TWENTY years ago this month, Mary Fisher took the stage of the Republican National Convention and delivered a 13-minute prime-time speech that was seen by many as a sharp rebuke of her party’s negligence in the face of the growing AIDS epidemic.
It was considered one of the best American speeches of the 20th century.
A mother of two young children who had grown up in Oakland County, the daughter of industrialist Max Fisher, Mary addressed the delegates as someone who was H.I.V. positive herself.
“Tonight, I represent an AIDS community whose members have been reluctantly drafted from every segment of American society,” she said. “I am one with a black infant struggling with tubes in a Philadelphia hospital.” She added, “I am one with the lonely gay man sheltering a flickering candle from the cold wind of his family’s rejection.”
It was a speech that was both surprising and poignant. Few, including Ms. Fisher herself, expected that she would survive a disease that had already killed more than 150,000 Americans by the summer of 1992.
But Mary Fisher is still alive — and still taking issue with her political party.
