Former Oceano CSD director, wife remembered for AIDS activism: ‘A huge debt of gratitude’
Mary Lucey, a former Oceano Community Services District trustee and longtime AIDS and LGBT rights advocate, has died.
Lucey and wife Nancy Jean MacNeil died hours apart on Feb. 11 from unknown causes in their Oceano home, Oceano CSD board director Linda Austin said.
Austin said since moving to Oceano in the mid 2000s, Lucey and MacNeil were “supportive of the community” in many ways; Lucey served two terms on the Oceano CSD board from 2008-16, and also served on the Oceano Advisory Council from 2015-16.
“The first time I met them I was pulling weeds in a little park in the center of town,” Austin said. “They pulled up and said, ‘We just moved here and we want to get involved in the community, can we help you pull weeds?’ No one had ever asked that.”
The official cause of death for Lucey and MacNeil has not been determined at this time, Austin said, but it seemed MacNeil died overnight in her sleep and Lucey died in the morning when she found her wife.
“I think she just died of a broken heart,” Austin said.
Fellow activists remember Oceano advocates
Following news of their death, the pair were remembered for their years of activism promoting AIDS awareness.
Lucey and MacNeil met through AIDS activism project ACT UP Los Angeles in spring 1990, while trying to bring attention to the plight of women with AIDS in the Walker A unit of the Correctional Facility at Frontera in Chino, the ACT UP Los Angeles Oral History Project said in a news release Feb. 13.
While herself imprisoned in the Walker A unit, Lucey experienced the “devastating lack of treatment provided to women with HIV and AIDS,” the release said.
“After the organization’s protest at Frontera, ACT UP LA expanded their actions towards all California prisoners with AIDS,” the release said. “Mary and Nancy’s activism helped lead to the first compassionate release of a prisoner with AIDS, Judy Cagle, allowing her to die at home with dignity.”
Described by the ACT UP LA Oral History Project statement as a “loud and proud lesbian,” Lucey was one of the first out HIV-positive women in Los Angeles.
With ACT UP LA, Lucey advocated for the CDC to expand the definition of AIDS to include women’s infections, the statement said. She worked as the first woman AIDS coordinator for the city of Los Angeles in 1994 — a program that funded Clean Needles Now, the first needle exchange program in Los Angeles, according to ACT UP LA.
That program at the time was estimated to prevent 12,000 new HIV infections each year, the ACT UP LA Oral History Project said.
Lucey would also found the first peer support group for HIV-positive women in 1990, the statement said, and co-founded Women Alive, an organization which offered aid to HIV-positive women, with MacNeil, who was working as a United States Postal Service Worker.
Rev. Valerie Spencer, a Black transgender woman who fought for the rights of people with AIDS alongside Lucey at the Minority AIDS Project, told The Tribune Lucey was one of the first AIDS advocates to accept transgender people into the movement with open arms.
“Nobody knew anything about what (being) trans was — in fact, that language wasn’t even used back then,” Spencer said. “There were no trans people in HIV community planning. It was just me, and guess what: I was in my 20s and did not know what the hell I was doing.”
Spencer said Lucey taught her everything about advocacy, community planning and public policies, including everything from how to write a grant to how to “cuss out Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
At the time, transgender people were suffering through the AIDS crisis with even less support than their gay and lesbian comrades, Spencer said, and were pushed out of most AIDS advocacy group over their gender identity.
“I knew a lot of the gay boys involved, the personalities that were involved, but they were still stuck on the fact that I was trans,” Spencer said. “They didn’t think we were deserving to walk and chew gum at the same time, but the lesbians came and got me.”
Spencer said today’s generation of queer Americans owe Lucey and other advocates like her “a huge debt of gratitude” for their work during the AIDS crisis.
“I will love and adore and miss my big, bodacious friend,” Spencer said. “We lost contact but she was always dear to my heart.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2023 at 10:56 AM.
