Takia (center) visits the Mr. Friendly booth at USCA with Dave Watt (left) and the PrEP Warrior (Erwin KiddFriendly Willhite). (WATCH: VIDEO BELOW) Hearing Takia tell me about her short journey with HIV – she tested HIV positive just a few months ago – was the easy part for me. She and I [...]
Activist Carmarion Anderson, NMAC director Paul Kawata, and activists Octavia Lewis, Bre Campbell, and Francesca Schumann. The United States Conference on AIDS (USCA), celebrating thirty years of teaching practical skills to HIV service providers, found itself the target of old-school activism on Friday when transgender activists stopped the plenary program to voice their [...]
George (PJ Johnnie) gets an HIV test, setting the multi-track action of the play into motion. As Much as I Can, the theatrical event playing in Baltimore September 7-14, isn’t content with merely showing you the lives of gay black men in a city plagued with high rates of HIV infection. Instead, this [...]
Adam Sank (photo: Michael Martin) Comedian Adam Sank has a joke about HIV that left me gasping when he told it to me, the kind of story that has a punchline that mortifies you with shock and a naughty, guilty delight. I would tell you this joke right away but you might get [...]
The entire concept of the DaddyBear dating app – rich daddies are waiting by their iPhones to shower lonely bears with gifts and romance – is pathetic and hilarious. Their stated position on the HIV status of those daddies and bears, however, is frightening. In his new piece for the site INTO (“New App For [...]
The good people at Thrive Alabama has been working their butts off for years, covering twelve counties in northern Alabama with five free clinics and vans that travel country roads you would never find on your GPS just to fetch clients for appointments and get them home again. But don’t ever say that the hardworking [...]
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 [...]
