Hiv Positive Quotes

A planet without AIDS is possible, but to create that planet we must do away with the vestiges of the old planet where testing positive to the HIV virus effectively relegates an individual to the subclass of Human society

AIDS would have claimed fewer lives if we had publicly recommended what I wish to call ‘The Presumption of Sickness,’ i.e., the principle that whomever we are about to sleep with is HIV-positive until proven HIV-negative.

Being HIV positive doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to die before each and every person who is HIV negative.

The more different someone seems from us, the more unreal they may feel to us. We can too easily ignore or dismiss people when they are of a different race or religion, when they come from a different socioeconomic “class.” Assessing them as either superior or inferior, better or worse, important or unimportant, we distance ourselves. Fixating on appearances—their looks, behavior, ways of speaking—we peg them as certain types. They are HIV positive or an alcoholic, a leftist or fundamentalist, a criminal or power monger, a feminist or do-gooder. Sometimes our typecasting has more to do with temperament—the person is boring or narcissistic, needy or pushy, anxious or depressed. Whether extreme or subtle, typing others makes the real human invisible to our eyes and closes our heart.

In a section of The Vaccine Book titled “Is it your social responsibility to vaccinate your kids?” Dr. Bob asks, “Can we fault parents for putting their own child’s health ahead of that of the kids around him?” This is meant to be a rhetorical question, but Dr. Bob’s implied answer is not mine. In another section of the book, Dr. Bob writes of his advice to parents who fear the MMR vaccine, “I also warn them not to share their fears with their neighbors, because if too many people avoid the MMR, we’ll likely see the disease increase significantly.” I do not need to consult an ethicist to determine that there is something wrong there, but my sister clarifies my discomfort. “The problem is in making a special exemption just for yourself,” she says. This reminds her of a way of thinking proposed by the philosopher John Rawls: Imagine that you do not know what position you are going to hold in society—rich, poor, educated, insured, no access to health care, infant, adult, HIV positive, healthy immune system, etc.—but that you are aware of the full range of possibilities. What you would want in that situation is a policy that is going to be equally just no matter what position you end up in. “Consider relationships of dependence,” my sister suggests. “You don’t own your body—that’s not what we are, our bodies aren’t independent. The health of our bodies always depends on choices other people are making.” She falters for a moment here, and is at a loss for words, which is rare for her. “I don’t even know how to talk about this,” she says. “The point is there’s an illusion of independence.

Some men would not still be HIV negative or alive, if they had managed to sleep with some of the women with whom they want or wanted to have sex.

Some people have contracted HIV during their separate endeavours to give someone or some people a curable STD.

There is something cathartic about what has happened to me during this stay in hospital. I’ve heard others say that coming face to face with your own mortality can have this effect. You look with harsh, savage eyes at the life you are living and resolve to make the best of the time you have left, if you can be allowed the luxury of a few extra years to fulfill your plans. Around me, I see an urgency creep into the lives of friends once they have an AIDS diagnosis: they rush out and try to complete as many life projects as they can, before their health deteriorates.

Even as I worried, I admired her strength and unwillingness to give in to the virus in her blood. "I'm fighting to show that I can still succeed," she told me once. "An HIV-positive person is not a disable person. I still have my dreams.

November 2, 1984 was an especially tragic day in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/AIDS epidemic. That was the day Anthony Fauci became the Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (NIAID). (Good Intentions p.128) It was the day a thin-skinned, physically ultra-diminutive man with a legendary Napoleonic attitude was positioned by destiny to become the de facto AIDS Czar. In the fog of culpability that constitutes what could be called "Holocaust II" one thing is clear: the buck, on its way to the very top of the government, at least pauses at the megalomaniac desk of Anthony Fauci.

The cure for HIV?” “In 2007, a man named Timothy Ray Brown, known later as the Berlin patient, was cured of HIV. Brown was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His HIV-positive status complicated his treatment. During chemotherapy, he battled sepsis, and his physicians had to explore less traditional approaches. His hematologist, Dr. Gero Hutter, decided on a stem cell therapy: a full bone marrow transplant. Hutter actually passed over the matched bone marrow donor for a donor with a specific genetic mutation: CCR5-Delta 32. CCR5-Delta 32 makes cells immune to HIV.” “Incredible.” “Yes. At first, we thought the Delta 32 mutation must have arisen during the Black Death in Europe—about four to sixteen percent of Europeans have at least one copy. But we’ve traced it back further. We thought perhaps smallpox, but we’ve found Bronze Age DNA samples that carry it. The mutation’s origins are a mystery, but one thing is certain: the bone marrow transplant with CCR5-Delta 32 cured both Brown’s leukemia and HIV. After the transplant, he stopped taking his antiretrovirals and has never again tested positive for HIV.

