Papers of Joyce Wallace, 1968-2002

Physician Joyce Wallace, daughter of Samuel Malakoff, a teacher, and Henrietta Yetta Hameroff Malakoff, a speech therapist, was born November 25, 1940, in Philadelphia. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, she received a BA in history from Queens College in 1961, then studied pre-med at Columbia University's School of General Studies before receiving her MD from the State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn in 1968. She started practicing medicine in the late 1970s in Greenwich Village, where many of her patients were gay men. In 1981, before AIDS was recognized, she was among the first physicians to report finding Kaposi's sarcoma among their patients and was a co-author of "Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Pneumonia Among Homosexual Men -- New York City and California," one of the first reports linking Kaposi's sarcoma with immunodeficient gay men. Wallace shifted her focus to examining the impact of AIDS on female sex workers and dedicated herself to making them safer through AIDS tests, safe sex education and condom distribution, and needle-exchange programs. She attempted to start drop-in centers providing meals, clothing, and transitional housing for drug-free sex workers, but her efforts were blocked by local residents. She started an alternative sentencing project at Manhattan Criminal Court where sex workers were given condoms, AIDS literature, and drug treatment instead of prison sentences. She also founded the Foundation for Research on Sexually Transmitted Diseases in 1982 and served as its executive and medical director until 2003. Wallace held academic appointments at Mount Sinai, New York Medical College, and Stony Brook University. In 1964, she married Lance Wallace, a researcher. They divorced in 1973. In 1979, she married Arthur Kahn, a stockbroker, with whom she had a son and daughter. They later divorced. Wallace died of a heart attack in New York City on October 14, 2020.