APRIL 2018 • ISSUE 282 • AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE
CHARACTER STUDIES
• Filmmaker & Photographer Larry Clark • Pushing Dead Director Tom E. Brown • Still At Risk Playwright Tim Pinckney • Documentarian Denny Tedesco
*plus
• Radiant Health • Epic Black Voices • Joseph F. Delgado • Kiara St. James
chloë
SEVIGNY Takes Creative Risks to Empower Others
WHAT’S YOUR STORY GOING TO BE? INTRODUCING BIKTARVY® Ask your healthcare provider if BIKTARVY is right for you.
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BIKTARVY.com Please see Brief Summary of Patient Information with important warnings on the adjacent pages.
Do not take BIKTARVY if you also take a medicine that contains: `` dofetilide
Brief Summary of Patient Information about BIKTARVY® BIKTARVY (bik-TAR-vee) (bictegravir, emtricitabine, and tenofovir alafenamide) tablets Important: Ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist about medicines that should not be taken with BIKTARVY. For more information, see “What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking BIKTARVY?”
What is the most important information I should know about BIKTARVY? BIKTARVY can cause serious side effects, including: `` Worsening of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. If you have an HBV infection and take BIKTARVY, your HBV may get worse (flare-up) if you stop taking BIKTARVY. A “flare-up” is when your HBV infection suddenly returns in a worse way than before. • Do not run out of BIKTARVY. Refill your prescription or talk to your healthcare provider before your BIKTARVY is all gone. • Do not stop taking BIKTARVY without first talking to your healthcare provider. If you stop taking BIKTARVY, your healthcare provider will need to check your health often and do blood tests regularly for several months to check your HBV infection. Tell your healthcare provider about any new or unusual symptoms you may have after you stop taking BIKTARVY. For more information about side effects, see “What are the possible side effects of BIKTARVY?”
What is BIKTARVY? BIKTARVY is a prescription medicine that is used without other anti-HIV-1 medicines to treat Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) in adults: `` who have not received anti-HIV-1 medicines in the past, or `` to replace their current anti-HIV-1 medicines for people whose healthcare provider determines that they meet certain requirements. HIV-1 is the virus that causes AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).
`` rifampin
What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking BIKTARVY? Before taking BIKTARVY, tell your healthcare provider about all your medical conditions, including if you: ``have liver problems, including hepatitis B virus infection ``have kidney problems ``are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if BIKTARVY can harm your unborn baby. Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant during treatment with BIKTARVY. Pregnancy Registry: There is a pregnancy registry for women who take antiviral medicines during pregnancy. The purpose of this registry is to collect information about the health of you and your baby. Talk with your healthcare provider about how you can take part in this registry. `` are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed if you take BIKTARVY. • You should not breastfeed if you have HIV-1 because of the risk of passing HIV-1 to your baby. • At least one of the medicines in BIKTARVY can pass to your baby in your breast milk. It is not known if the other medicines in BIKTARVY can pass into your breast milk. Talk with your healthcare provider about the best way to feed your baby. Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, antacids, laxatives, vitamins, and herbal supplements. Some medicines may interact with BIKTARVY. Keep a list of your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist when you get a new medicine. `` You can ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist for a list of medicines that interact with BIKTARVY. `` Do not start a new medicine without telling your healthcare provider. Your healthcare provider can tell you if it is safe to take BIKTARVY with other medicines. Continued on next page.
BIKTARVY contains the prescription medicines bictegravir, emtricitabine, and tenofovir alafenamide. It is not known if BIKTARVY is safe and effective in children under 18 years of age.
BIKTARVY.com
Continued from previous page.
How should I take BIKTARVY? `` Take BIKTARVY exactly as your healthcare provider tells you to take it. BIKTARVY is taken by itself (not with other HIV-1 medicines) to treat HIV-1 infection. `` Take BIKTARVY 1 time each day with or without food. `` Do not change your dose or stop taking BIKTARVY without first talking with your healthcare provider. Stay under a healthcare provider’s care during treatment with BIKTARVY. `` If you take antacids that contain aluminum, magnesium, or calcium, take BIKTARVY on an empty stomach 2 hours before you take these antacids. `` If you take supplements that contain iron or calcium, take these supplements with food at the same time that you take BIKTARVY. `` Do not miss a dose of BIKTARVY. `` If you take too much BIKTARVY, call your healthcare provider or go to the nearest hospital emergency room right away. `` When your BIKTARVY supply starts to run low, get more from your healthcare provider or pharmacy. This is very important because the amount of virus in your blood may increase if the medicine is stopped for even a short time. The virus may develop resistance to BIKTARVY and become harder to treat.
