg came to visit me in New Orleans, and I got to know her a little bit better. She was already thinking then about where she might move, given the shifting red tide in Texas. She’s my age, and single, and has had her share of great and crappy experiences in activist groups and nonprofit jobs over the years. She loved her job at the time, working as a social worker in a Houston abortion clinic, but felt the noose tightening.

Texas GOP Governor Gregg Abbott, only a year older than we are, has proven himself to be a true MAGA-stripe pol, pushing to roll back LGBTQ and women’s rights and those of immigrants. His basic platform has been a GOP staple: guns, the unborn, and immigration. Texas already had the strictest abortion laws in the country before the SCOTUS decision. Abbot is determined to remove rape as an abortion exception. He also backs a Texas law that allows private citizens to sue those who help someone get an abortion. Among his newer cretin bonafides, Abbott joined Florida’s DeSantis in busing newly arrived migrants to Washington, D.C.)

Texas also has its share of progressives, and Austin and Houston have a lot of them. In 2021, Beto O’Rourke was still raising Democratic hopes that he could oust Abbott, and Virg was invested in building up the state’s electoral blue stripe. In her spare time, she volunteered to help get out the vote for progressives and stayed in Houston long enough to work the November election polls. In a further setback, Abbott was re-elected this November, winning 54.8% of votes compared to O’Rourke’s 43.8%, a victory for anti-abortion forces.

The urgent question she was mulling when she visited was whether she could stay in Texas if Roe v. Wade was overturned, and if so, how? If not, what were alternatives? Would she have to leave home again? How could she keep help her beleaguered communities – the women, the queers, the unhoused, the undocumented? Everything was getting more and more intense, she says of the months that preceded the fall of Roe. And then everything sort of exploded. Just overnight.

I wanted to know then what’s kept Virg going, and what was working – or not – now, some 30 years after she found her political home in ACT UP, first in Austin, then in San Francisco. How had a self-declared shy, studious girl from Houston become a balls-out, fun-loving, brave lesbian activist who’s found her mission joining and building up front-line activist groups from scratch again and again? How does she still find joy and stay calm amid the escalating threats and violence directed against feminist groups and providers offering legal abortion services and activists engaged in clinic defense?

For me, it’s not just a paycheck, she explains. I’ve worked in nonprofits almost my whole life; it’s the cause. More than once, a friend has asked her if it’s all worth it – the challenges, the low pay, the anti-choice threats – about her Houston job. I’m a tired, old, burnt-out AIDS activist. I got to show up and help people empower themselves and talk about sex all day long. It doesn’t get better than that. No amount of money would be better than that.

The Klan marches in Harris County, Texas. From 1882-1945, over 600 lynchings were documented in Texas by the NAACP and the Houston Chronicle. They are included in an archive at The Lynching Project of Sam Houston State University. Photo: Houston Chronicle.

My dad reminded me I was conceived in the Rio Grande valley, Virg tells me, sliding into the story of her childhood. She’s a natural storyteller, and a fast talker, happy to veer off into asides of fun, the details that make the story. I was the reason they moved to Houston. She has two siblings, a brother and a sister; until recently, she lived with her brother in their childhood Houston home, remodeled after her mother passed away. I’m the spoiled rotten brat of my whole generation, she adds, not even joking, meaning she was the center of her family’s attention.

For her, family means a larger brood, and one reason she returned to Houston years back was to reconnect with them. We’re sort of European mutts, she jokes, having done an Ancestry.com DNA test. We’ve got some Germans, French, Welsh… a tiny bit of West Africa. And, she adds, laughing, South. South meaning Texas, meaning the heavy drawl she had as a child and learned to lose as an adult. She likes many aspects of the South – the warmth, the roots in Black culture, the focus on community. She also grew to hate the racism of the south, and is an active anti-racist, bringing her awareness of whiteness and privilege and racial inequity to the causes she champions.

Her father was a machinist; her mother a homemaker, and later, she worked as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant run by a Chinese neighbor who was a talented chef. Young Virg was quiet, bookish and loved school. When I ask about the values she may have picked up in the home, she says both her parents contributed to that. Her father was very involved in his union and local politics and her mother joined him for actions. My first lesson in solidarity and domestic economics was when his shop went on strike, she recalls. My brother would have been 16, so I was 10 or 11. He sat us down and explained how it was going to be kind of lean Christmas and why. I remember it being a very adult conversation. In fact, that Christmas was joyful; young Virg got crayons and coloring books she loved. Plus, it was exciting to go to the strike. We would drive down at night and take sandwiches and coffee to the guys who were picketing. I felt as if I was doing my part. I grew up knowing that there are some principles and ideals worth making a personal sacrifice for.

