In , he organized a nationwide boycott of products manufactured by Philip Morris Companies, Inc. Capitol, he outed a dozen public figures, although no news outlets published the names, [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ] [ 18 ] [ 19 ] and he played a pivotal role in the outing of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Pete Williams by writer Michelangelo Signorile in The Advocate , an American LGBT-interest magazine.
When Terry M. Helvey and an accomplice, Charles E. Vins, murdered Helvey's shipmate, U. Navy Seaman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. After relocating to San Francisco, California, in , Petrelis successfully lobbied the city's Department of Public Health SFDPH to make the female condom available to gay men, [ 23 ] and advocated reopening the gay bathhouses there.
Petrelis was born in Newark, New Jersey , where he lived for "four or five" years before his family moved to Caldwell , a nearby suburb. My daughter's the most beautiful one! Petrelis attended an alternative high school in East Orange, New Jersey , where he was openly gay.
He remembers first becoming involved with the gay community as a teenager, traveling to the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Petrelis remembers feeling outrage on hearing the news of White's sentence and said of the property destruction he had watched that night, "I remember feeling that was okay β that you had to have this destruction of personal property to send a message And we had to look out for ourselves β even with the relative liberal attitudes of San Francisco.
Petrelis moved to New York, in , where he renewed his acquaintance with a male couple he knew from his teenage visits to the city. One of these men was the first of Petrelis' friends to die of the disease that would later come to be known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome AIDS.
