In 1989, The Alexian Brothers, a congregation of religious men, opened an AIDS hospice in Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood to give AIDS patients, who were being shunned by their families and faced homelessness, a place to die with dignity. As the advent of antiretrovirals and education changed the “face of AIDS” and the rate of new infection among relatively affluent homosexuals decreased, the Brothers continued to seek out the most socially and economically vulnerable and marginalized HIV/AIDS patients — poor people with mentally illness who are recovering from addiction.