What are the possible side effects of BIKTARVY? BIKTARVY may cause serious side effects, including: `` See “What is the most important information I should know about BIKTARVY?” `` Changes in your immune system (Immune Reconstitution Syndrome) can happen when you start taking HIV-1 medicines. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections that have been hidden in your body for a long time. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you start having any new symptoms after starting your HIV-1 medicine. `` New or worse kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do blood and urine tests to check your kidneys when starting and during treatment with BIKTARVY. Your healthcare provider may tell you to stop taking BIKTARVY if you develop new or worse kidney problems.
What are the possible side effects of BIKTARVY? (continued) `` Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis). Too much lactic acid is a serious but rare medical emergency that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: weakness or being more tired than usual, unusual muscle pain, being short of breath or fast breathing, stomach pain with nausea and vomiting, cold or blue hands and feet, feel dizzy or lightheaded, or a fast or abnormal heartbeat. `` Severe liver problems. In rare cases, severe liver problems can happen that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow, dark “tea-colored” urine, lightcolored stools, loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, or stomach-area pain. The most common side effects of BIKTARVY are diarrhea (6%), nausea (5%), and headache (5%). These are not all the possible side effects of BIKTARVY. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to the FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.
General information about the safe and effective use of BIKTARVY. Medicines are sometimes prescribed for purposes other than those listed in a Patient Information leaflet. Do not use BIKTARVY for a condition for which it was not prescribed. Do not give BIKTARVY to other people, even if they have the same symptoms you have. It may harm them. This Brief Summary summarizes the most important information about BIKTARVY. If you would like more information, talk with your healthcare provider. You can ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist for information about BIKTARVY that is written for health professionals. For more information, call 1-800-445-3235 or go to www.BIKTARVY.com. Keep BIKTARVY and all medicines out of reach of children. Issued: February 2018 BIKTARVY, the BIKTARVY Logo, GILEAD, and the GILEAD Logo are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. © 2018 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. BVYC0004 02/18
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“
We need to throw away the stigma and fear about HIV testing. It’s time we make HIV testing a part of our health routine. — Jay Ellis, Actor
”
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DOING IT Testing for HIV
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c o n t e n t s April 2018
32 Cover Oscar-Nominated Actress Chloë Sevigny Talks with A&U’s Sean Black About the Independent Spirit of Filmmaking and AIDS Advocacy
Departments
Features 10 A Band of Two Filmmaker Denny Tedesco Reflects on Why AIDS Advocacy Has Been a Family Affair 28 Radiant Indeed With a New Name, an ASO in Orange County, California, Continues Its Stellar Services 38 Gallery Filmmaker & Photographer Larry Clark Reframes Realism 44 Still At Risk Playwright Tim Pinckney Bridges AIDS Activism Then & Now
6
Frontdesk
8
Digital Footprints
12
NewsBreak
17
Ruby’s Rap Ruby raps with Actor Benjamin Farmer
viewfinder 20
Brave New World
22
Just*in Time
23
Our Story, Our Time
lifeguide 49
Destination: Cure
50
Access to Care
52
The Culture of AIDS
42 Poetry
53
Lifelines
48 Fiction
56
Survival Guide
46 Pushing Dead Director Tom E. Brown Discusses His New “AIDS Comedy”
cover & inside photos by Sean Black
A&U Frontdesk
Kids in America
A
