Pose on FX is nothing less than astounding to me. So much could have gone wrong, with the era, the themes, the characters, and – the aspect of the show closest to my heart and my critical eye -- the disease that looms over it all. Trans writers and advocates are better qualified to remark, [...]
A die-in on 5th Avenue during 2019 Pride Weekend in New York City. (photo: Leandro Justin) Our friend Larry Kramer, the godfather of the AIDS activism movement, hasn’t lost his edge. That should surprise no one. In his speech at the Queer Liberation March on Sunday, however, Larry was nearly wistful, reminiscing on [...]
Larry Bryant, Jr., at the Reunion Project in Washington, DC, on June 22, 2019 For many years, I have viewed activist Larry Bryant, Jr. as one of the most highly regarded voices of conscience in the HIV/AIDS movement, and among Black men in particular. At the recent Reunion Project event in Washington, DC, [...]
Jade Elektra performs at the Toronto AIDS Vigil on June 18, 2019. (Bob Leahy) When Toronto drag queen Jade Elektra, aka HIV positive activist Alphonso King, Jr., stepped to the stage of the 2019 Toronto AIDS Vigil on Tuesday night, she knew she had a message. It wasn’t simply that she would become [...]
Jack Thompson, who just won the 2019 International Mr. Leather (IML), is a lot. And he carries it well. Jack is biracial. He’s gay. He’s transgender. He’s extremely kinky, depending on what scale you use to measure such things. Jack is also utterly transparent about all that he is, to a disarming degree. His speech [...]
"It's 3:00am and I have a plane to catch in the morning, people." Fainting is weird, especially the third time it happened during one weekend. By that time, I knew enough to grab a safe spot – the front steps of the house, I had been admiring the blooms in the courtyard – [...]
On Thursday, May 16, 2019, the House Oversight Committee conducted a hearing to try and get to the bottom of the Truvada pricing and patent scandal. They were not messing around. The title of the hearing was, “HIV Prevention Drug: Billions in Corporate Profits after Millions in Taxpayer Investments.” The hearing was the culmination of [...]
Gilead Sciences, the pharmaceutical that makes Truvada, the only FDA-approved drug for PrEP, is having a great week in the public relations department. First, Gilead announced they were surrendering their patent for Truvada a year early, and now Federal officials have announced that Gilead will donate enough Truvada for 200,000 people in the United [...]
Krishna Stone, one of the many women profiled in the book, Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community. My first job in AIDS in the 1980s was at the Los Angeles Shanti Foundation, an organization that provided companions for the dying. When our founding director, Daniel [...]
I’m a Southerner, first and foremost. We love beauty pageants and drag queens. So, the new video series Anal About My Health is right up my (ahem) alley. Produced by MPACT (Global Men’s Health and Human Rights), the cheeky series is based on the actual life experiences of several Bay Area drag personalities. In each [...]
