Riek Stienstra

Biography

Author: Mark Bergsma

“If it feels right, it is right.”

Riek Stienstra was born in the Frisian village of Boornbergum in 1942. Both her parents were teachers and socialists. The family’s dinner-table conversations often revolved around social issues and activism. Riek was not at all interested in dolls; she preferred to play with a Meccano set. In her third year at middle school, she fell head over heels for a girl for the first time. Being 15 at the time, she instinctively felt it would be better not to talk about it. She nevertheless confided in her grandmother, who reassured her: “If it feels right, it is right.”

Later, she ended up in Amersfoort, where she started working with children who were considered difficult to raise. The staff at the institution consisted largely of women. At one point there was a rumor that two of the group leaders were in a relationship with each other. Both women were immediately dismissed, while the rest of the female staff came under strict supervision. This made a deep impression on Stienstra: “That came as a real shock for me: ‘Wow, so you really have to watch out.’” The experience did not stop her from moving in with a girlfriend, however.

In Amersfoort, she received training as a social worker. Following her studies, she became director of the Social Academy in Amsterdam. In the meantime, she had also become familiar with the gay scene in the Dutch capital and carried out activities for Group 7152, a national network that supported lesbian and bisexual women in those days. Incidentally, Stienstra wanted nothing to do with the notion then circulating in parts of the women’s movement that lesbianism might be a choice; nor was she in favor of any endless analysis about the origins of homosexuality: “It is much better to just figure out how to live with it as happily as possible.”

Schorer Foundation

In 1974, Stienstra started working at the Schorer Foundation, the world’s first health clinic for homosexuals clients. Established in 1967, the foundation was the idea of the COC, but church organizations had also been involved. While those Christian organizations believed that sexual minorities had a right to pastoral guidance, they remained ambivalent towards homosexuality. For that reason, it was an unwritten rule for the first few years that the foundation would not hire LGBTQ+ employees. It was thought that they would become too emotional involved. It was a striking double standard.

In the early 1970s, the progressive Dutch government under Prime Minister Den Uyl decided to replace the foundation’s cautious and supposedly “neutral” board. For Stienstra, that was precisely the moment to approach the organization. In her application letter, she wrote candidly: “It certainly also played a part that I myself am homosexual and feel a certain affinity with the issues with which your foundation is involved.”

Buddy project

Stienstra very quickly succeeded in bringing a great deal of knowledge and expertise into the foundation. She also built up a large network. This turned out to be of vital importance when, at the beginning of the 1980s, AIDS began its predatory attack on the gay community. There was so much fear and panic, but it failed to throw her off course: “It was an enormous challenge. We didn’t know how we were supposed to solve it, but I thought: ‘Let’s approach it creatively.’ And indeed, a great many innovations in health care emerged [in that period],” she later recalled in an interview.

Stienstra herself played an important role in that innovation. In 1985, she introduced the so-called buddy system in the Netherlands, an approach she had already seen in practice in San Francisco. The system resembles what we would now call informal care, but the support came not so much from family members as from volunteers from the community, with particular attention to social and emotional support. Many people with AIDS had a great need for psychosocial guidance alongside regular medical care. The Schorer Foundation was at the forefront in that regard. She remembered how groups of men came together to take in the first patients. She was also struck by the way AIDS broke through traditional role patterns: “I am fascinated that so many men mothered terminal patients with AIDS right through to the bitter end.”

The method proved effective. Stienstra became director of the foundation in 1986 and threw herself heart and soul into the buddy project. She managed to obtain money from all sorts of places and knew her way around at the Ministry of Health. While some did not always appreciate her pragmatic attitude, many ultimately came to see her, in her role as the figurehead of the Schorer Foundation, as us mem (Frisian for “our mother”). Under her leadership, the organization would grow to no fewer than 35 staff members and 150 volunteers in 1991. Buddy care would remain the main focus for years; the need for that began to decline once the combination therapy for the treatment of HIV became available in 1996.

Organizational powerhouse

Riek Stienstra was an organizational powerhouse. She was involved in countless initiatives, from the feminist activist collective Mama Cash to the magazine Diva and the theater group Panter. In 1987, under her leadership, the Schorer Foundation also began publishing important works for the LGBTQ+ community, including the biography of Jacob Schorer.

Starting in 1998, she began focusing on the emancipation of older LGBTQ+ people. Four years later, she retired and returned to Friesland. At her farewell, Stienstra received a knighthood in the Order of Orange-Nassau in recognition of her merits. In one of her last interviews, she looked critically towards the future: “I don’t think there is a good balance in the way the gay movement [in the Netherlands] deals with other minorities, whether those are Moroccan boys and girls or people with disabilities. That step still needs to be taken.”

Riek Stienstra died unexpectedly in 2007 from the effects of colon cancer. As a result of choices made in the Amsterdam municipal government regarding the distribution of subsidies, the Schorer Foundation went bankrupt five years after her death. Riek will be remembered as the driving force behind the foundation, but above all as the one who introduced the buddy system, which proved to be so valuable for so many people with AIDS during the depths of the AIDS crisis. In 2012, several former employees of the Schorer Foundation made a fresh start with the Pink Buddy Care Foundation, ensuring that the buddy system still lives on in Amsterdam at any rate.