George W. Smith

May 7, 1935 – November 6, 1994


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Image – Gary Kinsman and George Smith (left to right) at an AIDS ACTION NOW! demonstration at Toronto City Hall, May 1998.

To summarize his work, it was about giving people the ability to see how they were being oppressed and to use that information to subvert the agents and agencies of oppression. In that sense, George’s work was extremely subversive.
– Sean Hosein (AAHP transcript, p. 20)


George Smith came up with the phrase that was echoed to me at the late Bob Gardner’s memorial, and that is “documents and demonstrations.” It’s not just good enough to have a demonstration for rage or anger that you’re feeling, but you’ve got to ask what is your demonstration going to accomplish? How is it going to help us move forward? Yes, you demonstrate because you’re angry. That’s fine. But what are your aims for the demonstration? Is it to get media attention? Is it to educate key stakeholders? Is it to do something else? Is it…” You know, da-da-da. And so we always had to have a policy document to go with our demonstration. Now, that policy document might just be a page with key issues, but our demonstrations became eventually guided by our policy documents so they worked together. I believe he called it D & D – documents and demonstrations.
– Sean Hosein (AAHP transcript, p. 9, emphasis added)


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Image – Members of AAN! meeting with then Federal Health Minister Perrin Beatty. From left to right: George Smith, Greg Pavelich, Brent Southin, Perrin Beatty (Front), and Ross Laycock. 

George Smith came up with the phrase that was echoed to me at the late Bob Gardner’s memorial, and that is “documents and demonstrations.” It’s not just good enough to have a demonstration for rage or anger that you’re feeling, but you’ve got to ask what is your demonstration going to accomplish? How is it going to help us move forward? Yes, you demonstrate because you’re angry. That’s fine. But what are your aims for the demonstration? Is it to get media attention? Is it to educate key stakeholders? Is it to do something else? Is it…” You know, da-da-da. And so we always had to have a policy document to go with our demonstration. Now, that policy document might just be a page with key issues, but our demonstrations became eventually guided by our policy documents so they worked together. I believe he called it D & D – documents and demonstrations.
– Sean Hosein (AAHP transcript, p. 9, emphasis added)


George strategy
Image – AIDS ACTION NOW! members involved in a scrum where they try to rate the National AIDS Strategy. Left to right: Tim McCaskell, Doug Wilson, George Smith, Russell Armstrong (back). 

He was not the easiest person to get along with. And a lot of people will I’m sure tell you stories about what an asshole he was, but he’s just not given his due. He was fucking brilliant. Like, the smartest. He was shockingly bright in many different ways. And his significance historically within both the gay movement – gay and lesbian movement – but within HIV is not acknowledged. He would be on the tip of everybody’s tongues if he had been in the US. He was so important, but he was challenging. You know, most folks of that sort are challenging as well. He was a really good guy; he was really a lovely human being, but with an edge. … He taught a way of thinking about social transformation also in ways that began with experience. He was taking from Dorothy Smith’s work; he was taking from early feminist work on experience and consciousness-raising and so forth, and translating it into the world of HIV, and gay politics and HIV. And at the same time he was a visionary. He was a real visionary; he was amazing at that kind of stuff – not so much with the practicalities of running an office, but extraordinary in terms of imagining what needed to happen. So, he taught me and other people how to think organizationally. The activism wasn’t about making your choice between whatever version of Marxism was on the go. Or, it wasn’t about sloganeering; or it wasn’t about whatever particular ideology you could hook into or even your ideas about homophobia and hooking onto these sort of explanations about things. It was actually about learning how things worked and then doing that with other people and then fixing – changing them, changing how those things worked. So, that was extraordinary and it opened up.
– Eric Mykhalovskiy (AAHP transcript, p. 14-15)


There are so many times when you think, “Ah man. I wish George was here because I wonder what he would say about this shit that we’re dealing with in terms of the criminal law.” Like, he would’ve been all over it.
– Eric Mykhalovskiy (AAHP transcript, p. 12)


George proposed AIDS ACTION NOW! as a slogan, all in caps with an exclamation mark. So, it was not just simply a name; it was actually what we were demanding.
– Gary Kinsman (AAHP transcript, p. 6)


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Image – AIDS ACTION NOW! members George Smith and Brent Southin (left to right). 

George clearly would have been far more articulate than I could recall, but I mean he was basically saying that the theory of change was that you used demonstrations to get the attention of folks in power, and get the attention of the media and get the attention of the public, but that was not enough. Because if you simply got their attention and then didn’t follow through and tell them more specifically what it was you needed to get done, they wouldn’t get it right, because they didn’t get it right in the first place. So you used a combination of demonstrations and documents: demonstrations to get the attention, documents to actually get the change that you needed and to make evidence of why you needed it. I believe that was the first time that I had heard that particular theory of change. I was more of a kind of an activist background and you just make noise. And he was the person who kind of said, “Well, no, making noise is not sufficient. … George Smith [was] … the intellectual weight behind how AIDS ACTION NOW! … and his famous phrase of “Demonstrations and Documents” continues to haunt us.
– Glen Brown (AAHP transcript, p. 17, 37, emphasis added)


And then George, we talked about George off and on, who was, the intellectual core of not only the Right to Privacy Committee, but also AIDS ACTION NOW! through those days. I mean towards the end he started getting sick and he suffered from depression. And when he’d get really depressed he’d get paranoid and he became problematic, but somehow despite all of that he still managed to contribute. He left AIDS ACTION NOW! when CATIE spun off as a separate organization and really threw himself into all of that painstaking, horrible, boring work of establishing this institution, . Making sure that it was going to work and, you know, as difficult as he was, I mean he certainly laid the foundation for CATIE at the end.
 – Tim McCaskell (AAHP transcript, p. 42)


George obituary
Image – An obituary for George Smith, printed in XTRA! November 11, 1994

To learn more about George Smith, we invite you to check out our Toronto interviews. We invite you to read interviews with Julia Barnett, Glen Brown, Sean Hosein, Gary Kinsman, Tim McCaskell and Eric Mykhalovskiy. We also invite you to peruse memories of George in our Omeka collection, and to read about his research (on the ways people with HIV/AIDS hook up to social services) in a recent AAHP blog.