A retreat being held this summer, known as SoberPoz, will welcome anyone living with HIV who identifies as participating in a program of recovery of some kind. This kind of safe space is terribly important and I want to explain why - and then encourage you to share...
This is a story about how the staff at the very first HIV/AIDS agency in Los Angeles managed to handle the stress of that time without falling apart - and a random, whimsical twist of fate that followed many years later. My first job in the AIDS arena was at the Los...
(This interview between myself and Kerry Thomas appears in the April/May 2024 issue of POZ Magazine.) When Kerry Thomas began serving a 30-year sentence in Idaho for nondisclosure of his HIV-positive status in 2008, becoming a prominent voice for people living with...
When an audience member gives a dollar bill to a drag performer in Oklahoma City, they bow ever so slightly in a kind of reverent curtsy when handing it over. Here at the County Line nightclub on a recent Saturday night, I watch it happen again and again. Maybe it's...
You should know the end of the story first, because the ending demands to be heard. It took place last month in the largest event space at The LGBT Center in New York City, where hundreds of people were excitedly greeting each other, grazing at the food table or...
The students who hang out in the Dr. Jesse R. Peel LGBTQ Center of East Carolina University (ECU) are welcome guests in a dynamic, welcoming space. Among them are all manner of gender expression and burgeoning sexualities. You’ll find them lazing on couches or typing...
As I say in my recent interview for Dennis Hensley’s podcast (“Dennis, Anyone?”), it’s hard to talk about this without sounding like a total dick. But really, when has that ever stopped me before? Dennis has a way of entertaining his audience with zippy one-liners...
(I will never explain the early days of AIDS better then this, so I post this essay to commemorate World AIDS Day every year. This essay, written in 2007 for Southern Voice newspaper, won "Outstanding Opinion Piece" from NLGJA, the national LGBTQ journalism...
Charles Sanchez is one busy New Yorker. There’s the writing he does for nearly all of the major HIV outlets, his regular Instagram show featuring community notables, and then his dashes to the gym to contend with the five pounds, give or take, that continue to mock...
My husband Michael and I were sitting on the front steps of our new home in Atlanta. I tell you this because it is one of those moments that gets seared into your consciousness, one of those Where Were You When moments. Michael was explaining where he wanted to plant...
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