Lori Cannon, a longtime HIV/AIDS activist and driving force behind Chicago’s response to the AIDS crisis, has died at 74.
Cannon died at home Sunday evening. More information, including a full obituary, will come soon.
Cannon was known for her decades of service to Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community and people living with HIV/AIDS. She co-founded Open Hand Chicago, the city’s only meals on wheels program for low-income people with AIDS, in 1985.
Open Hand later became Vital Bridges under the umbrella of Heartland Alliance Health, and Cannon continued as the driving force behind Groceryland, the organization’s food pantry for people living with HIV, even after Heartland Alliance dissolved in 2025.
Cannon also co-founded ACT UP Chicago with her best friend and political cartoonist Danny Sotomayor and activist Paul Adams in 1988. She was also one of the earliest volunteers for Chicago House, a nonprofit empowering people living with or vulnerable to HIV/AIDS to live healthy and dignified lives.
Lori Cannon, Mark Schoofs and playwright Scott McPherson at an AIDS protest against Mayor Daley, early 1990s. Photo by Rex WocknerIn 1988, 1990 and 1994, Cannon was on the steering committee for the NAMES Project – AIDS Memorial Quilt, coordinating media and public relations activities relating to the quilt’s displays in Chicago.
Cannon was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame as a “Friend of the Community” in 1994.
Over the years, Cannon became known as a “beacon in red,” with her signature red hair and nails a comforting sight to the many people she supported.
“It’s hard to imagine Chicago without her, and it’s hard to imagine this community without her,” said Owen Keehnen, an LGBTQ+ historian and close friend of Cannon’s. “I am just one of the many, many people who find it hard to imagine the future without Lori around and in our lives.”
In a June interview with Windy City Times, Cannon reflected on her early work with Open Hand Chicago to support people living with HIV/AIDS.
Cannon said she drew upon her skills as a show-business bus driver and mapped out regular routes throughout the city to deliver meals to people living with AIDS. She recruited numerous volunteers to drive the routes—many of whom were people living with HIV themselves, Cannon said.
“A lot of the volunteers who signed up to deliver food were young boys in Lake View who were diagnosed themselves,” Cannon said. “It was a daunting challenge they were looking at. They were looking at their own future as people were slipping away.”
These volunteers were the operation’s backbone, Cannon said.
“They were the eyes and ears of the program,” Cannon said. “They’d report back on what they were seeing and what people needed in our community.”
Cannon said the personal connections made between volunteers and the people they were serving mattered just as much as the logistics. And it was important to Cannon that the program support people living with HIV by providing essentials that food stamps didn’t cover.
“People on food stamps can only apply food stamps to food,” Cannon said. “And so the necessities—toilet paper, soap, shampoo, laundry soap, paper towels—they have to buy them. I was trying to save my clients a few pennies.”
In a 2007 interview with Windy City Times cofounder Tracy Baim for the Chicago Gay History Project, Cannon reflected on what first drew her to a life of service: it was heartbreak after a close friend in the LGBTQ+ community died in her arms.
“I decided this was to be my life, and I made it my business to network with the spokesmodels in the community who were the movers and shakers,” Cannon said in the interview. “They accepted me. We volunteered together. We got arrested together. No, I’m not gay, but I have such an abiding respect and admiration for the community for what they’ve had to overcome.”