bout the same time that I learned that Chloë Sevigny had agreed to be our April cover story, I got a call from a college friend of mine that someone we both knew, a fellow member of the class of 1984 (Brown University), had died from AIDS-related complications. This eighties friend of ours had gone on to a successful career on Broadway and Off-Broadway and was even nominated for a Tony Award for his supporting roles in several AIDS-related productions. This handsome and charming regular in productions at Brown’s radical Production Workshop wasn’t gay. In fact he was known as one of the few straight actors in such then-radical transgender Brown University productions as Jean Genet’s The Maids. The reason why his death rattled me so much was that his was a most-welcome friendship in the still nascent time when AIDS was a very scary reality for so many of us in the fluid sexual reality of those seemingly innocent times—call it undergraduates exploring the sexual identities of their youth. Brown, known as the most liberal of the Ivies, was a perfect place for an artist like myself to paint sexually charged paintings that I was then allowed to hang in the lobby of the List Art Center. Obviously I was thumbing my nose at the art establishment, professors and students alike. Experimentation in both my paintings and affections were a sign of the times. But I digress. For me, experimental actor, humanitarian, and solid AIDS activist Chloë Sevigny is one of the most interesting and risk-taking creative spirits to come out of Hollywood. Her pictures, from her debut in Larry Clark’s Kids (don’t miss Senior Editor Sean Black’s exclusive interview with the auteur director and photographer in this same issue), to more recent hits like Beatriz at Dinner and TV’s Bloodline are proof that this artist has never stopped evolving her artistry. My affection for the cutting-edge career of this month’s cover story has continued unabated through the years. Never one to forget how many visual artists we have lost to AIDS, she recounts to A&U’s Sean Black how important it is to remember the extensive loss to the
AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE issue 282 vol. 27 no. 4 April 2018 editorial offices: (518) 426-9010 fax: (518) 436-5354
American arts community: “There are so many photographers [like Mapplethorpe] who’ve brought attention to the AIDS movement. I mean [the early days] weren’t pretty but the work is very effective and moving.” Explaining the importance of staying connected with the early losses in the arts community in a fundraising project for the nonprofit Opening Ceremony, “I wanted to highlight that period of time and have them [the kids] look at the images, be struck by them and then go and do research on their pocket computers and find out who he [Mapplethorpe] was and how he died. I was hoping to open up a conversation among young people through the power of a T-shirt campaign.” Sevigny’s commitment to honoring the AIDS dead is both energetic and genuine; her belief in the arts to bring about change and awareness are refreshing in these tiresome times of looming cuts. Along with Sevigny and Larry Clark, this issue honors artists who take creative risks and prove that there is more than one story about how HIV/AIDS impacts our lives. Editor at Large Hank Trout interviews director Tom E. Brown about his new movie, Pushing Dead, which deftly puts a comic spin on long-term surviving. (The film is also reviewed in The Culture of AIDS, along with a new play, High Fidelity Transmission by Rajesh Talwar.) Mr. Trout also talks to Tim Pinckney about his play, Still At Risk, which examines AIDS activism in the early days of the epidemic as well as the present day. And although Denny Tedesco chose session musicians, including his father, as his subject for his documentary The Wrecking Crew, he explains to Senior Editor Dann Dulin why AIDS advocacy became a family affair. We need to support the power of the arts to at once document our AIDS history and also shine a light on where we need to go, bridging past creative losses and spotlighting current gains dealing with the AIDS crisis.
DAVID WAGGONER
Editor in Chief & Publisher David Waggoner Managing Editor: Chael Needle Senior Editors: Dann Dulin, Sean Black Editors at Large: Chip Alfred, Hank Trout Special Projects Editor: Lester Strong Arts Editor: Alina Oswald Poetry Editor: Noah Stetzer Consulting Editor: Nick Steele Copy Editor: Maureen Hunter Contributing Editors: Sarah Churchill Downes, Reed Massengill, Kelly McQuain, Lesléa Newman, Robert E. Penn Contributing Writers: Noël Alumit, T.J. Banks, Larry Buhl, Ruby Comer, George M. Johnson, John Francis Leonard, Candace Y.A. Montague, Connie Rose, David Rosenberg, Corey Saucier, Stevie St. John, Justin B. Terry-Smith, Patricia Nell Warren, Jeannie Wraight, Rob Zukowski Art Director: Timothy J. Haines Contributing Photographers: Jordan Ancel, Davidd Batalon, Mark Bennington, Tom Bianchi, Sean Black, Adam Bouska, Brian Bowen Smith, Tim Courtney, Duane Cramer, Stephen Churchill Downes, Greg Gorman, Francis Hills, Renée Jacobs, Michael