By Reyna Ortiz — This story was published as part of Windy City Times’ 2025 cohort of its Our Stories, Our Power community journalism course. Reyna Ortiz, who reported and wrote this story, is director of programs at TaskForce Prevention and Community Services.
On a Wednesday night on a brisk Spring evening on the West Side of Chicago, a group of youth gather from all over the city. As they put down their bags and start to change into their gear, someone yells, “Pump that beat!”
Some laugh, while others start their stretches. But all are ready to vogue the house down.
Taskforce Prevention and Community Services, home of the West Side Vogue School, is a safe space for Black and Brown LGBTQ+ youth at 9 N. Cicero Ave. Its services include HIV/STI prevention and treatment, mental wellness, violence prevention and other essential services.
To some, the organization is unheard of. But to most within the Black and Brown LGBTQ+ community, Taskforce Prevention has been a haven—a space to exist authentically even amid a time, a city and a Presidential administration that tells them their existence is a stain or a fallacy.
The village behind TaskForce
One must understand the African proverb of “It takes a village to raise a child” to understand how countless hands have touched, prayed and wished for TaskForce Prevention to continue thriving, through all its ups-and-downs and the good and bad. This village of LGBTQ+ people and their allies is what has kept the space afloat for 35 years.
On July 18, 1990, TaskForce AIDS Prevention was incorporated by a Board of Directors, marking the beginning of its formal journey.
At the time, many Black LGBTQ+ leaders were invested into building a Black-led HIV prevention organization to combat the onslaught of HIV/AIDS and how it uniquely affected their community.
Among TaskForce’s first leaders was Robert Ames, a founder of the organization and visionary of what was originally named TaskForce AIDS Prevention.
Ames’s work as an activist, community organizer and leader started in 1990 when he began volunteering at South Side Help Center, first as a prevention specialist and later moving up the ranks to organizational specialist.
Despite his foundational role, Ames’ name and legacy is often overlooked, except among those directly connected to his work or who recognize him as a mastermind behind one of the city’s first safe spaces for Black LGBTQ+ youth.
In the early ‘90s, HIV/AIDS was ravishing the Black Gay community, but Ames’ vision carried TaskForce through to the new millennium.
One of Ames’ early supporters was Betty Smith, founder of the South Side Health Center who had previously worked at a hospital where Black men and women were dying of complications of HIV/AIDS. Ames was applying for grants to get TaskForce’s programs off the ground, and Smith helped him navigate city bureaucracy and limited financial resources to accomplish his goals.
Smith was passionate about supporting TaskForce because she witnessed the discrimination and lack of empathy that Black patients were experiencing at medical facilities. So she started conversations and educated the Black church community about HIV/AIDS.
Ames sought Smith’s support as a guide, mentor and fiscal agent for a young TaskForce that he hoped to grow into something bigger.
With Smith’s support and the backing of the South Side Health Center, which at the time was the largest Black-led organization in the city, Ames was able to secure funding and open TaskForce out of an old Minority Outreach Intervention Project location Downtown at Roosevelt and Wabash.
As TaskForce continued to grow, so did Ames’ network of community members, leaders, doctors and allies who would carry the organization’s work forward after Ames’ death in 2005. That’s when the torch was passed to Ron Lee, who would take over as executive director.
Developing future generations of Black gay leaders
Black gay community members came from all over the city to get information on prevention services from TaskForce, including DeMario Adams, current outreach director for TaskForce, who encountered the organization 20 years ago as a young gay Black man who was looking for resources.
Adams said he felt consumed by conversations about HIV while other issues that affected him as a Black gay man often went unaddressed, he said. He also felt exhausted by the ongoing reminders about HIV and instead wanted mental health support.
While participating on the Chicagoland Youth Against AIDS community advisory board, Adams was introduced to TaskForce, which was still at its Downtown location.
Through TaskForce, Adams learned of the Ballroom community, a subculture where mostly Black and Brown queer people can express themselves freely through performance, dance fashion and community gatherings called balls. This world within a world connected Adams to other like-minded individuals and kicked off his two-decade career as a Ballroom Icon and Father of the House of Prodigy.
“The Vogue school is like TaskForce’s heart,” Adams said. ‘The Vogue School is TaskForce’s largest resource. It’s why so many participants access Taskforce.”
Participating in TaskForce’s Vogue School and being surrounded by Black doctors at the organization is what taught Adams to be a more effective advocate, he said. Now, Adams sees a calling in supporting Black LGBTQ+ youth and a vibrant future for TaskForce.
“I see a future at Taskforce to become a citywide resource, expanded, bigger and able to reach more people,” Adams said.
Adams isn’t the only one who found his calling at TaskForce, an organization known for developing community leaders.
Antonio King, now LGBTQ Health & Outreach Liaison at Chicago Department of Public Health described his time at TaskForce AIDS Prevention as transformative.
While working in the nonprofit field in the early 2000s, King was introduced to Ames and TaskForce by his longtime friend Lois Bates, a transgender icon who died in 2011.
King took a position at Taskforce as prevention case manager, working alongside Bates, who at the time was one of the only advocates addressing disparities affecting the Black trans community.
King worked alongside Ron Lee, who became executive director of TaskForce after Ames died, to ensure the organization was constantly evolving.
In the early 2000s, they rebranded the agency from TaskForce AIDS Prevention to TaskForce Prevention and Community Services.
“I chose that name because we were impacting the community in so many more ways than HIV/AIDS,” King said.