In the window were displayed the covers of several pornographic videos. “The Story of O-Positive,” Armod said aloud. “I don’t understand. Is that like HIV positive?” “Idiot,” Mordr said, slapping Armod lightly upside the head. “Ah, but I am in the mood for good literature,” Ivak said with a grin. “How about these? A Tale of Two Vampyres. The Stakes of Wrath. Or that one.” He pointed to the left. “Great Neckspectations.” “I still don’t understand.” Armod was frowning, although his white skin did color when he craned his head from side to side and realized what one of the pictures depicted. “Now me, I always did like a good classic mystery movie,” Sigurd added, also grinning. “A Tomb with a View.” Vikar worried that they were embarrassing Alex, but then she said, “My favorite is Vlad Really Did Impale Her.” His brothers glanced at him, then Alex, and burst out laughing. “Mayhap I will not kill her after all,” Mordr declared, giving Alex a wink that did not sit well with Vikar. Not one bit. “Can we buy some?” Armod asked.

Guantánamo has a long and ugly history. Ten years ago, the military prison in Guantánamo was employed as the world’s only detention center for refugees who were HIV-positive. In 1993, Hatian prisoners conducted a hunger strike to protest their detention and vast numbers of people in the U.S. joined the fast as a gesture of solidarity. But you are referring to the outlaw military prison where initially anything was possible because the U.S. government believed that a facility that is outside the U.S. could also be outside the reach of U.S. law.

To understand my doctor’s error, let’s employ Bayes’s method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we’ll get a more accurate result if we employ a bit of additional relevant information about me and consider only heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who have taken the test. (We’ll see later what kind of difference this makes.) Now that we know whom to include in the sample space, let’s classify the members of the space. Instead of boy and girl, here the relevant classes are those who tested positive and are HIV-positive (true positives), those who tested positive but are not positive (false positives), those who tested negative and are HIV-negative (true negatives), and those who tested negative but are HIV-positive (false negatives). Finally, we ask, how many people are there in each of these classes? Suppose we consider an initial population of 10,000. We can estimate, employing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that in 1989 about 1 in those 10,000 heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who got tested were infected with HIV.6 Assuming that the false-negative rate is near 0, that means that about 1 person out of every 10,000 will test positive due to the presence of the infection. In addition, since the rate of false positives is, as my doctor had quoted, 1 in 1,000, there will be about 10 others who are not infected with HIV but will test positive anyway. The other 9,989 of the 10,000 men in the sample space will test negative. Now let’s prune the sample space to include only those who tested positive. We end up with 10 people who are false positives and 1 true positive. In other words, only 1 in 11 people who test positive are really infected with HIV.

Social science now tells us that if we can take indigent girls between the ages of 10 and 14 and give them a basic education, we can change the fabric of an entire community. If we can capture them in that fleeting window, great social advances can be achieved. Give enough young girls an education and per capita income will go up; infant mortality will go down; the rate of economic growth will increase; the rate of HIV/AIDS infection will fall. Child marriages will be less common; child labor, too. Better farming practices will be put into place, which means better nutrition will follow, and overall family health in that community will climb. Educated girls, as former World Bank official Barbara Herz has written, tend to insist that their children be educated. And when a nation has smaller, healthier, better-educated families, economic productivity shoots up, environmental pressures ease, and everyone is better-off. As Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard University president, put it: “Educating girls may be the single highest return investment available in the developing world.” Why is that? Well, you can make all the interpretations you like; you can posit the gendered arguments; but the numbers do not lie.

It would be a mistake to imagine that drug companies are the only people applying pressure for fast approvals. Patients can also feel they are being deprived of access to drugs, especially if they are desperate. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s the key public drive for faster approvals came from an alliance forged between drug companies and AIDS activists such as ACT UP. At the time, HIV and AIDS had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and young, previously healthy gay men were falling ill and dying in terrifying numbers, with no treatment available. We don’t care, they explained, if the drugs that are currently being researched for effectiveness might kill us: we want them, because we’re dying anyway. Losing a couple of months of life because a currently unapproved drug turned out to be dangerous was nothing, compared to a shot at a normal lifespan. In an extreme form, the HIV-positive community was exemplifying the very best motivations that drive people to participate in clinical trials: they were prepared to take a risk, in the hope of finding better treatments for themselves or others like them in the future. To achieve this goal they blocked traffic on Wall Street, marched on the FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and campaigned tirelessly for faster approvals.

