“There is no greater form of stigma than when it is written into our laws.” SERO Project founder Sean Strub made that notable remark years ago, in regard to what he considers one of the great moral issues of our time: the prosecution of people living with HIV for no other reason than the fact [...]
Jeff Berry, newly named director of The Reunion Project The Reunion Project has always held a special place in my aging heart, probably because the national network of long-term HIV/AIDS survivors addresses the very issues relevant to people like me, namely, what the hell will happen to us as we age, and where [...]
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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