Kerner, Tara Lessard, Tom McGovern, Nancy Perry, Annie Tritt National Advertising Director: Harold Burdick, Jr. Sales & Marketing: David L. Bonitatibus Advertising Sales Office: (518) 426-9010 National Advertising Representative: Rivendell Media (212) 242-6863 Subscription Info: (518) 426-9010 Circulation Manager: Robert Schelepanow Bookkeeper: Richard Garcia Board of Directors President: David Waggoner Vice President: Harold Burdick, Jr. Secretary: Richard Garcia Founding Board Members: Mark S. Labrecque, 1961–1992, Christopher Hewitt, 1946–2004, Mark Galbraith, 1962–2011 In Memoriam: Bill Jacobson, 1939–2005 Rhomylly B. Forbes, 1963–2011 • Chris Companik, 1957–2012 Nancy Ellegate, 1959–2015 A&U (ISSN 1074-0872) is published by Art & Understanding, Inc., 25 Monroe St., Suite 205, Albany, NY 122102743, USA. For A&U advertising information please call 518-426-9010; for subscriptions and address changes please call 518-426-9010; for letters to the editor and unsolicited manuscripts write A&U Magazine, 25 Monroe Street, Albany, New York 12210; fax 518-436-5354; or e-mail: mailbox@aumag.org. All unsolicited manuscripts that do not have a S.A.S.E. cannot be returned and will not be acknowledged. ©2018 Art & Understanding, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. A&U may not be reproduced in any manner, either in whole or in part, without written permission of the publisher. A&U and the graphic representations thereof are the registered trademarks of Art & Understanding, Inc., a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization. Individual Subscription rates: $24.95 (12 issues). Institutional rates: $80.00 (12 issues). For subscriptions outside the USA and possessions, $30.95/Canada, $49.95/ international, payable in advance in U.S. currency. First North American serial rights revert to contributors upon publication. A&U retains the right to anthologize work in further issues, as well as in microform or reprinting on the Internet within the context of each issue. Statements of writers, artists and advertisers are not necessarily those of the publisher. Readers note: subjects and contributors to A&U are both HIV-positive and HIV-negative. In the absence of a specific statement herein concerning the serostatus of any individual mentioned in, or contributing material to, this publication, no inference is made with respect thereto and none should be implied. Letters written to A&U or its contributors are assumed intended for publication. Art & Understanding, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for unsolicited submissions and does not guarantee the return thereof. PostMaster: Please send address corrections to A&U Magazine, 25 Monroe Street, Suite 205, Albany NY 122102743, USA
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A&U columnist John Francis Leonard interviewed HIV advocate and writer Mark S. King [“Rewriting His Own Script,” March 2018] and the love just poured in for the cover story, which touched on drug use, recovery, and finding one’s voice. As Mark stated, humbly, about his impact on the HIV community and beyond, “I’m most proud of helping someone who’s tested HIV-positive realize that there’s love and laughter and life and engagement after this diagnosis.” Holly Clark also truly captured the advocate’s soulful intelligence through her wonderful photography.
@AmericasAIDSMagazine 8
King photo by Holly Clark Davis photo by Andrew Kist
mostloved
In March’s Role Call, HIV advocate and Merck spokesperson Maria Davis penned a column in the form of a letter addressed to those living with HIV, modeling the importance of staying on top of one’s treatment and wellness. “Surrounding yourself with people that understand your struggle, your journey, and who know you apart from your HIV status is crucial in nurturing a healthy spirit. Sharing your experiences and your feelings can help you to validate your struggle and move past obstacles in a healthy and positive way.” Readers responded positively to her message. Wrote one fan: “Once again Maria Davis is dropping knowledge. This article is very insightful and contains advice that is not only useful to people with HIV and AIDS but to anyone with an incurable disease.” Correction: The HIV educational campaign I Design came to a close at the end of 2017. The Role Call column in March 2018 implied that it was still ongoing.
@au_magazine
@au_americas_aids_magazine A&U • APRIL 2018
SOMETIMES, OUR HIGHEST HEIGHTS HAPPEN
LONG BEFORE TAKEOFF. Proud Partner of the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.
