Editor’s Note: RVA Magazine is proud to partner with Virginia PrideFest, happening this Saturday, September 12, and to produce the annual Pride Guide celebrating Richmond and Virginia’s LGBTQ+ community. You can download the 2026 Pride Guide HERE.
We’d also like to thank the following sponsors who made the 2026 Pride Guide possible: Virginia Museum of History & Culture, Virginia MOCA, Virginia Repertory Theatre, Richmond Triangle Players, Health Brigade, Godfrey’s, Chrysler Museum of Art, and River Fox Realty.
Mary File Clem, who died earlier this year at her home in Jetersville at age 79, was the first director of Fan Free Clinic, now known as Health Brigade. More than 55 years later, the organization she helped create is still operating in Richmond.
But in 1968, Clem was just 22 years old when her friend Lenore Gay, a social worker at what was then Richmond Professional Institute, came to her with a stack of papers and a problem. People needed healthcare, and Gay was struggling to get a free clinic started.
“My friend Lenore Gay handed me a stack of papers of people that needed help and said, ‘I’m trying to get a free clinic started, but I’m just not having any luck,’” Clem recalled in a 2025 interview with a Health Brigade staff member. “She gave it all to me. And I just started making phone calls. To help her with the pile, well, then she just left it with me. I set about my task with my phone glued to my ear. I wrote people begging for supplies to start this, we got together in people’s living rooms, this was my baby now.”
Two years later, Fan Free Clinic opened its doors as Virginia’s first free clinic.
For Patience Salgado of Health Brigade, understanding the organization meant understanding Mary. When she first got to Health Brigade, she sought Clem out because she wanted to know what kind of people had created something capable of surviving for more than half a century.
What she found was someone she describes as “super down to earth, but very formidable.”
Salgado was particularly interested in the moment Mary and the other founders came out of. The late 1960s saw the rise of the free university movement, counterculture and mutual aid, with young people leading the conversation.
To Salgado, there are parallels between that period and the moment we find ourselves in now.
“There was just such a sense and spirit of mutual aid and helping each other in a way outside of systems,” she said. “Healthcare is a human right, and there’s a resistance in that. We need to care about our neighborhood and our neighbors and our people around us in this very tangible, real, everyday way. So much is happening to people and it’s getting stacked. It was already hard, and now it’s getting stacked to new levels.”
Clem eventually joined Robert “Bob” Bluford, William Fitzhugh and Robert Petres in establishing Fan Free Clinic. Health Brigade’s history remembers its founders as “two doctors, a nurse, and a minister.” Clem was the nurse, but Salgado believes that description doesn’t quite capture what she actually did.
“She did the grunt work, like the movement work, to make it happen,” Salgado said.
Salgado sees something familiar in that work, particularly for women of Mary’s generation: the countless tasks happening behind the scenes that actually turn an idea into reality.
“There are women behind that are making this happen,” Salgado said. “And I think sometimes they go unnoticed, especially in that time.”
Fan Free Clinic provided free healthcare to people who otherwise struggled to find it. Sexual and reproductive healthcare, including birth control and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, became an important part of that work.
According to Salgado, the clinic officially operated from 5 to 9 p.m., but would continue seeing patients until midnight or 1 a.m., sometimes treating 50 people in a night. The work never stopped because people had nowhere else to turn without facing the stigma of the times. Where were the queer community and other marginalized communities going to go?
“We believe everyone deserves this, so that’s how it should be,” Salgado said. “When you are a possibility model in a community, then guess what happens? Those things become possible.”
“What began with Mary File Clem’s belief that everyone deserves healthcare became a movement that transformed lives across Virginia,” said Karen Legato, executive director. “Her vision and courage continue to inspire our work every day. We honor her legacy by continuing to build a future where everyone has access to the care and dignity they deserve.” See the post HERE
Clem continued working in healthcare long after helping establish Fan Free Clinic. Her career spanned more than 40 years as a registered nurse, massage therapist, nursing teacher and Lamaze childbirth educator and the institution she helped start remains a clear example of what she believed throughout her life.
Back in 1968, any 22-year-old could have looked at that stack of papers and decided the problem was too big for them to solve. Instead, Clem started making calls.
That spirit, in many ways, still defines Richmond today: you see a problem, and it’s on you to decide whether you’re going to be part of the solution.
“I think we need Marys of the world right now,” Salgado said. “She just did the work.”
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