My Voice by Paul Stephen Lynch Why was I born? What is my purpose here on this earth? Is there more out there after this life ends? At some point we all ask ourselves these questions. I can tell you with absolute certainty that for me, the answer to all three of these questions is… “I don’t know”. However, what I do know is that while I am here I am meant to learn from my mistakes, to grow through my pain, and to evolve. What will I be changed into? Again, I do not know. Perhaps I will become someone who is more courageous, more charitable, more peaceful, more dignified, more honest and more loving. I am very hopeful but nothing in life is guaranteed. Although, I have discovered that speaking from my heart and telling my truth is an integral part of my transformation. It is my voice. In those times in my life when I have experienced great pain – sadness, loss, conflict or depression – those have been the times that have brought me closest to this transformation. I recently realized that pain is one of the few things that seems to really get my attention and that I have spent a lot of my time just coasting down life’s path. Perhaps this is the reason why I seem to grow the most during the hard times, even though it often takes all the energy I can muster just to get through them. Quite a few years ago, while I was visiting a friend who was dying from AIDS, I saw a tapestry on the hospital wall that read: The Chinese word for “crisis” has two characters. One stands for danger; the other for opportunity. The times in my life that have been the most difficult have quite often proven to be my best opportunities for growth; to get closer to becoming the person I am meant to be. Of course, this doesn’t mean that painful circumstances ~ like HIV and AIDS ~ are good things or that they are in any way “all for the best” ~ or, that they even make any kind of sense. It just means that I know that there is always the possibility that something positive can ultimately come out of that which is incredibly bad. However, change does not happen in seclusion and I will likely need help from friends, family, teachers and even from people I do not know at all For me to continue moving closer to becoming the person I was born to be, I first needed to accept who I am. For me, that was relatively easy (easy does not mean painless mind you) and it happened at the unusually young age of twelve. The second step to transforming my life means I need to tell others the truth about who I am. I have been doing this ever since my personal acceptance occurred. As a result, I have learned that there will always be those people who cannot be trusted with the truth. There are also those who will simply never be able to understand my truth no matter what anyone says to them. However, others will hear the truth very clearly, understand it completely, and even care greatly. Moreover, I can hear, I understand, and I care. I have also learned that there are times when it is better to be silent. Sometimes words are just not necessary… Like when I am sharing with someone who already knows my heart. And then there are times when words are pointless… like when I have already spoken my truth to someone, yet they are simply not capable of hearing what it is that I am saying. This is when I need to find other ears. Sometimes, a silent sign of love is the best way, or even the only way that I can express myself. However, at those times, my silence is a choice that I am making. It is not being forced on me by fear or shame… and I will never let it be because… it is MY voice!

Every morning I say, “Thank YOU,” and I call a meeting with my committee of Angels. I assign them jobs: Dear Angel … Look after the young single mother in labor. Angel of strength … PLEASE comfort the young father who just found out he is HIV positive. Angels … One of you go to his wife, and make sure she does not get infected. Safety Angel … Please make sure my son wears his helmet on the motorbike. Angel of money … Make sure we can pay the bills for the clinic. Hand-washing Angels, Tooth-brushing Angels, Street-crossing Angels … Look after my grandchildren. Milk Angels … Help the mothers to breastfeed their babies. Angels of Midwives … Look after the birth-keepers. Angels of Peace … Please don’t give up!

Unless I'm working for Diddy, holding that umbrella, I ain't no one's assistant....

This is not promiscuity on my part, not at its roots; more that so few women will make concessions to the HIV-positive male that I am forced to do far more than my share.