Being a smaller LGBTQ+ organization, TaskForce was often subcontracted and left out of financial decisions by larger organizations that more easily navigated the nonprofit world, King recalled. Now two decades later, he’s in a position with the Chicago Department of Public Health to make sure that grants are more equitably distributed so the smaller agencies like TaskForce can also benefit.
From ballroom culture to community care
King, who was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 2024, thanked leaders at TaskForce for helping him reach this point, including Ames, Lee, Bates and Tommy Sampson, a community member who was a strong advocate for Black gay men within ballroom culture.
One leader at TaskForce who had a major impact on King was Dr. Margo Bell, a former physician in adolescent medicine at Stroger Hospital who got involved with TaskForce.
“Taskforce and I were at an event together and I met the program director at the time, Ron Lee, in the early 2000s,” Bell recalled.
Bell said she was impressed by the outreach workers, started having more conversations and understood how TaskForce works to serve LGBTQ+people. Bell was introduced to the ballroom scene, and she saw how the community strengthened TaskForce as an agency.
“Once I got introduced to ballroom, it became a very deep interest to me and I also wanted the outreach workers to become stronger,” Bell said.
This launched a partnership between Taskforce and Bell. After Lee died, Bell’s involvement with the organization grew further.
“We used to sponsor the ball community at the school of nursing and host a once-a-week gathering with the ball kids,” Bell said. “And over time, TaskForce Prevention then moved from downtown over to the West Side, at the space they are at now.”
As TaskForce continued its focus on the ball kids and its partnership with Bell intensified, she decided to build a transitional clinic inside TaskForce’s headquarters. Bell knew the partnership would improve their health and help them get into further care. Bell’s clinic would offer everything from asthma treatment to hormone therapy.
How Black leadership has helped TaskForce thrive, even amid challenges
TaskForce’s success has not come without challenges, Bell said. She recalled working with LGBTQ+ youth who endured extreme homophobia.
Bell also struggled with getting the Cook County government to officially recognize TaskForce as one of its community clinics, but the system wouldn’t allow it for many reasons, she said.
Another challenge was money.
Larger LGBT+ organizations had teams of grant writers and larger coffers than TaskForce was working with. So, for Taskforce, trying to compete with those entities for grants was difficult, but they persevered, Bell said.
Bell has seen TaskForce go through various executive directors throughout her involvement with the organization, and said Black leadership is part of its success and legacy.
Being led by someone from the community it’s trying to serve, TaskForce is able to better understand the needs of disenfranchised populations within the Black community, Bell said. This lived experience makes TaskForce’s team able to pinpoint certain factors or certain experiences that make their care relatable to their clients.
She also applauded TaskForce’s focus on serving LGBTQ+ people, noting the impact she’s seen it have on the community.
“I saw kids survive their health crisis, I saw youth grow from being people who came to Taskforce to people who actually provide services at Taskforce. I’ve seen youth really turn themselves around, but you have to want growth in order to be able to grow,” Bell said.
The proudest Bell has ever been of TaskForce was, after her retirement and departure from Chicago, seeing how the organization is still surviving and doing better than it’s ever been.
Leaving TaskForce with the team and with some of the people that have been raised throughout the years there has given her hope for the future of the agency to become more self-sufficient and independent from governmental grants and really focus on the core, which is the people.
Now, TaskForce is led by Dr. Chris Balthazar, who assumed the role of executive director in 2020.
Bell praised Balthazar as “the greatest executive director [Taskforce] ever had.”
“To see Taskforce thrive because to him has been amazing,” Bell said.
TaskForce’s future is rooted in its history
Balthazar started off as a volunteer at Taskforce as a college student. He would go to nightclubs to pass out condoms and do the “on-the-ground work” of reaching out to communities.
Balthazar was working at the time toward a master’s degree in psychology while he did this.
After building relationships with community health icons like Bell and Dr. Maya Green, Balthazar landed a job as a research assistant at Cook County Hospital (Stroger Hospital), where he worked in HIV data research for 10 years, eventually becoming research project director.
While working as a researcher, Balthazar strengthened his relationship with TaskForce Prevention, where he did a lot of community-engaged research studies.
While doing this research, Balthazar witnessed TaskForce go through multiple executive directors and struggle to maintain its authentic, grassroots nonprofit identity, he said.
“It was hard to watch. TaskForce struggled as an agency at the time with very few resources.” Balthazar said.
With the support of Bell, Balthazar eventually became executive director of the organization, he said. At that time he wasn’t sure what he was getting himself into, as TaskForce needed some restructuring to better serve its youth.
Now TaskForce, which led the 2025 Chicago Pride Parade, is reaching new heights as a Black LGBTQ+-led community organization.
“I think ‘for us, by us’ is so important because it allows members of our community to experience health and wellness services in a way that is familiar to them,” Balthazar said. “They don’t have to conform. They don’t have to code switch or present in a different way. They can show up authentically and interact with people who embrace that.”
LGBTQ+ communities are not just looking for places that are safe—that’s the bare minimum, Balthazar said. People are looking to build self worth, and TaskForce is a rare space for LGBTQ+ people of color where services are culturally tailored for them.
Balthazar said he envisions TaskForce as a model so that more spaces thrive for the LGBTQ+ community. Balthazar said he would also love to expand TaskForce’s reach across the city.
Thirty-five years old and still thriving, TaskForce embodies a celebratory tale about resilience, strength and never giving up on community.
Behind TaskForce is a legacy of Black LGBTQ leaders who have fought through tremendous discriminatory systems and were relentless in their vision to create a space for Black LGBTQ+ youth.
That legacy must continue, for the sake of Ames, Lee, Smith and everyone else who built the foundation for Black LGBTQ+ people to thrive.
