For decades, the Rev. Duncan Teague has been one of Atlanta’s most charismatic, high-profile public-health warriors, a fierce advocate for the city’s Black and gay communities.
He handed out condoms and did outreach in the 1980s, when a mysterious disease ravaged the city’s Black gay community. Over decades, he’s done grassroots HIV-AIDS education for local nonprofits and helped conduct grant-funded research on the virus. An ordained Unitarian minister, Teague recently visited Africa as part of a faith-based coalition fighting HIV-AIDS on the continent; back home, he founded a church in West Atlanta and talks openly about his own battle with prostate cancer.
It’s a curriculum vitae that many public health advocates would envy, with enough interpersonal connections to fill a phone book. But what makes his profile even more impressive is that Teague -- who came out as gay as a Kansas City teenager, majored in theater arts at a conservative Catholic college in the Midwest, then moved to Atlanta, a Black gay mecca -- considers himself an accidental LGBTQ health advocate.
“Had you told the ‘theater queen’ in 1980, ‘You know, you’re going to end up in Kenya doing (HIV-AIDS prevention) work as an ordained minister,’ I think I would have laughed,” says Teague, whose parents raised him according to their old-school Baptist faith. His activism on behalf of the marginalized, he says, stems in part from those childhood lessons, and his own spiritual journey as an adult.
“I thought it was just my being, first, a good Christian, and then a good person,” says Teague. “And then being a good spiritual person became a career.”
It all started not long after Teague graduated from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas and moved to Atlanta in 1984 at the suggestion of a close relative. Though he was working in a series of punch-clock jobs -- waiter, Kinko’s staffer, office clerk -- waiting to break into the Black theater community, his timing seemed prescient.
“Within two years of moving here, there was this pandemic that had started, and it was called the HIV and AIDS virus,” he says. “I was starting to see it, feel it, live in it, lose friends. And I started doing what I could to help.”
Teague began establishing himself in Atlanta’s Black queer community, then volunteering at community organizations like Black and White Men Together, an interracial gay men’s advocacy organization. Within two years, Teague was working with local nonprofits like AID Atlanta; by 1988, he was representing the region at national AIDS prevention conferences. Within a decade, Teague was working with AIDS researchers at Georgia State University and the AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta.
It was a surprising turn, even to Teague.