We serve a hard, edgy crowd. Nearly all the women are black. Few make much effort with appearances any more. Most arrive with hair mashed and twisted, in unwashed sweatshirts and dirty jeans. There is grime under their cracked, badly painted nails. A handful have white teeth, but most passed long ago from yellow to brown. Several have problems with drugs. A few are quite obviously HIV-positive. The women drag themselves through the line like forgotten spirits shuffling off toward the River Styx. They are neither enthusiastic nor reluctant, neither fatalistic nor indignant. They are, for the most part, utterly without affect. They do not grin, cry, laugh, complain. They are merely present. In college, we would-be revolutionaries pretended that the oppressed would one day rise as a mighty army to smite the capitalists, overthrow the system, and establish a truly just society. Well, here are a couple of dozen of the most oppressed people in America, all lined up for their food, and the greatest passion they are able to summon is for brief but heated argument over who got the larger portion. Half may be dead in two years. If not for the hopeful, innocent beauty of their children, who still return a smile for a smile, I probably could not bear to come at all.

found to be HIV positive. Now Mrs. G. is showing signs of sepsis. On a large piece of paper, Day displays the questions that will focus the discussion for the entire class period: • What are your concerns about this patient? • What is the cause of the concern? • What information do you need? • What are you going to do about it? • What is Mrs. G. experiencing? Using

Not everyone who has killed themselves because they were HIV positive would have been killed by AIDS.

Queesha even cried. I felt so bad for her. I heard that she really wanted to give Chris children, but with her being HIV positive, it made it scary.

It was her concern and commitment to a friend which last year involved her in perhaps the most emotional period of her life. For five months she secretly helped to care for Adrian Ward-Jackson who had discovered that he was suffering from AIDS. It was a time of laughter, joy and much sorrow as Adrian, a prominent figure in the world of art, ballet and opera, gradually succumbed to his illness. A man of great charisma and energy, Adrian initially found it difficult to come to terms with his fate when in the mid-1980s he was diagnosed as HIV positive. His word as deputy chairman of the Aids Crisis Trust, where he first met the Princess, had made him fully aware of the reality of the disease. Finally he broke the news in 1987 to his great friend Angela Serota, a dancer with the Royal Ballet until a leg injury cut short her career and now prominent in promoting dance and ballet. For much of the time, Angela, a woman of serenity and calm practicality, nursed Adrian, always with the support of her two teenage daughters. He was well enough to receive a CBE at Buckingham Palace in March 1991 for his work in the arts--he was a governor of the Royal Ballet, chairman of the Contemporary Arts Society and a director of the Theatre Museum Association--and it was at a celebratory lunch held at the Tate Gallery that Angela first met the Princess. In April 1991 Adrian’s condition deteriorated and he was confined to his Mayfair apartment where Angela was in almost constant attendance. It was from that time that Diana made regular visits, once even brining her children Princes Willian and Harry. From that time Angela and the Princess began to forge a supportive bond as they cared for their friend. Angela recalls: “I thought she was utterly beautiful in a very profound way. She has an inner spirit which shines forth though there was also a sense of pervasive unhappiness about her. I remember loving the way she never wanted me to be formal.” When Diana brought the boys to see her friends, a reflection of her firmly held belief that her role as mother is to bring them up in a way that equips them for every aspect of life and death, Angela saw in William a boy much older and more sensitive than his years. She recalls: “He had a mature view of illness, a perspective which showed awareness of love and commitment.” At first Angela kept in the background, leaving Diana alone in Adrian’s room where they chatted about mutual friends and other aspects of life. Often she brought Angela, whom she calls “Dame A”, a gift of flowers or similar token. She recalls: “Adrian loved to hear about her day-to-day work and he loved too the social side of life. She made him laugh but there was always the perfect degree of understanding, care and solicitude. This is the point about her, she is not just a decorative figurehead who floats around on a cloud of perfume.” The mood in Mount Street was invariably joyous, that sense of happiness that understands about pain. As Angela says: “I don’t see death as sad or depressing. It was a great journey he was going on. The Princess was very much in tune with that spirit. She also loved coming for herself, it was an intense experience. At the same time Adrian was revitalized by the healing quality of her presence.” Angela read from a number of works by St. Francis of Assisi, Kahil Gibran and the Bible as well as giving Adrian frequent aromatherapy treatments. A high spot was a telephone call from Mother Teresa of Calcutta who also sent a medallion via Indian friends. At his funeral they passed Diana a letter from Mother Teresa saying how much she was looking forward to meeting her when she visited India. Unfortunately Mother Teresa was ill at that time so the Princess made a special journey to Rome where she was recuperating. Nonetheless that affectionate note meant a great deal to the Princess.

Never had she met a man that was willing to continue to talk to her after—not only telling him she had a child—but that she was HIV positive.

They’d tried automatically generating the stories in response to the figures but had ended up with nonsense—one scenario suggested by the computer was that a gang of toddlers had terrorised a war veteran with a syringe full of HIV positive blood.

