They’ve done everything they can to reduce love to a feeling…butterflies in the stomach. It ain’t that. Love will change your whole world. It’s revolutionary. ‒ Julian Watkins, MD

I was working in a hospital at Columbia in 2016 [when Trump was elected] and I had an existential crisis. I went into public health and worked in the sexual health clinics, and then COVID happened. 

The People’s Clinic started in the very beginning of the pandemic. I knew that the lockdown was coming. We didn’t know the basics of COVID-19. I started feeling heartsick, worried sick. I had to do something. I started doing Instagram Lives regularly, taking questions, giving practical advice. I was using safety guidance from the CDC on influenza, because COVID is similar. 

The People’s Clinic went from giving updates to talking about why things are the way they are, why different neighborhoods were feeling the pandemic in different ways. We partnered with 8 Ball Community and had a show on the 8 Ball TV platform. 

I hosted along with Mason Wilson and my colleague Carlotta Starks, a nurse from the health department. We styled it like a talk show or news briefing, “This is what’s going on in the city. These are the numbers. This is what the updated guidance is.” That led me to what I do now in the health department. I saw how useful and important it was to translate technical guidance in a way that people could understand.

A: What gave you the creativity to work through your fear and say, “I’m going to serve in this moment?”

J: It was an intuitive decision, but also informed by my medical training. Most of my mentors trained during the HIV crisis. I talked to them about how they felt at the beginning that crisis. I thought about how I would have responded if I had been around back then. Then the pandemic happened, and I was like, “This is the thing that you never thought would happen but always thought about. You have the skills. You have the knowledge, just do it.”

A: How did you decide to become a doctor in the first place?

J: I was born into it. I was going to be a vet until I was 11 or 12. Then my grandpa, my mom’s dad, got sick and stayed with us. Our house was patriarchal. I would always hang out with my mom because she was doing women things by herself. I helped her take care of my grandpa, and was like, “Oh, you can help people and they can talk to you. I want to do that for a living.” 

A: I love defining medicine as “women’s work,” caring work. So often we think about men in long white coats.

J: That helped me understand how broken the system is. I went into medicine thinking about healing and care, but being in the field, I saw how you are trained to see people as a disease, to analyze people by risk factors. Being queer, you read about a queer person or a black person or a latin person, and know that the category is a signal for something — they introduced this into the question to trigger you to think about something that those groups are prone to have. Whenever you see yourself represented, you’re always connected to some negative thing. It’s a mind fuck.

A: The baseline is set at white maleness, as if that’s not a risk. 

J: It’s all centered on this one “standard human” and that goes unquestioned. It’s part of the conversation I’m having right now at work. People within the medical system and in the press are like, “Why don’t those people trust, what’s wrong with them? Oh, it’s Tuskegee, right? That happened a long time ago, but they’re still mad about it.” 

Medicine was built on a broken foundation. In was connected to eugenics. Founders of the field were actively participating in that conversation. The father of gynecology owned slaves and operated on enslaved women and didn’t use anesthesia. He wrote about it.

One of the founders of the American Medical Association also enslaved people and spent his whole life working to prevent black people from becoming doctors. So Tuskegee is one small example of a system that operates from that “standard human” perspective and has tried to validate that point of view. It took a Constitutional amendment to desegregate medicine.

What do you do when the broken thing is a system, a system that we rely on, and a system that never questions itself? When you have a system that is broken, a lot of what it produces is broken. When you compare the U.S. to similar big Western nations, we are underperforming, near the bottom of the top 30 list. We know that communities don’t trust the system. We’ve all supposedly signed the same social contract, but the terms and the way people understand the terms are drastically different. 

To gain trust, you have to build integrity. How do you show people that you learned from your mistakes, that you’ve named them and are committed to preventing them from happening again?

A: Perfectionism gets in the way of actual change.

J: Upholding an unattainable ideal is damaging and harmful to so many people, including the people who are closest to the ideal. If you take away the ideal, you have to admit that the system that we’re born in is oppressive. The foundation of this place is one of genocide, a kidnapping campaign. But people protect the ideal and its historical roots. They’ll protect everything about it because if it’s taken away, they feel like their worth is gone.

A: An ego death for the collective. 

J: I think it comes down to the centrality of fear in our society. Our national defense budget dwarfs everything else — $700 billion a year. When we’re doing systemic change, we’re dismantling a system that’s obsessed with death. That obsession is coming from fear. 

At work, we were talking about Dr. Martin Luther King. America also created MLK. His legacy is something for all of us. The Civil Rights Movement and all our most powerful and radical social movements come from this ethic of love.

It is a transformative power. We’ve seen what fear running rampant can do. We’ve seen what hate can do. That’s why they’ve done everything they can to reduce love to a feeling… butterflies in the stomach. It ain’t that. Love will change your whole world. It’s revolutionary. I’ve been on a campaign of integrating the word “love” into the language that we’re speaking as an agency.

We’re now saying the word in conversations about mistrust. Saying, “The vaccine is not going to heal all pains, but you need the vaccine so that we can keep this conversation going and keep working on the things that need to happen.” 

In January and February of 2021, when the vaccines were first rolling out, only 60% of the health department was vaccinated. It turned out that no one had talked to the 5 or 6,000 people who work here. I assembled a team and built a program around answering vaccine questions and talking about the pandemic within our agency. We also talked about health equity and social justice. 

A big part of the work is internal work. I’m a student of James Baldwin and bell hooks and other black intellectuals. They talk about love as transformative. I realized that we need to make sure that we talk about love and taking care of ourselves, building community, breaking down barriers. We need to do this inner work in an open way. 

Love is a daily practice and a commitment. I grew up in a religious household. My dad is a pastor. My older brother is a pastor. In those early lockdown days of the pandemic, I started reading as if it were a spiritual practice. I really love people, their energy, the community. One of my love languages is service, but I’m not an unlimited well. Protecting my peace is a part of this journey too.