Charles Sanchez skips a lot. It is a natural, vivacious skip, an outpouring of unabashed joy that melds the cheerfulness of The Sound of Music with the bliss of the Pharrell Williams "Happy" video. Nothing stands in the way of his delight. Not even life with HIV. It...
The most powerful speaker at the recent "HIV is Not a Crime" conference was a man named Kerry Thomas. He held the crowd of more than 150 advocates spellbound for a full twenty minutes. And he never even took the stage. When one of the conference organizers, Reed...
"Talk to me like you talk to your friends when no one is around." That was my only request when I sat down with each of four HIV negative gay men to create a short film about their lives and attitudes (video below). They held back nothing, sharing details of their sex...
Maybe we should blame the criminal prosecutions of people with HIV on the mythical legend of Gaetan Dugas, also known by his slanderous nickname, Patient Zero. Dugas was a gay flight attendant from Canada who, according to Randy Shilts' 1987 book And the Band Played...
Last night I kissed a straight guy full on the lips. Then he tenderly put his arms around me and kissed me back. Tonight I'm going to do it again. It sounds like conquest. Or breaking a taboo. At the very least it fulfills the fantasies of many a gay man. And it makes...
"Remember when Billy Perry gave you a black eye?" David asked me. He stood on a ladder with a screwdriver in his hand. I was holding up Mom's new light fixture while David attached it to the ceiling. We took on the project during a visit I made back home a few weeks...
If you're considering how to best disclose your HIV positive status to everyone you know, here's one suggestion: learn to sew. Television's long-running reality hit Project Runway could be holding a spot just for you. Over the course of a dozen seasons, the fashion...
The year 2013 was a game changer for My Fabulous Disease, and I want to thank you for your clicks, comments, and shares. I have more confidence as an advocate and a writer, thanks to you, and traffic for this blog more than doubled over last year! I'm bad at...
My most courageous self, the best man that I’ll ever be, lived more than two decades ago during the first years of a horrific plague.
To view young gay men and say, “if only you saw all the AIDS deaths I saw…” disturbs me on all sorts of levels, and it says far more about us than it does about them.
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