By Julia Zrihen on July 13, 2026

Note: This article was originally published by Beyond Chron.

A Journey Through AIDS and Homelessness to Permanent Supportive Housing

Joseph Duffy has lived in the Tenderloin’s Pierre Hotel for 8 years. He got placed in the Pierre after 11 dreadful months of homelessness.

“On April 1, April Fool’s Day, I got a call from my case manager at the hospital, Erin Collins. ‘Joe, it’s Erin. Listen to me. Say nothing, make no jokes. You have 40 minutes to get from where you are to go over to the CAAP building. Second floor. Go. Talk to no one. Don’t talk to people on the bus. Don’t stop and help a stranger on the street. Blinders, Joe, get there. It’s going to be a really good day for you.’

So, I got there… There’s no guard. ‘Hello! (hello, hello).’ (echoes). I was waiting for people to jump out from under the desks, like April Fools! And this guy comes out from the back office and I turn and cross the room. He goes, ‘Are you Mr. Joseph Duffy?’ And I said ‘I am.’  He goes, ‘Ha ha!’ He puts his arms out like this. He goes, ‘Come here, boy, you did it. Welcome to Supportive Housing.’

And I ran across the room to him, dropped my bags. He picked me up, and spun me around.”

Joey was dressed in a crop top walking down the hallway of his Philadelphia suburbs high school. The music teacher stopped him in the hallway. “You, with the navel,” she said. “Can you sing and dance?”

He had had no musical or dance training. “Yes I can,” he said boldly.

In all likelihood it was not just Joey’s belly button which attracted the music teacher’s attention. She probably sensed the boy was dripping with ambition. The youngest of eight children, Joey informed his family from the age of three that he was going to be a singer and dancer.

“I would move the furniture in the family room and watch Fame on Saturday mornings… just looking at myself in the reflection of a television screen…I credit Debbie Allen in teaching me how to dance.”

At nine years old, Joey went to a modeling agency to audition. “My mother was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Listen, I told you I was going to do this. I need a break.”

The “tall, statuesque” agent was “instantly enamored” with Joey: “she was like, ‘who are you?’” Nine-year-old Joey paid for the modeling lessons with his communion money. He did commercials, runway, “and I was an underwear model for a while. My mother was freaking out. She was like, “We have neighbors, what do you mean?”

“My mother’s whole thrust was, don’t be a show off, don’t be flamboyant, and she was trying to say: don’t be gay. Like, don’t be like flitting around, because… you’re a Catholic school boy.”

~

I first saw Joey at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic at a Safety Committee meeting of tenant leaders. He is 54 now. He was dressed in a pink blazer with no shirt underneath.

“…And we have more power than we think,” He was saying. “‘Cause you don’t want to see a white f*g on the news pissed off about something going on in the city.”

In the last decade Joey has been on the verge of death from AIDS-related illness. The disease has killed so many of his friends he lost count. He was homeless for 11 months. His showman’s confidence (“Stonehenge doesn’t have balls bigger than me when it came to auditioning… you have 30 seconds, 16 bars of music to prove yourself, and hope to God they call you back to dance, because they’ll go, man, he can honk, and he can also hoof it”) translates easily into scrappiness, a  determination to defend himself and anyone else against “all of this shit that the world drops on us, it’s like the sky is falling.”

“Well, I can dodge raindrops faster than anybody.”

When he started to improve from a grave illness in 2016, the doctor asked him if he would go back to acting. “Maybe I will act again, but I said, ‘what I want to do, Doctor, is to leave a lasting impression, a really good one, with the world, and to help people.’ Which is why I’m here, which is why I live where I live, why I’m a tenant organizer.

“I don’t want any person out on the street out there right now, if I encounter them, and they come to me and they need help, I’ll take the shirt off my back. And I’ve done it. You’re cold. It’s winter. Take my coat, take my shoes, you’ll run faster. And because I can find another pair.”

~

In a 41 year acting career Joey was rarely out of a job. He performed in A Chorus Line, Gypsy, Funny Girl, Cabaret… you name it. He was in Parade national tour and spent two years in Germany performing in Grease, where he started in the ensemble and eventually picked up enough German to play multiple roles.

In 1999 he left behind a flourishing performing career to follow his lover, Bob, to the West Coast. He had to start auditioning all over again. “I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have much money. I didn’t have a plan.”

But still, “my guardian angels found me.” On the radio in Bob’s car Joey heard about the American Musical Theater of San Jose. He sent them a picture and a resume. “20 minutes later the phone rang… she’s like, ‘nice resume, Joe. Oh my goodness, where have you been all my life?’ I said, ‘I’ve been around the world and I,I,I…”

In 2016, he woke up in the hospital weighing 108 pounds, with 6 T cells and a viral load so high that someone with the flu could kill him with a cough. A complication of AIDS.

He had been diagnosed in 1999. “‘Let me ask you, Joe,’” said the Doctor, after Joey had recovered with the aid of antiretroviral treatment. “Why weren’t you on medicines for the last 15 years or more?’

“‘Because all those medicines killed my friends.’”

When Joey and Bob went their separate ways in 2018, Joey was left without money or a home.

“It was the worst 11 months of my life, and I got through it, and I mean it was just… horrible. The conditions were horrible every day. It was like I’d wake up, if I even slept, It was like, get me out of here, get me away from these heinous people! Just the shelter system is really this prison.”

I asked Joey if he regrets moving to California with Bob in the first place. He faltered. “It’s the one thing that… to live with regret is a horrible thing to feel.. but I don’t regret – ”

Then he smiled gracefully. “Can’t forget, won’t regret, what I did for love.”

~

Moving into the Pierre hotel brought Joey out of the loneliest time of his life. “Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. But when you are both, when you’re alone and you’re lonely… you can die from that.”

Last week, I walked down Ellis street with Joey. We could hardly make it a block without him running into a friend and stopping to hug them and breathlessly joke about something or other.

Living in an SRO has also, said Joey, “helped me use my skills to help other people. Because I don’t want anyone to be in the place I was in.”