Original ACT UP activists Mark Harrington, Peter Staley, Gregg Gonsalves, and Ann Northrup at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on October 11, 2018. The AIDS activists who regularly stormed the homes, offices and even churches of the powerful beginning in the late 1980’s weren’t the only ones who were scared [...]
Very little happens by accident. The most iconic moments in HIV/AIDS activism – the appearance of the early SILENCE=DEATH meme, the footage of AIDS activist Peter Staley being peeled from a building during a protest, the photos of Sen. Jesse Helms’ home wrapped in an enormous condom – were the product of weeks of careful [...]
It is every bit as absurd as it sounds. The International AIDS Society (IAS) plans to hold their global AIDS2020 conference in San Francisco – an insanely expensive and privileged city located in a country that has become dangerously inhospitable to the very populations the IAS claims to serve. Thank goodness for a growing army [...]
Attendees at the "OUT WITH IT" pre-conference of AIDS2018 in Amsterdam. One of the great joys of my HIV/AIDS writing and video blogging over the years has been capturing the sights, sounds, and incredible people of the International AIDS Society’s (IAS) biannual conference. I’ve spent sleepless nights in hotel rooms everywhere from Vienna [...]
Kevin Mack speaks to supporters in Potomac, Maryland The garden party fundraising event last month in Montgomery County, Maryland, had all the usual markers of a political candidate on the rise. Well-dressed children frolicked on the lawn of the stately home while guests helped themselves to finger foods and glasses of wine. Several [...]
Ben Platt and Eric McCormack in Will & Grace, The revived Will & Grace television comedy has some pithy things to say about aging as gay men and our need to create families where we find them. The producers of the show, which is already a hit with audiences and critics, seem to [...]
Anne-christine d'Adesky in her element, at a San Francisco protest. (Photo: Juno Rosenhaus) Anne-christine d’Adesky got arrested, accidentally, long before it happened on purpose during AIDS protests. The Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist was covering civil disobedience at a nuclear facility in 1982 when she was approached by a suspicious policeman. Despite assuring him that [...]
It is coursing through our veins, sustaining life and fighting disease, and yet we fear it. The sight of a few drops can make an adult faint. A bucket of it in a movie is the very definition of horror. Even as Donald Trump contributes his perverted, sexist new layer of blood revulsion (through a [...]
Patrick Mutch, the sunny and earnest new CEO of Chase Brexton Health Care in Baltimore, does not mind addressing the elephant in the room. In his first interview with My Fabulous Disease since being hired after a tumultuous year for the agency, he got right to the point. “We’re changing the culture here,” Mutch promised, [...]
Donald J. Trump and the Republican-controlled congress are a threat to everything HIV advocates have been fighting for during the last thirty years, and that includes access to healthcare, HIV prevention programs like PrEP, and the dignity with which we treat those who are most vulnerable to HIV infection. This new political reality is reflected in [...]