Case in point: Byrdie, the son growing effortlessly into lifelong boyhood. Still a schoolboy, soon to be an old boy, blithely accepting accidents as privileges—for instance, his natural immunity to HIV. (Byrdie liked studious, upper-class females. They were not exactly high risk.) Byrdie was the phoenix edition of Lee, adapted to the novel environment, and Lee was a useless relic. He had positioned himself all his life as a rebel against a hegemonic order no one was interested in questioning anymore. It had lost its power to crush and all its clumsy weapons that inspired active fear. Its dominance was equal, but separate.

Other research continues to prove how our immune systems benefit from mindfulness. In another study of how mindfulness can improve health, UCLA researchers worked with HIV-positive adults in the Los Angeles area. Over the course of an eight-week MBSR training, just like the one given to the Promega employees and the one I took in New York, the Los Angeles group did not change their HIV treatment in any way except for meditation. And yet something dramatic happened. The CD4+ T cells, which are the so-called brains of the immune system, and the ones targeted by HIV, stopped deteriorating in the group that practiced mindfulness.

Today, the contraceptive sheath is used for seduction. `He seeks to seduce her, she resists, he brings out his condom, she falls into his arms.' She would, in the past, have been seduced by the erection; now, she is seduced by the protection. A step further, and being HIV positive [séropositif] will be seductive in itself (`This product can damage your health' serves almost as an advertising slogan). We have seen on our walls and our buses: `I'm HIV positive -- will you come to the dining hall with me? (say yes!)'; `Im a mongol -- will you come and play with me?`; Sero is beautiful. The direst thing becomes an advertising statement. A new moral order, a new conviviality based on this marvellous legitimacy of difference, even when it is the difference of the negative and the lack of living.

that the opinion is a nonrational one.” (All quotes are from the frontispiece of Rethinking AIDS) Root-Bernstein subsequently backed away from his position challenging HIV,

These changes have been steadily eroding the barrier between scholarship and activism. It used to be considered a failure of teaching or scholarship to work from a particular ideological standpoint. The teacher or scholar was expected to set aside her own biases and beliefs in order to approach her subject as objectively as possible. Academics were incentivized to do so by knowing that other scholars could—and would—point out evidence of bias or motivated reasoning and counter it with evidence and argument. Teachers could consider their attempts at objectivity successful if their students did not know what their political or ideological positions were. This is not how Social Justice scholarship works or is applied to education. Teaching is now supposed to be a political act, and only one type of politics is acceptable—identity politics, as defined by Social Justice and Theory. In subjects ranging from gender studies to English literature, it is now perfectly acceptable to state a theoretical or ideological position and then use that lens to examine the material, without making any attempt to falsify one’s interpretation by including disconfirming evidence or alternative explanations. Now, scholars can openly declare themselves to be activists and teach activism in courses that require students to accept the ideological basis of Social Justice as true and produce work that supports it.38 One particularly infamous 2016 paper in Géneros: Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies even favorably likened women’s studies to HIV and Ebola, advocating that it spread its version of feminism like an immune-suppressing virus, using students-turned-activists as carriers.39

In Greece, a 2012 measure allows police to “detain people suspected of being HIV positive and force them to be tested.” The measure also urges landlords to evict tenants who are HIV positive (to counter a perceived “public health threat”).27

The label finally decided I needed media training after I did an interview with the CBS Early Show at the Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day, a concert that kicks off the U.S. Open every year in August. I have to admit that I did not know who Arthur Ashe was. Now I know he was one of the greatest tennis players in the world and the first African American man to win Wimbledon. When he came out as HIV positive in 1992, he created an impact that lasted long beyond his death a year later. But back then, I just showed up and sang where people told me to. 98 Degrees was going to perform, so I was excited to sing with Nick again. I barely knew who any of the tennis players were, even Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. During the interview before the concert, the tennis players and us singers stood off-stage, and we were each asked what it meant to be there to celebrate Arthur Ashe’s impact. “I’m just so proud to be here and to give back,” I said, and then turned to Andre Agassi. “This is such a great event you put on.” Andre’s eyes widened in a look of “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Everyone, including the news crew, realized I thought Andre was Arthur Ashe. The late Arthur Ashe.

