Terrence Patrick “Terry” Bean is an American political fundraiser, a civil rights activist, and a pioneer of the LGBT rights movement. He is known for co-founding several national LGBT rights organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and the National Gay Games. As of 2012, he is the CEO and President of Bean Investment Real Estate and resides in Portland, Oregon. In 2014 he was arrested on charges of sexual abuse in a case involving a 15-year-old boy.
The AIDS pandemic impacted Terry Bean’s life in a very personal way. He lost many friends and two partners to the disease. Bean decried the failure of the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations to respond to the crisis and threw his fundraising muscle behind Bill Clinton’s candidacy in 1992, because of his promise to address the AIDS crisis. He said, “I have way too many friends who have just too few T-cells in their blood to be able to survive four more years of George Bush. This is the politics of survival.”
Now, 33% of homosexuals are infected with HIV, the cause of AIDS, and it causes those infected to age 14 years, AIDS still kills.