Richard King and Emil Matzner, 1982 (I will never explain the early days of AIDS better then this, so I post this essay to commemorate World AIDS Day every year.) My brother Richard smiles a lot. He has an easy laugh. But there was a time, years ago, when he held a poisonous [...]
Some of the ferocious women of USCHA; Rick Guasco hugs it out with Ace Robinson; Tik Tok personality Brian Thomas; a Puerto Rican performer. After scrapping the in-person USCHA conference for two years due to COVID, and efforts to locate the event in San Juan, Puerto Rico being threatened by two hurricanes – [...]
Mark S. King and Damon L. Jacobs Damon Jacobs is moving around his hotel room, setting up a tripod and attaching his camera, all the while chatting away enthusiastically about nothing in particular. His sunny attitude is disarming given the circumstances, and maybe that’s the point, because I’m standing butt naked a few [...]
The first AIDS joke I ever heard in the early 1980s, back when the threat seemed remote and I was young and insensitive enough to laugh at misfortune, was about who got AIDS. At the time, it was a disease that primarily affected gay men, intravenous drug users, and Haitians. The hardest thing about having [...]
DeKalb County HIV/STD Prevention Specialist Noreen Mirza The big picture view of monkeypox in this country has been fraught with heated debate, acrimony, homophobia, and anxious uncertainty about vaccine strategy and distribution. And that's just on social media. What a breath of fresh air, then, to witness a ground-level view of public health [...]
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis (2019 photo by Benjamin Ryan) Dr. Demetre Daskalakis has had a swift, visible ascent at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which snatched him away from a successful tenure at New York City's Department of Health after he created the progressive "HIV Status Neutral" program. His very direct, [...]
Tez Anderson and Mark S. King (photo: Derrick Mapp) Tez Anderson is a truth-bomb talking poster boy of long-term HIV survival. As one of the founders of the Let’s Kick ASS (AIDS Survival Syndrome) program, he advocates ferociously for the needs and visibility of aging people living with HIV. Tez and I both [...]
Clockwise from top left: Attendees at "For F#cks Sake;" with survivor Tez Anderson; a massage in the 'Positive Lounge;' a reveler at 'No Pants No Problem;' the monkeypox protest; with activist Jade Elektra. If you know anything about me, it’s that I’m not a clinician or researcher. I leave those stories to people [...]
There was something more than the typical passion on display when activists stormed the plenary stage at AIDS2022 today to protest the slow monkeypox response by United States public health officials. The cries of the diverse crowd of protestors were urgent and inflammatory. Their demands felt deeply personal. During a plenary session on monkeypox epidemiology [...]
When Jessica Whitbread was twenty years old, her physician told her after her HIV diagnosis that she had maybe twenty years to live. She responded to the news by getting involved with a number of HIV-related causes, including the International Community of Women Living with HIV (ICW). Before long, Jessica realized there simply weren’t spaces [...]
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