In the Wake of Puerto Rico’s Storm
LGBTQ activist brings aid to marginalized communities after Hurricane Maria
“What did you do during the hurricane?”
It was a common question in Puerto Rico in the months after Hurricane Maria made landfall on September 20, 2017. Wilfred Labiosa will tell you that he hunkered down with his partner in their San Juan flat, “trying to fall asleep, which I couldn’t. The apartment was shaking.” The window shutters held, though two panes shattered during the Category 5 storm, which had sustained winds of 175 miles per hour. Their 15th-floor apartment was drenched, says Labiosa (CGS’91, CAS’93).
It’s what Labiosa did after the storm that’s really worth talking about. The psychologist and mental health services manager worked—is still working—to help the island recover from Maria, while also confronting longstanding prejudices against gay people like himself and other LGBTQ Puerto Ricans who were often forgotten in the recovery effort.
Labiosa is the cofounder of Waves Ahead, an advocacy and support group for marginalized Puerto Ricans, including the LGBTQ community, the homeless, and seniors. It aims to fight “homophobia and transphobia in our machista [chauvinist] country,” Labiosa says.
Before Maria, Waves Ahead’s work centered on planning for the island’s first LGBTQ senior community center (people age 55 and older are one-quarter of the population, Labiosa says) and on finding seed money for LGBTQ-run start-ups. After the hurricane, however, the organization shifted its energy to emergency relief.
While the whole island was prostrate after the storm—5,000 Puerto Ricans may have perished due to delays in medical care, and all 3.5 million residents lost power—LGBTQ people were especially hard hit. There’s a perception that LGBTQ people cluster in cities, Labiosa says, when in fact many also live in rural towns that have recovered more slowly from the disaster than urban areas. From AIDS medications to insulin for diabetics, Waves Ahead has helped ferry life-saving drugs and technology to areas cut off by the storm. One man “needed a ventilator to survive,” Labiosa says, “and didn’t have electricity until January. We worked with the authorities to bring a generator.”
Before 2017 was out, Waves Ahead had provided food, drinking water, and other essentials to almost 700 individuals, and 85 families with a total of 109 children, the organization says. Eighty-five of the people it helped were LGBTQ, according to Waves Ahead’s statistics; 138 were elderly. Besides San Juan, Waves Ahead had reached out to more than half a dozen communities throughout the island; in rural areas, homeowners used blue tarps donated by the organization as makeshift roofs on their damaged houses.
Fellow Terrier and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto (CAS’84, Hon.’18) famously sparred with President Trump over the pace of federal assistance to Puerto Rico. Labiosa says Uncle Sam has since provided some needed aid, “but it’s not enough, and it hasn’t reached certain people outside certain roadways” threading major population centers.
At publication time, more than 6,000 people were still without electricity.
In search of a new life
“I can’t live in a place that hates me,” Labiosa says. “I’m Puerto Rican, and I want a Puerto Rico that is different,” shorn of anti-gay animus. Originally that meant leaving. He chose BU—his sister had attended in the 1970s—where he won the Scarlet Key for exceptional leadership. Even as he excelled, however, Labiosa couldn’t evade homophobia.
Then BU president John Silber (Hon.’95) “was very homophobic,” Labiosa says. (Silber and gays at BU battled over issues like the president’s analogizing homosexuality and bestiality.) LGBTQ students were largely invisible on campus, with the gay-straight student alliance boasting few members, he recalls, unlike today’s more noticeable presence. Labiosa didn’t come out until his junior year. When he did finally tell his friends he was gay, they barely blinked.
He remained in Boston for two decades in various jobs, including at the Boston Public Health Commission and Casa Esperanza, a behavioral health center serving Latinos that did contract work with the BU Center for Anxiety & Related Disorders.
Wilfred always had such a strong commitment to social justice and to helping vulnerable individuals and groups.
— Lena Lundgren, former School of Social Work professor at BU —
“He did exceptional work with clients with substance use and mental health disorders,” many of them homeless, recalls Lena Lundgren, a former School of Social Work professor now at the University of Denver. “Wilfred always had such a strong commitment to social justice and to helping vulnerable individuals and groups.”
Four years ago, he returned to Puerto Rico to help his mother, who was in bad health. She died last year; his father had died within a year of Labiosa’s return. He’d already decided to remain on the island, “my homeland,” a choice reaffirmed after the hurricane made Waves Ahead’s work even more vital to the LGBTQ community.
He’s done much of that work himself. Labiosa has personally delivered meals and supplies all over the island to older and LGBTQ hurricane victims. “If someone needed water purification pills, batteries, or food, Mr. Labiosa either brought what was needed, or he found a way to get it donated,” says Serena Worthington, director of national field initiatives at SAGE USA, a New York-based LGBTQ organization that partnered with Waves Ahead.
He’s also a master multitasker, she adds. “Even while he was making some of these deliveries, he was on the phone with me, plotting his next step toward building a robust LGBTQ older adult program” on which SAGE and Waves Ahead had originally partnered.
“We’re in the mourning stages. We still can’t believe what has happened to our country,” says Labiosa. But “I’m hopeful for the future. There are many Puerto Ricans in and out of the island that believe in it.”