LEWISTON – As someone who says no one deserves the disease, Lewiston grandmother Genia Graham volunteers as an HIV/AIDS prevention activist.

On Saturday, Graham is being honored with the Cameron Duncan Award from EqualityMaine, a gay and lesbian advocacy group, at the organization’s annual banquet in Portland.

The award is named for the late Cameron Duncan, one of Maine’s early AIDS activists, EqualityMaine Executive Director Betsy Smith said.

Some ask Graham why she bothers.

“They say, ‘But you’re not gay. Why do you care?’ I say, ‘because they’re people.’ I care about racial equality, about sexual orientation equality. No matter who or what you are, all people are equal. It’s wrong that people discredit someone, or don’t get to know to them, simply based on who they have for a partner.”

Graham, 45, moved to Lewiston six years ago from Orlando, Fla.

“I was really ill. I was dying,” she said, declining to reveal the type of illness. Her oldest daughter had married a Mainer. Graham packed up her two younger children “and moved up here to be with family to die,” she said. “But Maine didn’t let that happen.”

Graham got good medical care, and has high praise for Maine’s health care system. She came out of her illness, she said, with a desire to give back.

She became friends with an AIDS-afflicted man who was joining the Maine Community Planning Group to work on prevention. “He said, ‘You join too.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know anything about prevention.’ He said, ‘Fill out an application, and we’ll see what happens.’ I did. Here I am today. I got involved, and it just felt good. You feel like you’re contributing, so I stayed with it.”

She went from being a group member to a state co-chairwoman. She’s attended national conferences and has become comfortable lobbying in Augusta. Today she co-chairs the Maine Community Planning Group, which writes the state plan on HIV/AIDs education and prevention, said James Markiewicz, HIV prevention program manager for the Maine Center for Disease Control.

Graham is also an advocate.

“When people want a legislator to know something, but they are afraid to go and say, ‘I’m living with HIV or AIDs,’ I’m their voice.'”

A majority of the new HIV diagnoses are gay men, which is her group’s priority population. But she stressed the disease can happen to anyone in an intimate relationship.

“Don’t ever think because you’re straight, young, female, healthy you can’t get it. It can happen,” she said. In a recent talk, Graham recommended teens and young adults “pretend that every person you’re intimate with has AIDs” and use a condom for protection.

Before advances in AIDs medicine, people with the disease looked sick. “But AIDs looks real good nowadays,” Graham said. “AIDs can look like a grandmother, an 18-year-old girl, or a stud-looking guy in a three-piece suit.” She counsels people not to judge by looks.

EqualityMaine’s Smith said Graham’s award “is a big deal because HIV/AIDs is a big deal. People tend to start forgetting about HIV because it’s not a crisis anymore. But it still is a crisis among all sorts of populations.”

Smith called Graham “a tireless advocate” dedicated to making sure Mainers have access to programs and services. “Her work makes a difference.”

Graham’s goal is to help stop the disease. The only way it can be spread is through people who have it, she said. If people use prevention, “when the people who have it are gone, the disease could be gone,” she said. “I hope my grandchildren grow up in a world where they have to ask, ‘What is HIV?'”