B.T.W.
Blue Shift The battle between the “red” and “blue” states took a turn when Massachusetts hired some billboards in Texas and Florida to promote the Commonwealth while subtly criticizing…More
Browsing: AIDS
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Intrigue at AIDS, Inc.
Death in the Sauna exposes the political, financial, and international world of AIDS research, showing that not all such organizations are as altruistic as they appear: greed and corruption rear their ugly heads. It also brings to light the homophobic forces working against these organizations, which force men like Lister to remain in the closet to keep the funding flowing.
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The Grand Story of Gran Fury
It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful makes a compelling case for the significance of Gran Fury’s imagery to the efficacy of ACT UP. Lowery also sees a larger significance: “Maybe the most important lessons from Grand Fury aren’t about AIDS explicitly, or even about pandemics, but rather the ability for this kind of work to sway public opinion, to shape our attitudes, and to change our worldviews.”
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The Dying Years
FIRST LOVE swirls at the center of Christopher Zyda’s memoir, The Storm, followed in short order by illness and death. The book recounts the fifteen-year period from 1983 to 1998, during which the promising UCLA English literature major who had “set my career sights on writing in Hollywood” meets and falls in love with 33-year-old Stephen, “a muscular man with brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and a beautiful smile.” …
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How ACT UP Did It
[Sarah] Schulman states at the outset that her primary purpose in writing Let the Record Show “is not nostalgia, but rather to help contemporary and future activists learn from the past to assist organizing in the present” and to show “that people from all walks of life, working together, can change the world.”
MoreWhat the AIDS Crisis Can Teach Us Now
As I write this, the new coronavirus has appeared in all fifty states and around the world. Numbers of cases are rising rapidly in the U.S., but testing continues to be spotty.
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‘AIDS activism kept me alive.’
BORN IN 1962, Malcom Gregory Scott, is an American writer, activist, and AIDS survivor. As a young man he joined the U.S. Navy, but in 1987 he was discharged for homosexuality. Upon his release, Scott also learned that he tested positive for HIV. A decade later, his battle with AIDS nearly ended his life. Miraculously, with the emergence of protease inhibitors coupled with medical marijuana, he survived, and he survives today.
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Those Posters Were Everywhere
Finkelstein also reminds us that the HIV/AIDS crisis is far from over, analyzing the work of a new generation of queer activists and their responses to narratives around the plague.
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Seasons in Hell
DAVID FRANCE’S HISTORY of AIDS opens with a memorial service for Spencer Cox, an ACT UP activist, to whom we come back in the epilogue. In between are approximately thirteen years of Hell. Although How to Survive a Plague pretty much follows the plot of the documentary film he released four years ago with the same title, the difference between the two is enormous. When the film came out, this reviewer wondered if a book would not give us more nuance, more insight into what people were really thinking in those ACT UP meetings we saw on screen. Well, here is the answer to that wish.
MoreGay Resilience and HIV Prevention
WE HEAR a lot about advances in HIV treatment, the use of Truvada or PrEP to prevent HIV infection for the sexually active, and the latest programs designed to promote safer sex. Largely unreported, however, has been a huge shift toward addressing “upstream” mental health issues—such as depression, substance abuse, or partner violence—because it has finally become clear that gay men who don’t feel good about themselves or their lives are less likely to protect themselves and more likely to take risks.
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