¿El qué dirán? What will people say? Along the border that separates El Paso and Juarez, where Catholicism and poverty largely define the culture, that question determines family standing and self-respect. "It's a very, very Mexican thing," says Armando, age 47. "El Paso's a big city with a small-town mentality."

Armando is one of 20 characters portrayed in successive, unrelentingly intimate monologues by assistant theatre professor Gregory Ramos in a play based on oral history interviews he conducted while living in El Paso beginning in the late 1990s. In Border Stories, Ramos, as both author and actor, gives life to experiences both humorous and tragic, his characters — an abused teenager, a lesbian bartender, a transgender prostitute, a gay priest — struggling to come out to parents (or themselves), to express their identities, to simply make a living, to cope with losing a loved one to AIDS in a place where the disease can scarcely be talked about.

"While I was in El Paso," says Ramos, "one thing that resonated for me was the lack of a visible gay community for a fairly large city (the population of the El Paso-Juarez metroplex is more than 2 million). People live out their lives and desires in private ways. They have relationships but they're never spoken of."

Ramos performed Border Stories as part of UVM's Sexual Responsibility Week on Friday, Feb. 15 at 6 and 9 p.m. at Burlington's FlynnSpace. The $25 tickets benefited the AIDS service organization Vermont CARES. To make the experience as accessible to students as possible, the offices of multicultural affairs and student life funded 50 tickets for students to buy for $5 each. The two performances raised over $3000.00 for Vermont CARES.

Adding layers of nuance and perspective to the project is a cross-disciplinary partnership between theatre and geography. Glen Elder, associate professor and chair of the latter department, read Ramos' play and was struck by the connections to his own work on the political, economic and cultural nature of border-making as well as the geography of sex, race and place. The idea for the Vermont CARES benefit was Elder's and he will open the performances with a lecture that puts the work into a larger context, connecting the southern border stories to the experience of living near other borders, including northern Vermont, and to the metaphorical borders that exist between people.

The event, notes Elder, is a continuation and strengthening of ties that the University of Vermont community has established with Vermont CARES (Committee for AIDS Resources, Education, and Services). At least two faculty/staff members (including Elder) have served as board chair, and others have or are currently serving on the board. With the organization reporting 20 new cases of HIV infection in Vermont in 2007, outreach to raise community awareness and continue the safer sex message remains a priority.

If the stories in Ramos' play seem from another time, Elder cautions that they are still highly relevant. "HIV/AIDS is very much alive and present here," he says. And the message goes beyond preventing new infections. It's for gay and straight alike to become more sensitive to societal stigma and prejudice. To witness Ramos in character and feel no empathy is almost impossible. There are funny moments in the play to be sure, and watching Ramos deftly perform a dialogue between a long-settled lesbian couple is a pleasure despite a poignant discussion about their adopted children.

"I'm scared for my kids," one says, "that as they get older they're going to have to confront the issue. Of us."

Human pain is present here in so many guises - humiliation, abuse, desperation for acceptance, loss of a partner or a child. The play aptly demonstrates that borders, even physical ones, are inevitably man-made constructs. But there are other borders: between love and rejection, illness and health, life and death, in and out of the closet - a border, Elder says, that must be crossed not once, but continually. "Queer lives," he says, "are always border stories."

But Ramos brings the element of hope. "If I could underscore anything," he emphasizes, "my goal in doing this — and one of the things I emphasize in my teaching — is to use theater as a means to create public thought and social dialogue around issues like these. It can be entertaining but it's also a tool — better society through theater."