A few weeks ago I spent the day at the Florida AIDS Walk, and it was striking how different it was from the Walks I attended years ago. Smiling faces, racial and ethnic diversity, baby strollers, and most of all a feeling of happiness and celebration. That's progress,...
Five Fun Facts about Flatulence!
Lately, I've been filled with more gas than Rush Limbaugh on an Oxycotin high. It usually happens in bed at night, where my long-suffering boyfriend has a very limited retreat. "What food pyramid item was that?" he'll ask like a horrified Top Chef judge, his fingers...
Choose one: always “safer sex” or always tell your HIV status?
Once again, the HIV disclosure debate has heated up among prevention advocates, the media, and front-line sexually active men and women just trying to get laid. It all boils down to this: should sharing your status be morally mandatory, or does having protected sex...
Dixie Carter’s death leaves historic AIDS legacy.
In 1987, when nurses would still flip coins to see which would enter the room of an AIDS patient and politicians debated sending those with HIV to an isolated island, something truly remarkable happened. And the passing Friday of the great Dixie Carter, 70, is a fine...
Expert bloggers discuss Miley Nascar Porn!
When all the planets in our solar system align, you either get Mayan-themed global disaster, or you get... this. The leading queer bloggers in the country, a virtual hall of presidents, together on one stage. Such was the scene at the Gay and Lesbian Literary Arts...
Smokin’ Kraken: Why gay men love monsters.
Long before the Big Moment in the shamelessly delightful "Clash of the Titans" remake, somewhere between the Winnebago-sized scorpions and the fatal gaze of a slithering Medusa, it occurred to me that I've been squealing with delight at monsters longer than, well,...
Did the Bareback Time Machine kill Chad Noel?
Among the many online condolences to the family of Chad Noel ("Jim and Bonnie, so sorry to hear of the loss of your son...") are glimpses of the boy this young man was, while growing up in the ironic hometown of Laramie, Wyoming (where Matthew Shepard lived and...
Gay Otter Love: “Thus with a kiss, I die.”
Romeo and Juliet they were not. For, dear reader, they were but Otters, they of fur and fang. And hark! Hear more! For Juliet wouldst find no sister here, for these loves were brave and happy males! An otter typically lives to a ripe old age of 14, at the outside. But...
Tracking the elusive “bug chasers” of HIV
"I (have) always hated any suggestion that AIDS was a gift. A Mercedes is a gift." -- Mark S. King, "A Place Like This," pg. 180 I must admit my belief that bug-chasers are an extremely elusive and exotic form of pervert that aren't as much seen as talked about. For...
Win a car, bed a star in “a place like this…”
When I was nineteen years old, I vacationed to Los Angeles and won a car on "The Price is Right." And so begins my first book, "A Place Like This," about my years in 1980's Los Angeles. The book has been on my mind lately because of my work preparing a new one. Since...
