Puerto Rican roots. Living and working in New York City Blotcher moved to New York City after graduating from college in the spring of 1982. As promised, Tom Steele hired Blotcher to write for Christopher Street and The New York Native''', two publications covering arts and politics in the New York City lesbian and gay community. Blotcher was living with friends on the Upper West Side. In 1983, Blotcher worked as an associate producer for Our Time, a thirteen-week television series on metropolitan gay life, produced and hosted by activist, author and film historian Vito Russo. Because the pay was inadequate, Russo suggested Blotcher get a night job at the Saint Marks Baths located on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where Russo had worked while writing his book The Celluloid Closet. Blotcher got a job as a towel boy. In 1989, Blotcher moved to the Lower East Side, taking a one bedroom apartment on the second floor of an 1889 tenement building on Essex Street where he paid $485 per month in rent. Blotcher recalls that many of his activist comrades also lived in the neighborhood, and several, including his friend, author Michelangelo Signorile, lived upstairs in the same building. On the Lower East Side, members of ACT UP formed "uneasy alliances" with community organizers there by day, and peopled local bars like the Tunnel and Wonder Bar at night. In 1990, with Alan Klein, Blotcher co-founded Public Impact Media Consultants, a public relations firm specializing in progressive groups and individuals. Blotcher and Klein had met in 1987 at a picket Blotcher helped organize against Cardinal John O'Connor and the policies of the Roman Catholic Church. ACT UP and Queer Nation Blotcher was volunteering at the Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1987, working the telephones for donations to its annual AIDS Walk New York, when he first heard about the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). A friend came into the office and told him a group of activists was marching on Wall Street the next day to protest the high price of azidothymidine (AZT), one of the only drugs then available to fight HIV. Blotcher said that resonated with him, so he attended the demonstration the next morning. A few months later, when he saw ACT UP at the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, "in all its fiery fury, all of its grandeur, all