There is a moment in a 1982 NBC News television report about the emerging plague that still stops me in my tracks. Keep in mind, the culprit for the mysterious illness and death of so many gay men – the primary cases in this country at that time – was unknown....
In the early 1980s, I was a gay man living in West Hollywood, California, and the AIDS crisis was barely on the horizon. I remember hearing about people dying, maybe a friend of a friend, and thinking to myself, “oh, I think it must happen to really sleazy people....
The Reckoning, a blog site devoted to Black LGBTQ+ voices, has been producing kick-ass content for the last few years. It is also riding high these days, with the recent announcement of its second consecutive GLAAD Media Award nomination, joining previous winners Holy...
Here’s a fun fact. If people had simply stopped having sex in the 1980s, AIDS would have been stopped in its tracks. But we didn’t and it wasn’t. The culprit was basic human need. Even in the face of our own mortality, we reached out to one another and we touched and...
I grew up on Air Force bases. My father was an officer, Colonel Harol R. King, which was a handy thing to mention if the base police caught you lighting firecrackers in the street or running around the golf course like an idiot. Mostly, though, growing up meant...
When the short video “27000” premiered at London Pride in 1996, featuring a live performance from Jimmy Somerville, the world of HIV was a much different place. The new HIV drug "cocktail" that would finally curb the epidemic was only in its first weeks of use, with...
Activist Peter Staley's much-anticipated new memoir, Never Silent, opens with almost unbearable nail-biting suspense, sweeping us into the behind-the-scenes machinations of an ACT UP takeover of the New York Stock Exchange at opening bell. It's legitimately dangerous,...
One of the sunnier, and always inspiring, HIV anti-stigma campaigns in our communmity will hit social media this Wednesday, September 22, when A Day with HIV takes place, and you’re invited. People living with HIV (and our wonderful allies) are invited to snap a photo...
You probably don’t know his name, but you might have heard the name of his most famous “victim.” In 1990, dentist David J. Acer was accused by his patient, Kimberly Bergalis, of infecting her with HIV. It was the start of an onslaught of accusations from Acer’s...
“Where will we dance?” The elderly gay man asks the young queer bartender the question with all sincereity, confused about where gay men will be able to congregate, much less dance, once the small town’s last remaining gay dance club is closed. The criminally young...
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