Timothy Ray Brown, the first person to be cured of HIV, died today, Tuesday, September 29, 2020. He delivered messages of hope for the HIV community through social media and interviews until nearly the end of his life. The passing was announced on his Facebook page by...
You know this will be an unusual interview, even for Instagram, when the host brings an enormous glass of wine to his lips and toasts his guest. “Let’s get into it,” Peter Staley says, and in the other chat box, Dr. Anthony Fauci laughs. The smile on the face...
Tim Hoeffgen did a quick google search of his Scruff date as he headed over to meet him. Tim was living in Nevada in early 2013, and the guy he had been chatting with on the dating app looked a lot like the man who was on the cover of the LGBTQ newspaper in Las Vegas...
There are few nights more consequential in the history of gay men than the evening a group of gay men gathered at the home of Larry Kramer more than 35 years ago and began the business of creating the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (now known simply as GMHC). One of the men...
(This essay appears in my collection of essays, My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor, available now at online outlets or your local bookstore.) The ceiling fan isn’t twirling fast enough to cool our bodies, not after the cardio workout we just had. My...
The 2020 GLAAD Award for Outstanding Blog has been awarded to My Fabulous Disease. The GLAAD Awards were established in 1990 to recognize “outstanding representations of the LGBTQ community in media.” Long-term HIV survivor and activist Mark S. King produces all...
My brother Richard will tell you stories about his long-time partner, Emil Matzner, with great enthusiasm. Emil’s endearing quirks, their adventures as a couple, things like that. Richard might even provide details about Emil’s death from AIDS thirty years ago, but...
When POZ Magazine began work producing their online series, “POZ at Home,” editor Oriol Gutierrez came to me with a question. Would I like to come up with something, together with my friend and performer Charles Sanchez, that could be an entertaining coda to their...
The judgment of the social media gods, decreed Monday morning, was withering and furious: the buff gay men on the Fire Island beach over the holiday weekend were nothing less than suicide bombers. Virtuous gays everywhere watched the video posts of these gurls gone...
“I’m just a guy with HIV and a keyboard,” I often say. It’s meant as a pithy remark, sure, but it also feels like I’m somehow diminishing my power, and I won’t do that right now. Today, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association (NLGJA) announced the winners...
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