While working in a genito-urinary medicine clinic I saw a significant number of young men—some in their teens—who engaged in frequent unprotected sex because they wanted to contract HIV. This was at a time when HIV was almost exclusively associated with homosexuality, the development of AIDS and premature death. For many reasons, mostly social and cultural, HIV had become mixed up with sexual politics and notions of selfhood. These young men wanted to be HIV-positive to strengthen their sense of being gay and acquire status within the wider gay community. Many of them achieved their aim —and subsequently died.

We talk about the rampant homelessness among us, the hunger, the isolation. And then this young brother says he doesn’t expect he has long to live. He tells us he is 18 and has been diagnosed HIV positive and with that there is a grief in the room that cannot be contained. We grieve for him and we grieve because if we weren’t aware of it before, now we cannot turn away: we live in a world where hatred is so deep that adults are fine ensuring death sentences for us young people who have done nothing but be in the world who we were born to be.

Today negative has become the new positive.

South Africa presently has the highest number of people living with HIV in the world; 7 million South Africans in a population of 48 million are HIV-positive, for a prevalence rate of 12.9 percent—a figure that rises to 18 percent if one excludes children.

Mbeki’s government, however, refused to distribute antiretroviral medication to pregnant women who were HIV-positive.

Invasion of the bloodstream by HIV is followed by an incubation period of six to eight weeks that leads to a “primary infection” that lasts about a month. Often, the primary infection is asymptomatic and unknown to the patient, who nevertheless undergoes seroconversion, meaning that HIV antibodies reach detectable levels and the patient becomes HIV-positive.

The South African government reported in 2014 that girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen were seven times more likely to be HIV-positive than boys, with comparative prevalence rates of 5.6 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively.

In 2000, 6 million South Africans—or one in eight people—were HIV-positive, and seventeen hundred additional people were infected daily. At that time of crisis Mbeki’s government, far from providing leadership and support for the campaign against AIDS, argued that the disease was a secondary problem. It was, the South African president claimed in a speech at Fort Hare University in 2001, a myth propagated by Eurocentric racists who wished to portray Africans as “germ-carriers, human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its passions to reason.”9 Playing the “race card” for all it was worth, in an April 2000 five-page letter to President Bill Clinton and others, he accused Western leaders of a “campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism” akin to “racist apartheid tyranny.

At the 2002 International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Bill had a conversation with Nelson Mandela about the urgent need to lower the price of HIV/AIDS drugs in Africa and across the world. Bill figured he was well positioned to help, so he began negotiating agreements with drugmakers and governments to lower medicine prices dramatically and to raise the money to pay for it. It worked. More than 11.5 million people in more than seventy countries now have access to cheaper HIV/AIDS treatment. Right now, out of everyone being kept alive by these drugs in developing countries around the world, more than half the adults and 75 percent of the children are benefiting from the Clinton Foundation’s work.

They increased the number of diseases from two to nearly thirty that could be classified as AIDS, and after that they started a global testing program of ‘vulnerable populations,’ which just coincidentally happen to be people not in a position to defend themselves easily. They started to find AIDS everywhere, including in Africa, but including in the United States—and wouldn’t you know, one of the communities they found was the African-American community, and they tested a lot of women and they found a lot of HIV-positive women, and they decided, well, let’s go forward.” —Kary Mullis, winner of 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Most visibly and politically effectual were the twelve large-scale photographs by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin (b. 1961) forming the exhibition Ecce Homo (1998). The photographs depict classical situations in the life of Christ, but they are staged in contemporary settings with obviously gay and lesbian models – naked, in leather gear, transvestites, HIV-positive, etc...

Dr. Fauci’s embellishments quickly made HIV-positives the modern equivalent of lepers. Paranoia of AIDS from nonsexual contact persisted for years. In New York in 1985, for instance, 85 percent of schoolchildren at one public elementary school stayed home during opening week, while hundreds of parents demanded the school system bar any HIV-positive children from attending classes.

I’m talking about people who live in some of our most affluent cities,’ says O’Casey, ‘but they’re driven to live below the earth. People who—for whatever reason—aren’t welcome on the surface: homeless people, addicts, the HIV positive. There are subterranean communities all over the world, in catacombs, sewers and abandoned metros. The Tunnel People in Las Vegas, the Empire of the Dead in Paris, the Rat Tribe in Beijing. A lot of them are proper societies, with electricity and phone lines, even churches and restaurants sometimes. The Rat Tribe in Beijing are mostly migrant workers, some of them brought in to build for the Olympics. The only place they can afford to live is underground, in tunnels and old air-raid shelters.

