May is National Masturbation Month -- Hurry, folks! Only a few days left to celebrate! -- and I will admit to feeling smug, because I have more experience with gay men masturbating than anyone else I know. During my years in Los Angeles in the 1980's, I owned and...
"Talk to me like you talk to your friends when no one is around." That was my only request when I sat down with each of four HIV negative gay men to create a short film about their lives and attitudes (video below). They held back nothing, sharing details of their sex...
Maybe we should blame the criminal prosecutions of people with HIV on the mythical legend of Gaetan Dugas, also known by his slanderous nickname, Patient Zero. Dugas was a gay flight attendant from Canada who, according to Randy Shilts' 1987 book And the Band Played...
Last night I kissed a straight guy full on the lips. Then he tenderly put his arms around me and kissed me back. Tonight I'm going to do it again. It sounds like conquest. Or breaking a taboo. At the very least it fulfills the fantasies of many a gay man. And it makes...
There is a classic episode of Oprah from 1987 that can still raise my blood pressure. That year, the tiny town of Williamson, West Virginia, became part of a national discussion about AIDS when Mike Sisco, who had returned to his home town to die of the disease, dared...
In the late 1980's, I let this odd, fussy man into my office at LA Shanti, my first AIDS agency job. He seemed earnest and harmless and he just wanted a few minutes of my time. "I have the cure for AIDS," he politely announced. Sadly, he wasn't the first person to say...
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… straight, in a way I knew I could never be. Alone in my room, I listened to my beloved...
"Remember when Billy Perry gave you a black eye?" David asked me. He stood on a ladder with a screwdriver in his hand. I was holding up Mom's new light fixture while David attached it to the ceiling. We took on the project during a visit I made back home a few weeks...
"We don't know the side effects of this drug. It's too expensive. Insurance won't cover it. It hasn't been studied enough. It will encourage slutty behavior. And why the hell don't people just use condoms?" -- Objections raised to the oral contraceptive progesterone...
If you're considering how to best disclose your HIV positive status to everyone you know, here's one suggestion: learn to sew. Television's long-running reality hit Project Runway could be holding a spot just for you. Over the course of a dozen seasons, the fashion...
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