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, [...]
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 [...]
The Positive Lounge, for people living with HIV, at AIDS2022 in Montreal The server is dressed in a black bolero jacket, the kind of thing waiters in a fine restaurant might wear, and he is carrying a tray of juices to restock the food table. Clearly, he is conscientious about his work, because [...]
U=U advocates at the AIDS2022 pre-conference event in Montreal The Prevention Access Campaign (PAC) announced that their global effort to educate people that people living with HIV with an undetectable viral load are unable to transmit HIV sexually (known as “undetectable equals untransmittable,” or “U=U”) has now been adopted by the United States [...]
Mark S. King, Brady Dale Etzkorn-Morris, Randy Davis and Linus Ignatius The poutine covering the fries in Brady’s bowl is suspicious. “It’s cheese curd,” Randy offers, and as the lone Canadian among us we figure he should know, but his explanation isn’t reassuring. The four of us, white gay men all, pick through [...]
Years from now, there will be gay men who made it through a case of monkeypox who will have the scars up and down the shaft of their penis to prove it. Let me repeat that. Scars. On their cock. For the rest of their lives. I don’t think there’s a derma-peel that will take [...]
The mainstream media and public health officials are being so damn careful not to label monkeypox “a gay disease” that they’re doing a disservice to the gay men who most need important information about the outbreak – while misleading everybody else. In a July 18th New York Times story of the excruciating symptoms and lack [...]
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