I’m sure our newcomers appreciate hearing that being diagnosed with HIV is not all doom and gloom.” The leader’s gaze swept over all the others in the circle. “With an attitude like Duncan’s, great things will happen to you. Don’t let the disease define you. Make the disease work for you instead.” An hour later, the meeting was over. John had gotten the opportunity to introduce himself to the group, something he would have preferred to have skipped, but that wasn’t allowed. Everyone must participate in that part; only the question and answer session that followed was optional. He hadn’t mentioned that he used to be a cop, certainly not that he had been fired. He’d just said that he was a private eye and that he would be happy to be their spy if they needed one. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” Linda asked John when they were outside the room and in the hallway, where donuts and coffee and tea were served. Most of the participants milled around there, connecting with each other. John shrugged and grabbed a jelly donut. “I guess not.” The bespectacled leader named Robert came up to them then. He was on the short side and had an emaciated face with delicate features. He stuck out a bony hand toward John. John took it and gave it a firm shake. “John, it’s so nice to have you join us today,” Robert said with a broad smile that displayed big, graying teeth. Robert was HIV-positive as well, and in the chronic HIV stage. “Thank you for having me,” John said and returned the smile as best he could. “It’s been very…educational. I’m glad I came.” “Great,” Robert said, then his attention went to Linda. “Thanks for bringing your friend, Linda. And for coming again yourself.” “Oh, of course,” Linda said and smiled. Her hazel eyes glittered with warmth. “It’s a great group and you’re a great leader.” “Thank you. That’s so kind of you to say.” Robert tossed a glance over his shoulder, then leaned in toward John and Linda. “I just wanted to apologize for Doris.” “Apologize?” Linda repeated. “What did she do?” “Well, for starters, she’s not 33. She’s 64 and has been infected for thirty years. She’s also a former heroin addict and prostitute. She likes to pretend that she’s someone else entirely, and because we don’t want to upset her, we humor her. We pretend she’s being truthful when she talks about herself. I’d appreciate it if you help us keep her in the dark.” That last sentence had a tension to it that the rest of Robert’s words hadn’t had. It was almost like he’d warned them not to go against his will, or else. Not that it had been necessary to impress that on either John or Linda. John especially appreciated the revelation. Maybe having HIV was not as gruesome as Doris had made it seem then. Six Yvonne jerked awake when the phone rang. It rang and rang for several seconds before she realized where she was and what was going on. She pushed herself up on the bed and glanced around for the device. When she eventually spotted it on the floor beside the bed, it had stopped ringing. Even so, she rolled over on her side and fished it up to the bed. Crossing her legs Indian-style, she checked who had called her. It was Gabe, which was no surprise. He was the only one who had her latest burner number. He had left her a voicemail. She played it. “Mom, good news. I have the meds. Jane came through. Where do you want me to drop them off? Should I come to the motel? Call me.” Exhilaration streamed through her and she was suddenly wide awake. She made a fist in the air. Yes! Finally something was going their way. Now all they had to do was connect without Gabe leading the cops to her. She checked the time on the ancient clock radio on the nightstand. It was past six o’clock. So she must have slept

SHORTLY AFTER HE BECAME vice president–elect of the United States in November 2016, Mike Pence attended a performance of the Broadway musical Hamilton. Created and composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, an artist of Puerto Rican descent, and with an openly gay, HIV-positive actor as Miranda’s alternate for the role of Alexander Hamilton, the musical is the embodiment of the American dream, fluid-style. It rewrites the founding of American history as a racially complex, multicultural tale. Its meter is rap music. It’s about a New Yorker, by a New Yorker, and, of course, became a worldwide sensation in New York. So when the audience booed the culturally conservative former governor of red Indiana after his presence in the theater was acknowledged, it was as perfect a storm as one could conjure in the age of the worldview divide.

In 1992, the U.S. Congress funded an Office of Alternative Medicine, which seven years later became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), still associated with the prestigious National Institutes of Health. In the two decades ending in 2012, the government sank $2 billion into NCCAM. Despite that huge expenditure, the center has never produced one bit of evidence for the value of “alternative medicine”—and that includes acupuncture, reiki, and various forms of spiritual healing. (The joke among advocates of scientific medicine is “What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.”) The work funded by NCCAM included studies on the effects of “distance healing”—including prayer—on HIV and glioblastoma (brain cancer), on coffee enemas as a palliative for cancer, and on magnetic mattress pads as cures for arthritis. None of these studies gave positive results; indeed, many of their results haven’t even been published.

