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....
People living with HIV in Maryland have lost insurance coverage and gone without medication following a December ransomware attack against the state health department that hobbled the Maryland AIDS Drug Assistance Program (MADAP). The health department, meanwhile, has...
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...
The annual GLAAD Media Awards, which “honor media for fair, accurate, and inclusive representations of LGBTQ people and issues,” included several stories, writers, and outlets from the HIV community among their 2022 award nominees. For the first time, POZ Magazine has...
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...
A financial crisis that will curtail hundreds of millions of dollars to HIV clinics and the community-based organizations that run them is coming on January 1, 2022. It’s only weeks away. Meanwhile, our national advocacy groups are essentially frozen into...
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,...
Ultimately, the organizers of the United States Conference on HIV/AIDS (USCHA) ran out of viable options for hosting the largest annual HIV conference in the country as an in-person event. For weeks, as the delta variant of COVID surged and the prospects for...
My sex life in the 1980s before AIDS came along was glorious. My endurance level was Olympian, my sexual response time was faster than a wink from a cute man, and body fluids went flying like they were shot from cannons. Today, I am 60 years old. It’s easy to wonder...
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