From her mother, the greatest early lesson was empathy. Virg explains that she taught her to befriend and show kindness to other children, whether it be the neighbor boy that might break her new crayons, or the Black kids that she encountered through her parents’ union and civil rights activism, some living in low-income or public housing. One of my earliest memories was when Mom and Dad took us to rallies and marches and stuff. I thought we just went to parades and picnics with Black people… they all seemed to really like me…. Once the KKK started showing up, that was when they stopped taking us.

When I asked her about the spoiled rotten brat part of her bio, she laughs. Where should I start? She shares an early anecdote, from when she was two, and still not walking, because her older siblings carried her everywhere. Her parents took her to an orthopedist, worried something was seriously wrong. Nope, she laughs. He told them to put me down and let me scream. I went straight into running. The other big memory that stands out is reading – or rather, being read to, by her older brother. I was smart…‘too smart for your own good,’ she adds. She landed in kindergarten, a keen reader.

She was a straight A student — and a bit of a smarty-pants troublemaker. The refrain was, will you please behave? She tried, but.… She spent a lot of school time in a corner, which was fine, she says, if the teacher also gave her a book.

A bookish Virg in high school, pre-ACT UP T’s and a leather jacket. Photo: Virg Parks personal archive.

Two things marked turning points in her teen years and early 20s. One was the school debate team; the other was drugs -- first marijuana, later speed and coke. My friend wanted to join the debate club…you take a position, you research it, you present evidence – and explain to the other side why they are totally wrong. It was the right place for her smarts to shine, and, I point out to her, excellent training for an activist. The debate club brought her out a bit; she began to lose her social shyness. Pot also helped. She discovered it in her senior year, and then I became a really cool nerd, hanging out with the cool kids, sneaking out to get high in English class and acting out.

Her debate coach also helped her overcome her Texas accent, which, she was told, would make others ignorantly think she was less smart than she was. They worked on her diction and how to use her voice. That training has served her as an activist and community organizer.

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College was a bit bumpy. Virg felt directionless, interested in various things, passionate about none. Her teachers and friends thought she should be a lawyer; everyone had an opinion but her. She did have some political awareness and liked the League of Women Voters. She was also figuring out her sexuality. I would be attracted to some boys, but definitely attracted to girls…girls in school, but also, she ticks off a few names of celebs, Jodie Foster…Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall…I had big crushes on them. I gave guys a fair chance and they all sucked -- not in a good way, she adds, joking. My friends would talk about how much they enjoyed sex, and I wasn’t that into it. The last guy I had sex with?…. I think he was gay, too and also didn’t know it….

The clues were all there that I was a lesbian, she adds. I was totally a baby dyke in high school. I graduated high school in ‘76. But the only examples I had (of gay people) were the kids who got beat up every day. And I had friends I suspected were gay. One day, those friends showed up at her house when she was already in PJs and dragged her out to her first gay bar. Looking further back, she remembers sleeping naked with a close girlfriend ‘cuz, uh, it was warmer? she says by way of an explanation, as in, yeah, right? I look back and think, ‘God, we were dense.’

In her mid-20s, she was also sexually assaulted by a man with a butcher knife. Four of her best friends witnessed the assault, but she says, they were afraid to do anything. The 1985 assault traumatized her and has left its scars. She did years of therapy, and says she’s healed over time, but to this day I will typically walk in (to an apartment) and lock the door. I have that kind of phobia.

After the assault, Virg moved to Austin and her personal and work life began taking more shape. She got a job in the ad department of the local weekly Austin Chronicle and was smitten by the art director who became her first girlfriend. She became friends with the paper’s music reporter and tagged along to clubs as her plus-one. Amused, she recalls how a coworker warned her against spending time with lesbians; Virg assured her she was aware. No one thought to warn her about her new girlfriend’s speed addiction, she notes wryly.

They were together for five tumultuous years. We partied a lot, Virg says, describing the role drugs played in their relationship. It got to the point where Virg had to help her girlfriend get off speed. Then it was one trauma after another because she became addicted to pain meds. After too many cycles of dyke+drugs drama, she says emphatically, I was done.

Virg, Beto, and younger Texan feminist activists supporting Lina Hidalgo, the first Latina and first woman elected as county judge of Harris County, the county that includes Houston, in 2018. Photo: Virg Parks personal archive.

— END OF PART ONE.

For PART TWO, go to main page of Tell Me Everything.

All earlier weekly Spotlight Conversations can be found on the main page.

Tell Me Everything

Spotlight Conversation: OG badass feminist activist Virg Parks (Part 1 of 2)

As Texas goes deeper red, and abortion remains the hot-button issue of American electoral politics, Parks is rediscovering the activist fire that sparked in ACT UP and keeps her going.

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