Uneasy Silence: An activist seeks justice and courage over a lifetime of change

In Uneasy Silence: An activist seeks justice and courage over a lifetime of change

Mary tells her story of speaking truth to power while living with AIDS, journeying through cancer and surviving a near-death experience. She navigates global relationships while creating visual art and serving her various communities. Her constant concern for The Other enables her to find the strength to stand up, speak up and make a difference, inspiring us to do the same. Across the pages of the book, Mary Fisher bears witness with humor, courage, compassion and grace, conquering the uneasy silence we all know too well, showing the way to finally be heard and be free. 

Not long after her own HIV diagnosis, Mary Fisher mounted a world stage in Houston, TX, to address the 1992 Republican National Convention where she stunned the assembled thousands (and broadcast audience of millions) with her speech, “A Whisper of AIDS.” Her address from that evening is well-remembered 30 years later and is featured in countless rhetoric texts as a model of advocacy persuasion. It’s been ranked (Oxford Press) as one of the “100 Best American Speeches of the 20th Century.”

But Mary didn’t stop there. Twenty-two years and countless actions later, Mary was honored as a global Disruptor, receiving a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award in the company of NIH Director Francis Collins and others. It’s one of many tributes paid to her including five honorary doctorates.

Throughout her life, Mary has balanced her love of making art with her commitments as an advocate. Her message-bearing sculptures, quilts, and stylized textiles have found a ready market from the halls of U.S. embassies to the homes of private collectors. Her work as a world-class jewelry designer has blended with her unending passion as an activist, yielding lines of bracelets produced by vulnerable women in Africa and nations around the world. Her work is a call to action: The 100 Good Deeds Bracelet generated over 4 million acts of kindness. Mary’s aesthetic is at once elegant and accessible, subtle and strong.  Just as certainly, her advocacy is unquestioned. For decades, through art and action, she has inspired and given a voice to those muted by injustice, poverty, illness and fear.

Mary has lived longer by any measure than the world thought possible that long-ago night in Houston. In 2012, while recovering from treatments for an aggressive breast cancer, she authored a second memoir. “My first memoir in 1995 was my story about dying,” she explained. “Messenger is my story about living.”

The years have been a gift, and Mary has used them well. She’s never been quieted in her calls for diversity, equity and inclusion. She’s celebrated for her oratory that inspires others, is a recognized patron of the arts from Broadway to local theater, and is a proven and tireless campaigner for compassion and community, encouraging others to find ways to heal a broken world.

In 2020, her long-held dream was realized when she hugged her first grandchild – an experience that could never have been imagined three decades earlier.

Given her passion for action, Mary’s years of survival have become years of service to those she meets, a remarkable story of grace still unfolding.