Patrick Mutch, the sunny and earnest new CEO of Chase Brexton Health Care in Baltimore, does not mind addressing the elephant in the room. In his first interview with My Fabulous Disease since being hired after a tumultuous year for the agency, he got right to the point. “We’re changing the culture here,” Mutch promised, [...]
Leo Forte, Chris Hanner, and Rock Evans in a scene from the video series "The PrEP Project." “PrEP is a prevention strategy that deals with sex, namely bareback sex,” says gay film student Chris Tipton-King, “and I got tired of people tip-toeing around that fact.” The young Bay Area resident had never seen a PrEP [...]
No Justice No Pride protestors blocking the Capital Pride Parade. (Photo: Dylan Comstock) Hell hath no fury like a privileged white gay man who has waited too long for the next pride parade contingent to sashay by. When #NoJusticeNoPride blocked the DC Pride parade route on June 10, causing an hour delay to an already [...]
Larry Kramer, Kelsey Louie of GMHC, Mark S. King, and Larry's husband, David Webster. (Photo: Nathan Perkel) The new POZ Magazine feature article, “Finding Larry Kramer,” tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the iconic activist found his way back to GMHC nearly thirty years after the organization kicked him out for being such a pain [...]
"The One You Need To Let Go Of The Most," by Jason Fritz & Matt Momchilov, based on images from the Louise Hay Ride. The hall, an auditorium in a West Hollywood park, was filled to overflowing. Hundreds of people, nearly all of them gay men, were crushed together in folding chairs, seated on the [...]
(May 17, 2017 will mark five years since the death of music icon Donna Summer. This is why her legacy still matters.) The music my friends liked when I was a teenager intimidated me. It was the head-banging rock of the early seventies, and it felt alien and unappetizing. Most of all, it just felt… [...]
The angel visits, in the 1993 Broadway production of Angels in America. We all know how this ends. Despite the avalanche of articles on aging with HIV or advice about how to avoid long-term side effects or even news of progress toward a cure, nothing will change the inevitable. None of us will [...]
(Sean McKenna, as part of a portrait series by photographer David Meanix.) Last December I attended the most moving, transcendent World AIDS Day program I have witnessed in years. That’s not saying much, of course. These evenings are usually well-meaning but maudlin, featuring tearful eulogies while we hold up candles that drip on our fingers and [...]
Amazing, really, that this needs to be said: stop posting images and video of the last moments of the lives of innocent people. This is snuff porn, and we’re contributing to it under the insane guise of “enlightenment” and “getting people to give a shit.” Such is life in the digital world, where everything is [...]
Thirty-two years ago this month, I received a phone call from a nurse at my doctor’s office telling me that I had tested HIV positive. We didn’t schedule a follow-up visit or begin a treatment plan, because there wasn’t a single medication approved for the virus, which had only been identified the previous year. The [...]