Wall Street: I’d start carrying guns if I were you.      Your annual reports are worse fiction than the screenplay for Dude, Where’s My Car?, which you further inflate by downsizing and laying off the very people whose life savings you’re pillaging. How long do you think you can do that to people? There are consequences. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But inevitably. Just ask the Romanovs. They had a nice little setup, too, until that knock at the door.      Second, Congress: We’re on to your act.      In the middle of the meltdown, CSPAN showed you pacing the Capitol floor yapping about “under God” staying in the Pledge of Allegiance and attacking the producers of Sesame Street for introducing an HIV-positive Muppet. Then you passed some mealy-mouthed reforms and crowded to get inside the crop marks at the photo op like a frat-house phone-booth stunt.      News flash: We out here in the Heartland care infinitely more about God-and-Country issues because we have internal moral-guidance systems that make you guys look like a squadron of gooney birds landing facedown on an icecap and tumbling ass over kettle. But unlike you, we have to earn a living and can’t just chuck our job responsibilities to march around the office ranting all day that the less-righteous offend us. Jeez, you’re like autistic schoolchildren who keep getting up from your desks and wandering to the window to see if there’s a new demagoguery jungle gym out on the playground. So sit back down, face forward and pay attention!      In summary, what’s the answer?      The reforms laws were so toothless they were like me saying that I passed some laws, and the president and vice president have forgotten more about insider trading than Martha Stewart will ever know.      Yet the powers that be say they’re doing everything they can. But they’re conveniently forgetting a little constitutional sitcom from the nineties that showed us what the government can really do when it wants to go Starr Chamber. That’s with two rs.      Does it make any sense to pursue Wall Street miscreants any less vigorously than Ken Starr sniffed down Clinton’s sex life? And remember, a sitting president actually got impeached over that—something incredibly icky but in the end free of charge to taxpayers, except for the $40 million the independent posse spent dragging citizens into motel rooms and staring at jism through magnifying glasses. But where’s that kind of government excess now? Where’s a coffee-cranked little prosecutor when you really need him?      I say, bring back the independent counsel. And when we finally nail you stock-market cheats, it’s off to a real prison, not the rich guys’ jail. Then, in a few years, when the first of you start walking back out the gates with that new look in your eyes, the rest of the herd will get the message pretty fast.

Thabo Mbeki, then the president of South Africa, seized on the idea that AIDS was caused not by a virus but by other factors, such as malnourishment and poor health, and so he rejected offers of drugs and other forms of assistance to combat HIV infection in South Africa. By the mid-2000s, his government relented, but not before Mbeki’s fixation on AIDS denialism ended up costing, by the estimates of doctors at the Harvard School of Public Health, well over three hundred thousand lives and the births of some thirty-five thousand HIV-positive children whose infections could have been avoided.1

I, Patrick, am dying. I, Patrick, i am dead. I, Patrick, should not have turned gay. I, Patrick, is a warning to all the homosexuals.

In 2020, on the night of September 21, I died…

physical and mental states of Alzheimer patients' caregivers, cancer patients, and people with HIV; reduces the symptoms of asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and eating disorders; and positively addresses a host of PTSD symptoms. In fact, a recent pilot study of eleven veterans diagnosed with PTSD found that after a dozen sessions of narrative therapy, not only did over half of the veterans experience a clinically significant reduction of PTSD symptoms, but a quarter of them no longer met the criteria for PTSD.

If today is your past come tomorrow, then make your past your future of today.

Preparing to minister to HIV-positive people in South Africa forced me to face many fears. It revealed areas in which I was not trusting God. At the time, South Africa was the AIDS hotspot of the world. Fueling the spread was a common belief among the Zulu tribe that having sex with a virgin could cure a person from AIDS. Since no one knew who the virgins were, South Africa had the highest rape rate and child/infant rape rate in the world. And we would be ministering in the townships that caused the brunt of those statistics.

According to CDC estimates, approximately one-third of HIV-positives in the United States do not know their status.104 If this is the case, Harvey Bialy points out, there should be a huge number of people dying suddenly of AIDS.

According to CDC estimates, approximately one-third of HIV-positives in the United States do not know their status.104 If this is the case, Harvey Bialy points out, there should be a huge number of people dying suddenly of AIDS. This is not happening. In fact, the vast majority of those who test positive for HIV remain healthy for years. Duesberg and other critics argued that there is meager proof that people with HIV alone will not live a normal life span.105