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community to help spread education and reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS. Standing up against
homophobia and HIV/AIDS epidemic in Middle Georgia, Fambro aligned himself with
progressive activists and infectious disease specialists. Their effort led to the creation of the
Rainbow Center, Middle Georgia People With AIDS, and the Central City AIDS Network, the
key local organizations that advocated for change in healthcare, housing, and HIV/AIDS
education to diminish the stigma of the virus between the 1980s and the late-1990s. These
activists believed that by working together to educate and help those affected by the virus, they
could make a difference in their local community.
Fambro’s Roots in the Civil Rights Movement

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in the north-central Georgia area of Jones County,
Fambro remembered a wonderful childhood.2 As he recalled, “I was an only child and I was
spoiled rotten.” However, that wonderful childhood did not shield him from the ugliness of racial
discrimination. His white conservative parents exemplified the racial attitudes of the Jim Crow
era that disenfranchised people of color. He struggled to resolve the differences between his
parents’ racial philosophies and fundamentalist conservative religious values. Further
complicating that struggle, Fambro recognized his own homosexuality from a young age.3 Out of
fear of facing ostracism from his own family, he sought a message of acceptance and equality,
which he found within the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In a speech he gave in 2011,
Fambro explained that observing these demonstrations inspired him and opened his mind. He
became involved in the movement and noted how the tactics of nonviolence, as advanced by Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., dismantled the narratives of prejudice until they became irrelevant by the

2 Central Georgia comprises the following 21 counties: Baldwin, Bibb, Bleckley, Butts, Coffee, Crawford, Dodge, Houston,
Jasper, Jones, Lamar, Laurens, Monroe, Peach, Pulaski, Putnam, Spalding, Taylor, Twiggs, Upson, and Wilkinson.
3 "Middle Georgia resource compassion fuels comprehension services at Central City AIDS Network," HIV Risk Reduction 9
(2009): 1-4, https://www.pdffiller.com/en/project/147277139.htm?f_hash=e04b5c&reload=true.

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