The plague is over, lets party. Article by Elizabeth Pisani describing the troubling consequences of a gay scene in a world where HIV is treatable and AIDS is avoidable.
posted by seanyboy on Jun 2, 2008 - 45 comments

In 1974 - or 1976, depending who you ask - Armistead Maupin began writing "an extended love letter to a magical San Francisco” in the form of a serialized, fictional drama published originally in the Pacific Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, originally called "The Serial" which then became collectively known as Tales of The City. It is a suprisingly beautiful, deep, emotional, cosmopolitan and lasting tale about life in San Francisco in the turbulent, heady days of the 1970s and 1980s. Widely credited with and cherished for helping spread a little of the openess, tolerance and acceptance that San Francisco is now famous for. It then became a series of books - Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You - and lastly, the spin-off tale of Michael Tolliver Lives. Almost exactly twenty years after first publishing, it then became an excellent miniseries from the United Kingdom's Channel 4, which aired in the United States on PBS, but not without protest or limitations. [more inside]
posted by loquacious on May 4, 2008 - 39 comments

HIV is a gay disease.
posted by thirteenkiller on Oct 5, 2006 - 87 comments

Who goes to POZ Parties? Researchers profile HIV-1 positive men who have sex with men (MSM) at so-called "POZ parties": "Predominantly white and over the age of 30, subjects in the sample include a broad range of years living with HIV infection. Motivations for using a POZ Party venue for sexual partnering include relief from burdens for serostatus disclosure, an interest in not infecting others, and opportunities for unprotected sexual exchange. High rates of unprotected sex with multiple partners are prevalent in the venue. Although the sample evidences high rates of lifetime exposure to illicit drugs, relatively little drug use was reported in these sexual environments."
posted by docgonzo on Dec 19, 2005 - 42 comments

Dear Bareback Andy --a response by Signorile to Andrew Sullivan's recent article on HIV--"Still Here, So Sorry"-- how HIV vastly improved his life. (Sullivan also famously and prematurely wrote about the End of Aids in '96)
posted by amberglow on Jun 23, 2005 - 51 comments

HIV prevention efforts are failing. Last year, the discovery of a New York man with a novel form of drug-resistant HIV that rapidly progressed to AIDS caused some to warn of the emergence of a "superbug." The first clinical analysis of the case will be published Saturday in The Lancet (NYT preview); Dr. Martin Markowitz concluded the cause of the rapid progression to AIDS may be incomplete -- but that efforts to prevent the epidemic must be redoubled, especially in light of the growing use of methamphetamines. Dr. Carlos del Rio is blunt: "This is telling us that AIDS prevention programs have been a failure." The Gay Men's Health Crisis agrees.
posted by docgonzo on Mar 17, 2005 - 79 comments

The San Francisco Chronical has an observance on the 10th anniversary of the death of Randy Shilts. His second book, And the Band Played On opened my eyes to the AIDS epidemic, as I am sure it did to a lot of straight people. I was amazed to see him pilloried in the gay press as being a traitor to his "kind." My understanding is that this disfavor arose from his assertion that aspects of the hard-won sexual freedom enjoyed by many gay men were also killing them. Anyone want to weigh in on this?
posted by Danf on Feb 17, 2004 - 25 comments

Frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear the accuser and accused freely speak. In the west, before it was HIV/AIDS, it was GRID, for Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease, or Kaposi Sarcoma-Opportunistic Infection, or simply "gay cancer." But there are other names for it now, where it hits hardest, but no less euphemistic or obscuring. More inside...
posted by Mo Nickels on Dec 1, 2003 - 4 comments

Michael Johnston, a strong voice of the ex-gay movement, falls from grace, admitting he willingly had unprotected sex with men without disclosing his HIV+ status, after appearing in national advertisements to promote the ex-gay movement. One of his strongest supporters, the Concerned Women for America, are calling it a "severe moral failing" and equating homosexuality to alcoholism (i.e., a disease).
posted by archimago on Aug 8, 2003 - 60 comments

Dan Savage takes on the Rolling Stone "bug chasing"/HIV+ gay sex story in his column today, and lambastes one of his favorite sacred cows, Gay Men's Health Crisis and other outreach groups that seem to have a lackadaisical attitude towards their clients' risky behavior. He's written about this before, in the case of Seth Watkins, an HIV+ sex education worker who admitted in the NYTimes he has unprotected casual sex at clubs. Does any of this coverage increase awareness of the still-plenty-big threat of HIV, or does it just make gay men look bad? Respectful discussion within...?
posted by serafinapekkala on Jan 29, 2003 - 42 comments

An AIDS timeline from 1981-2001. As part of an exhibition by the Museum of the City of New York on Gay Men's Health Crisis, one of the first service organizations created to help fight the disease, a very simple interactive timeline was created--just pick a year or browse through them all...from a "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals." (NYT-1981) to "15,000 new HIV infections a day in 1999".
posted by amberglow on Dec 1, 2002 - 0 comments

Great article on the whole Andrew Sullivan and Michael Signoreli fiasco. Finally, a well written viewpoint about the barebacking incident that raised the hackles of gay conservatives and liberals alike.
posted by chason on Jun 8, 2001 - 3 comments

Is this Andrew Sullivan's ass? This morning, Jim Romenesko made a questionable publishing decision. He ran a link to an article in last Friday's edition of the newspaper LGNY, in which Michelangelo Signorile makes a very serious allegation: That Andrew Sullivan has been advertising for "bareback" sex online (anal sex w/o condoms). Such actions on Sullivan's part would be seen by many as exceedingly hypocritical given his voluminous writings of a moral conservative bent and his "arrogance toward the ghettoized gay scene" (as Signorile puts it), if not downright dangerous given his HIV+ status.

If true, this brings up plenty of ideological and moral issues, which I'm sure will be discussed in this thread. But that's not why I'm bringing it up here. I'm posting because of the vaguely Kayceeish nature of the whole thing. If you look at Signorile's article, you'll see that all the evidence is circumstantial. Several people who Signorile really really trust say they answered the ads and Sullivan was the guy that showed up when they met. The photos in the ads look like what most people expect Sullivan's body to look like (minus his head, of course). Also, Sullivan hasn't responded to anyone's questions about this, and after all, if the accusations were false wouldn't Sullivan be loudly denying them (wink wink)?

Complicating the whole mess is Signorile's own journalistic history - he made his name during the late '80s-early '90s running gossipy columns outing famous people against their will - and that Romenesko decided to publicize this article in the first place, thus ensuring that every single person in the national media is fully aware of the allegations, true or not. Is this actual proof that Sullivan is guilty of barebacking, or is he being Borked (Kayceed?)? Should it have been publicized like this in the first place, since a mention in Romenesko is the best way to start up a classic pack journalism action short of running a front-page story in The New York Times? Will other media outlets jump on this now and sully Sullivan's reputation, whether the allegations are true or not?
posted by aaron on May 29, 2001 - 41 comments