Johnny Fambro, longtime advocate for gays and homeless, dead at 63
If nothing else, Johnny Fambro had a heart.
The Macon man, who fought for gay rights as far back as the late 1970s and was among the first to sound a call to action when the AIDS epidemic hit in the early 1980s, died Friday night. He was 63.
“He was not scared to speak up or to fight for people with HIV and AIDS,” said Beverly Jones, the president of Sisterhood, a nonprofit in Macon geared toward helping black women with AIDS. “He said that people living with this disease needed to be treated with dignity.”
Fambro died about 8 p.m. Friday at Medical Center, Navicent Health, after being admitted to the emergency room, said Bibb County Coroner Leon Jones. Fambro, who suffered from heart and lung problems, died of natural causes.
Jones said Fambro’s death touched him personally. A few years ago a Macon woman called the coroner about 3 a.m. and said her daughter, who had AIDS, had been kicked out of her home in Atlanta.
“I called Johnny, and he said ‘Bring her to me,’” Jones recalled. Jones drove to Atlanta, picked up the young woman and took her to Fambro, who gave her housing and helped her get back on her feet.
“I will never forget that,” Jones said.
Fambro, a former nightclub DJ, was heavily involved in the mid-1980s with Middle Georgia People Living With AIDS, which merged with the Central City AIDS Network in the early 1990s. At the merger, Fambro became its executive director, said Michael Leon, who took the AIDS Network helm in 2010 when Fambro retired.
“Johnny has been a fixture in this community,” Leon said. “He started out helping people out of the trunk of his car. ... People would donate clothes, food and furniture, and he would go to the bars on Friday or Saturday night and give the items out to people.”
Leon said Fambro would not turn anyone away.
“His favorite saying was, ‘By the time they come knocking on our door, they’ve been turned away by everybody else, even their own families.’ ... He genuinely cared about people.”
Through the years, Fambro pushed AIDS education and preached the importance of safe sex to anyone who would listen. Leon said Fambro “stopped counting” when the list of his personal friends who died of complications from AIDS topped 250 people.
Dr. Harold Katner, a renowned AIDS expert, said Fambro was “an awesome person.”
“I never met a bigger heart,” Katner said. “It was always about other people. He never did anything for himself.”
Katner, chief of infectious diseases at the Mercer University School of Medicine, recalled visiting an AIDS patient one Christmas Eve. There was no food in the house, and there was no Christmas tree.
“The guy was suffering, and his mother was beside herself, watching her son die,” Katner said. “I called Johnny, and within the hour, Johnny not only brought food for the family, but he had a Christmas tree and presents. ... That man was really a saint in my eyes.”
Among his enduring legacies, Fambro was instrumental in getting an HIV clinic established in Macon, several people said Saturday. Katner said Fambro helped write grants for the Hope Center, a clinic run by the county health department.
Beverly Jones said her nonprofit group, Sisterhood, spun off from the Central City AIDS Network in 1999.
Jones, a substance abuse counselor, said she began to notice more women -- particularly black women -- with HIV in the midstate. HIV and AIDS were no longer confined to gay white men. Fambro encouraged the founding of Sisterhood as a way to reach another segment of the community that needed help, said Jones and Beverlyn Jackson, also of Sisterhood.
“Johnny was a pioneer,” Jackson said. “He brought HIV housing to the community, which became a prototype” for similar housing plans in other major U.S. cities.
Anita Ponder, a former Macon City Council president who hosts the annual Holiday Feast at Christmas that serves the poor and homeless, said Fambro has always been one of her partners in the event.
Fambro would line up the use of the Central City AIDS Network’s mobile health unit, making sure it was parked inconspicuously away from the event site. The mobile clinic was available to anyone who wanted free and confidential HIV testing, she said.
“It’s not just with me. He’s that way with one person after another,” Ponder said. “Everybody you talk to will have the same kinds of stories. He has always been one of those people you might not always see, but he’s always there.”
Telegraph writer Wayne Crenshaw contributed to this report. To contact writer Andy M. Drury, call 744-4477.
This story was originally published October 4, 2014 at 1:41 PM with the headline "Johnny Fambro, longtime advocate for gays and homeless, dead at 63 ."