There is so much distance in my mother's eyes that I fear she may never come close to me again. Circling her stare are wrinkles of pain, betrayal even, and in her hand she holds the watch. It was December of my senior year of high school, and things had calmed down...
Broadway star and Emmy-winning actress Sheryl Lee Ralph has been added to a slate of celebrities and community leaders who will appear at a virtual event on Wednesday, December 17, benefitting The Reunion Project, an alliance of HIV/AIDS survivors. “Mark is 65” will...
During the 2025 United States Conference on HIV/AIDS (USCHA), I watched a speech that may rank as the most beautiful speech I have seen in thirty years of attending this conference. Louie Ortiz-Fonseca, Director of LGBTQ Health and Rights at Advocates for Youth,...
More than ten years ago, when pop icon Donna Summer died, I wrote a tribute to the impact her music had made on me as a young gay man growing up in Louisiana in 1977. A few weeks ago, producer Becky Ripley at BBC Radio 4 in Bristol, UK somehow ran across that essay...
The phrase sat there on my Facebook feed, staring back at me like an accusation. “If you aren’t resisting, you are assisting,” the post read. I felt flush with self-conscious guilt. It wasn’t a familiar feeling, not after nearly forty years of speaking up and...
When Jeremiah Johnson was perusing the Gilead Sciences website last November, as one does when tracking one of the most insidious assaults in history against people living with HIV, an item he found buried deep in Gilead’s pulldown menus literally took his breath...
The casket of my friend Jesse Peel, an elderly longtime HIV survivor who died in 2023, was crafted of gorgeous wood—oak, I think. As I stood admiring it in the alcove of the church prior to his memorial, a powerful sense of déjà vu brought suppressed emotions rushing...
After ten cities, dozens of organizational sponsors and thousands of attendees, my book tour for My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor will end the evening of August 8th in Atlanta. It feels wonderful to be ending the tour in my hometown, where much of the...
As Chuck Parker stood over his room-mate’s dead body trying to process what he was seeing, a 911 operator on the phone urged him to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Parker would have done it, if he had thought there were any chance he might revive his...
This is a story about how the staff at the very first HIV/AIDS agency in Los Angeles managed to handle the stress of that time without falling apart - and a random, whimsical twist of fate that followed many years later. My first job in the AIDS arena was at the Los...
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