oted musician Tommy Tedesco had a very loyal fan—his son Denny. An immensely talented and versatile guitarist, Tommy was part of the “Wrecking Crew,” a group of studio musicians that played instrumental backup for some of the most exemplary songs waxed in the sixties. They created sound for such legendary artists as Frank Sinatra, Sonny & Cher, The Monkees, Ella Fitzgerald, The Mamas & The Papas, The Beach Boys, and, yes, even Elvis. Denny honored his father by making a polished and compelling documentary, The Wrecking Crew! (Glen Campbell and Leon Russell were part of the gang, as was bassist Carol Kay, the only female musician. She composed the famous intro to Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On.”) The studio musicians, who added so much to the quality of the sound of the finished product, were largely ignored in the credits. “The Wrecking Crew was the focal point of the music. They were the ones with all the spirit and all the know-how,” says Brian Wilson in the film. Tommy and Denny did not have your average papa and son relationship. They had a unique bond that included giving back. In the early nineties, Denny rode in the second California AIDSRide. Another time, his father raised funds for the Pediatric AIDS Foundation (before it bore Elizabeth Glaser’s name) by performing at The Groundlings Theatre, while Denny produced it. They both donated their time to other charities, as well. In 1996, several months before Tommy passed, Denny jumped into the making of the film. He assembled some of his dad’s colleagues from back-in-the-day, placed them at a round table with his dad and “let them fly.” For the next ten years, Denny worked on the production. It was an arduous process and obstacles were a daily challenge. In 2006 he began editing dozens of interviews that he had conducted over the decade. Even after winning festival awards around the country, no company would pick it up for distribution. There were 110 songs in the film and ninety-nine percent of them were hits. To pay the publishers, he showed the film at fundraisers and racked up credit card debt, even refinancing the family home. Its completion is testament to Denny’s devotion
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The Wrecking Crew! Filmmaker Denny Tedesco Pays Tribute to His Late Musician Father, Who Both Strummed Their Generosity Towards the HIV Community by Dann Dulin
and commitment to his father. If someone pledged a song for $1,000, they could put their dedication on the DVD and their name would appear at the end of the song credits. Classic songs like “Be My Baby” (The Ronettes) and “Good Vibrations” (The
George Takei [A&U, December 2013] is executive producer. Liking all types of music, unlike his pop, Denny does not play an instrument, though he took guitar, piano, saxophone and accordion lessons.
Beach Boys) went quickly. Gary Lewis’s “Everybody Loves a Clown” proved more difficult, so Denny called up a clown school, made a pitch, and they made a pledge. Eventually Magnolia Pictures picked up the film. Now screening around the world, The Wrecking Crew! can also be streamed on Netflix. Married to Suzie (co-producer of the film) for thirty-one years, Denny has a daughter in college and a son in seventh grade. The male twin of their daughter died at six months. Now, he’s working on a documentary entitled, The Three Tooners –I Draw Silly Pictures for a Living, the story of three animators who worked at Hanna-Barbera in the sixties.
Dann Dulin: What’s your biggest regret? Denny Tedesco: Not playing an instrument. I’m fifty-six years old and frustrated. I heard a radio interview recently saying that playing an instrument is a god-given talent. So I’m glad it wasn’t my fault. Now I can blame god! When did you first hear about the epidemic? When I went for a check-up and my doctor started asking about my sex life and whether I was wearing condoms. Back in the early eighties, the only thing we were fearful of was herpes. Share a story of someone close who died of A&U • APRIL 2018
photo by Isabella Tedesco
N
A BAND
OF T WO
AIDS-related causes. All my friends who died were co-workers. The sad part about it was that many kept it a secret. They didn’t want their families to know. What motivated you to do the California AIDS Ride? At that time, I had friends who had passed and I wanted to test myself and see if I could pull off the ride. I did it with a few friends. I was their token straight guy. It was so much fun to be around hundreds of people with one goal in mind, finding a cure.
How was the seven-day journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles on bicycle? It was my biggest personal disappointment in my life. I blew out my knee early in the ride, and instead, helped set up tents for others. I still rode every other day. At the end of the ride when we wheeled into Los Angeles, it was so great to find my wife, mother, father, and other friends waiting for us. Your father performed to raise funds for various organizations, one of them being Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Yes, this was the early nineties and he performed his one-man show, Confessions of a Studio Player, at The Groundlings. I’ll always remember on that night a friend of my father, a television composer, was in the audience. He seemed out of place there but what he told my father after the show moved my dad to tears. His child had gone into the hospital for an operation and was given a blood transfusion. He later died of AIDS-related causes. What is your biggest gripe about the public’s response to the epidemic? As in all diseases it becomes just part of society’s vernacular and we forget that the actual disease still exists. My fear is that we could be very close to a cure and our government in Washington will not have the hindsight to push forward and knock it out. I hope it becomes a blip in our memory like polio was to our parents. Using our collective will, it’s up to our society to find a cure. Whom do you deem a hero in the epidemic? Every person who lives with [HIV]. One of my friends was diagnosed in 1986 and he’s APRIL 2018 • A&U
sixty-seven years old now. He lives life to the fullest and is healthier than me.
