the past few years the observation of the day has been experienced a kind of renaissance. As the AIDS Free Generation movement has taken hold, and the Berlin Patient, PrEP and other scientific advances in the field of AIDS treatment and prevention, a new hope seems to be inspiring us to rediscover our passion to fight, or at least to make the discussion of AIDS and HIV to return to a place of relevance.
Read MoreIt was unimaginably awful, that moment when I realized my crippling depression was due to the fact that I had a long and healthy life ahead of me. I had spent my life living in acceptance of HIV’s terminal effect on life. I had held that foremost truth in all my life choices. But the rules had changed. I had to live. At least that’s how it felt to me. I had to live a long life. Not I get to, not I want to. I had to.
Read MoreLast week on a sex site, I got a message from a twenty-four year old, that said, “I just read your profile. You have AIDS. You don’t have a chance,” —I assumed he meant a chance with him. I had not attempted to hit on this young man; he offered this message of his own volition, without solicitation. Over the past decade, my experience of comments like this has become increasingly frequent, and this is among the more reasonable unsolicited rejections.
Read MoreIf I wasn’t too busy laughing at him, I might get really upset about Steve Anderson’s incredibly vile and homophobic remarks that suggest an AIDS-free America might be possible if all the gay people were murdered before Christmas. He has single handy given a whole new operational tact to the AIDS Free Generation movement.
Read MoreFirst, this blog entry is meant as an explanation of questions that have haunted me for many years. Even before the current "End of AIDS" debate began, I wondered about the questions I pose here. I skirted with the subject briefly in my novel, but I did not delve as deeply into it as I will here. I want to be very clear that this is an exploration of a personal fears, and some doubts I have about the motives behind much of the debates we see in our community. It is not a suggestion of any one individual's or movement's actual motives.
Read MoreI love life. I love the size and complexity of the world. I love the truth in the old saying, “If you want to make God laugh, make a plan.”
I also HATE that saying.
I hate it because in this world, I must always learn. I can never be sure. I hate it because I must constantly accept that no matter how hard I work, my vision will never be realized. I will never be able to make what exists in my imagination become reality.
Read MoreImagine the shock of this, after I had come of age with a two-year life expectancy. Every few months my expected time on this earth was rounded up a few more months, but the prognosis was always bleak at best. This went on for nearly a decade, almost all of my 20's. And there was no doubt that my health was declining. Recently, I saw a man on a talk show, a leader in the HIV/AIDS community, who described a similar experience, and received a round of applause when he stated his doctors, “Got it wrong.” This bothered me, and I have been struggling with the complexity of what his statement, and the audience’s reaction, really meant. What I have decided is that his statement was inaccurate. If effective treatment had not been discovered in mid-90s, those doctors would have been right. To my mind, the man on the talk show and I were simply lucky, and I don’t like being credited for luck. Perhaps we are both fighters, but we can’t know that’s what saved us, because that spirit did not save many other fighters that I knew. To me it seemed that he, like so many others, is now taking his survival for granted.
Read MoreHow “The Lego Movie” Can Stop AIDS
And fix almost everything wrong with the world!
Last Friday, amongst the fears of what was unfolding regarding the disastrous fate the Malaysian Airlines flight headed for the World AIDS Conference, I stumbled across a guy named Robert Brandon Sandor via Social Media. Sandor’s website is dedicated to the mission of ending HIV through sero-sorting, a term that is used to describe the practice of negative and/or positive people limiting their sexual partners to people of the same status. He has a plan to reach out to youth to take a pledge, which made me laugh, because I grew up in a school with an abstinence club, whose leader was sleeping around and kept the position to fool her parents.
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