This is a clever social media campaign: Healthline, an online health community, has asked people who have been living with HIV to create videos for those who have recently tested positive, known as "You've Got This." Think of it as "It Gets Better" for those with HIV. Of course, I had to create a video [...]
When it was revealed a few days ago that insurer UnitedHealthCare (UHC) had rejected a patient’s pre-authorization claim for the drug Truvada as PrEP due to “high risk homosexual behavior,” all hell broke loose. Advocates and organizations sprang into action with petitions and requests for meetings. And now, the insurer has reversed themselves -- and [...]
Discrimination against LGBT people is often once-removed, shielded under double-speak and fraudulent intentions. So, it’s refreshing, really, when a company comes right out and says in black and white that gay men aren’t worthy of the same protections as everyone else. In a pre-authorization denial letter to a gay patient seeking Truvada as PrEP, United [...]
When my guard is down, it comes to me. It flashes across my mind, an uninvited assault, sometimes when I am beginning to drift off to sleep or, more cruelly, when my mind is enjoying a pleasant reverie. It is then that the dark memory rushes in like a raid. He lived in a house [...]
The annual Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco is noted for its unbridled embrace of every kinky star in our sexual constellation. Even the fearless leather community that founded the event can sometimes appear tame amidst the outlandish costumes and clothing – and lack thereof – on display along the city’s tilted streets. In the [...]
Anne-christine d'Adesky in her element, at a San Francisco protest. (Photo: Juno Rosenhaus) Anne-christine d’Adesky got arrested, accidentally, long before it happened on purpose during AIDS protests. The Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist was covering civil disobedience at a nuclear facility in 1982 when she was approached by a suspicious policeman. Despite assuring him that [...]
It is coursing through our veins, sustaining life and fighting disease, and yet we fear it. The sight of a few drops can make an adult faint. A bucket of it in a movie is the very definition of horror. Even as Donald Trump contributes his perverted, sexist new layer of blood revulsion (through a [...]
Detail from Rotimi Fani-Kayode's "Untitled," courtesy of Autograph, London In thirty years of HIV work alongside black advocates, I have rarely written on the topic of race. It makes me uncomfortable, or perhaps I feel unequipped, unqualified. But it’s that very hesitancy, according to black gay academic Charles Stephens, that only makes racism [...]
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 [...]
