June is Pride Month in the LGBT community, and I was honored to be asked by Visual AIDS to curate a "web gallery" on the topic. Immediately, I considered a question that I had once posed to readers of my blog. If living with HIV is nothing to be ashamed of, is it...
This post will never be as romantic as I would like it to be. And it could never be as romantic as the truth. On the evening of July 22, 2012, Michael Mitchell went to a mixer at Cobalt, a gay club in Washington, DC. The international AIDS conference was being held in...
ACT UP has always intimidated me. In the 1980’s, while working at LA Shanti to provide emotional support to those dying of AIDS, I doubted my activist cred while watching the dramatic, inspiring actions of ACT UP. Everyone has a role to play, of course, but I so...
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation scandal has taken a downright creepy turn. Only one day after a stunning whistleblower lawsuit against AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) was made public, the embattled organization withdrew funding from an upcoming HIV advocacy event...
Michael Weinstein, the polarizing and famously litigious head of AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) just got a taste of his own medicine when a stunning Whistleblower lawsuit against AHF filed last year was unsealed and made public. The 34-page suit, brought by three...
It wasn’t easy keeping my composure when I interviewed for my first job for an AIDS agency in 1987. Sitting across from me was Daniel P. Warner, the founder of the first AIDS organization in Los Angeles, LA Shanti. Daniel was achingly beautiful. He had brown eyes as...
The annual HIV Cruise Retreat will set sail this November 8-15 aboard the Ruby Princess, departing Los Angeles and cruising the Mexican Riviera cities of Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas. This year, though, there will be a somewhat ironic special guest on...
Before my interview with activist Sean Strub, author of Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival, let me share a revealing story. It was late 2011 and my life was in shambles. The breakup of a long term relationship had sent me into a spiral,...
For twenty-five years I have been writing about living openly as a gay man living with HIV. Along the way I have spilled secrets, opened up about sex and relationships, highlighted the work of those who inspire me, come clean about my history of addiction and...
One of the times I contracted gonorrhea, which in my day was affectionately called The Clap, I was 20 years old and had just moved to West Hollywood, California. It was 1981, disco was still thumping in the bars, and the bath houses were packed. My dance card...
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