Year in review • A year of loss
Kirk Myers-Hill, right, riding in the Pride Dallas parade with his husband, Ricky Myers-Hill Since the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, which reached its peak here in North Texas in the late ’80s and early 1990s, not a year has passed that our community has not suffered significant losses.
The discovery of new and ever-improving treatments for HIV slowed those losses significantly, but it has not ended them. This year, however, the North Texas LGBTQ community lost two longtime leaders, though neither to HIV or the latest scourge, COVID-19.
While one — Kirk Myers-Hill — died suddenly and unexpectedly while the other — Dr. Brady Allen — died following a lengthy illness, both left our community reeling with grief. Kirk Myers-Hill Kirk Myers-Hill died Tuesday morning, April 4, while working in his office at the AIDS service agency he founded, Abounding Prosperity Inc., at the age of 54.
A 1986 of the Dallas ISD’s Business Magnet High School, Myers-Hill first became aware of the need for HIV education in Texas’ prisons during a brief period of incarceration, and from 1997 to 1998 he was a peer educator offering information on HIV/AIDS those incarcerated at the Mark Stiles Prison Unit in Beaumont.
