Help Malcom Represent Oregon at the DNC

My name is Malcom Gregory Scott, and I need your help to attend the 2024 Democratic National Convention as an Oregon At-large Delegate supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’m a sixty-two year old disabled queer veteran, long-term AIDS survivor, and lifelong warrior for progressive causes.

Attending the national convention will be an opportunity for me to both represent the interests of LGBTQ+ Oregonians, disabled Oregon veterans, Oregonians with AIDS, and those who care for them at the highest levels of our party, and to carry the enthusiasm and momentum of the convention home to Portland, the better to help ensure voters award Oregon’s eight electors to Vice president Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz.

I’m seeking to raise $6,000 for travel expenses to and from the Democratic National Convention, accommodations, food and incidentals during the convention, and other delegate expenses necessary to ensure effective representation.

No amount is too small. Every dollar is appreciated.

In 1987, the United States Navy discharged me for homosexuality, and I learned during my separation physical that I had contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That was a death sentence then, and I returned home to Washington, D.C., expecting to die. But politics and activism saved me. Encouraged by legendary activist Franklin “Gay is Good” Kameny, I dedicated myself to overturning the ban on LGBTQ+ military service, fighting government inaction on AIDS, and decriminalizing the medical use of cannabis. By 1995, HIV had caught up with me: I had lost a third of my healthy body weight, I had no t-cells left to count, and I was fighting horrific opportunistic infections. I had drafted a will, and started wishing farewells. I knew I was dying. Then, at the eleventh hour, I received the first effective drugs against HIV through an unusual compassionate access lottery administered under emergency authorization, none of which would have been possible if Bill Clinton hadn’t made bold changes urged by activists, and reversed twelve years of Republican inaction.

I am living proof that elections matter. And perhaps never before have the stakes been higher.

I believe Kamala Harris and Tim Walz may be our last bulwark against an anti-democratic Christian nationalist movement that threatens the lives and liberties of women, BIPOC communities, migrants, asylum seekers, non-Christians, and all queerkind.

With President Biden, Vice President Harris oversaw one of the most successful presidential administrations of my lifetime:

Attending the Democratic National Convention will allow me to celebrate the administration's accomplishments with other democrats, while reminding everyone, implicitly by my presence, and explicitly if so requested by the DNC communications team, that only democrats acknowledge that AIDS is not over.

Based on my reading of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, I can only conclude that a second Trump Administration will likely attempt to de-fund Ryan White C.A.R.E Act programs, AIDS Drugs Assistance programs, PreP access, AIDS-specific research grants and programs, certain basic scientific research, and education and awareness programs across government, from the National Institutes of Health to the Centers for Disease Control — even if doing so requires defying congress.

My presence will also be an implicit reminder that LGBTQ+ members of the military are serving proudly, effectively, and openly under current policies threatened by a second Trump administration.

In a second term, again aligned with Mandate for Leadership, Trump will likely end Department of Defense diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, limit or eliminate recognition of queer families for purposes of benefits eligibility, remove fitness and billeting exceptions for people with HIV, and, most alarmingly, expel transgender service members altogether. Such actions could then prepare the way, for reopening the larger question of the fitness of LGBTQ+ and HIV-positive Americans for the civil, foreign and military services.

The stakes are uncommonly high. The future freedom and welfare of queer and HIV-positive Americans hang in the balance, imperiled as they haven’t been since the darkest days of the AIDS crisis. Uniting behind Harris and Walz is the first step to stopping the plans — fifty years in the making — of an authoritarian Christian nationalist movement intent on returning LGBTQ+ people to the closet, and worse.

Join me in standing up for Kamala Harris and the just America she fights for every day, an America that upholds the individual’s most intimate rights, from bodily autonomy to freedom of thought, respects the separation of church and state, seeks to embrace all its people in all their magnificent diversity, and strives to lift up especially those who have been historically downtrodden. Such is the America of the patriotic protester, and the loyal dissenter. Such is the America of the defenders of our democratic institutions and the guard dogs of due process. It’s the America where we know we must always work harder to fulfill the enlightened promises of our founding, and it’s the America that can do anything so long as we are united.

I’m talking about Kamala Harris' and Tim Walz's America. And it’s the only America I can believe in.

Thank you for considering supporting my journey to the 2024 Democratic National Convention. I am so grateful for any amount you can donate.