Describe your relationship with your father. It was great though we could push each other’s buttons. We were each other’s biggest fans and proud of each other, yet also the most critical. When he was diagnosed with terminal cancer our fights ended. There is so much…I wish I had asked him. What one thing stands out the most about what you learned from your father? My father was always kind to the underdog. If someone was rude to someone in the recording studio and he was there, he could bury that person. There were so many stories I never heard until I made this film. Stories about my father helping young musicians break into the business. Stories of him pretending to mess up to cover someone else’s mistake, because they were the new guy. He put everyone at ease…unless you were an asshole. Name a memory that sticks in your head about your dad. I love telling this story: I was about twenty-one and living at home. I was screwing around at home with my shirt off and pretending to pose like a model, with my bulging muscles. I turned to my father and said, “GQ” (referring to the men’s fashion magazine Gentlemen’s Quarterly). Without hesitation my father replied, “AH” —Asshole, and then walked away. You interviewed many celebrities for your documentary. Who were you impressed with? Jimmy Webb was an hour of gold. Mickey Dolenz [The Monkees] was another. He couldn’t understand the backlash regarding
the Monkees. “We were a TV show. We were make-believe…,” he would proclaim. Cher was brilliant. No bullshit. If she says something, she means it. She always appreciated the musicians around her. Cher loved these guys, since her early days in the business when she was a background singer with the Phil Spector groups. Share a backstory. Dick Clark gave a wonderful radio tribute after my dad passed. So I sent a note and videotape thanking him and asking him for an interview. The letter came back with a nice decline, saying he really never met the guys so it would be hard to talk about them. But at the end of the letter, he wrote, “Just saw your trailer, call me, and you can talk me through it.” That’s all I needed. Any other stories? My father said Glen Campbell was the best rock/country guitarist that he sat next to in the studios. Couldn’t read a note, but ears like no other. When I interviewed him in 2003, I think he had already started to decline from Alzheimer’s. He loved talking about the studio days. He said that it was the best time of his life. Nancy Sinatra [A&U, May 2003] was a class act and always supported the musicians. During the making of The Wrecking Crew she would continually ask how I was doing and how I was holding up. What sparks your humanitarianism? To be honest, I don’t do enough and so I don’t feel I’m making any impact. The world is tearing everyone in different directions. We all seem to have ADHD. Help begins from one person to another. When I leave this earth, I just hope I impacted someone’s life in a positive way. Dann Dulin is a Senior Editor of A&U.
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NNewsBreak EWSBREAK 200-Plus Signatures Health GAP reports that, at the conclusion of the March 2018 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Boston, more than 200 scientists, researchers, and clinicians strongly denounced HIV/AIDS policies promulgated under the Trump Administration. Stating that “We are gravely concerned by President Trump’s pursuit of policies that are out of step with evidence,” the signatories to the letter specifically denounced: (1) President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2019 Budget proposal to the U.S. Congress that slashes at least $1.284 billion from global HIV programs; (2) The reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy, now called “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance,” which forbids U.S. funding for organizations that provide abortion counseling, a policy that will reduce the sexual and reproductive care provided to women living with or at risk for HIV; (3) The establishment of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division at the Department of Health and Human Services, and the proposed rule regarding “Protecting Statutory Conscience Rights in Health Care,” which would license health care providers to discriminate against their patients; and (4) Cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which would hinder basic HIV research and impair research with partner nations to fight HIV. The letter concludes, “Science shows us that we can defeat HIV, but not if we defy evidence. President Trump’s misguided budget proposal, and his Administration’s attempts to scale up policies in defiance of evidence, will only undermine the global AIDS response and should be stopped.” Along with Health GAP, signatories to the CROI letter include such renowned figures as Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Nobel Laureate who co-discovered HIV; Linda-Gail Bekker, President of the International AIDS Society; the HIV Medicine Association; and some 200 other internationally recognized researchers and clinicians. CROI, which attracts more than 4,000 HIV/AIDS international research leaders annually, has facilitated the presentation of important discoveries and accelerated progress in HIV/AIDS research. Founded in 1999, Health GAP (Global Access Project) is an organization of U.S.-based AIDS and human rights activists, people living with HIV/AIDS, and public health experts who combat policies that deny treatment and fuel the spread of HIV. The group campaigns for drug access for people with HIV/AIDS globally and invests resources into sustaining the global AIDS movement, actively working with scientists and people living with HIV/AIDS throughout the United States and elsewhere. The full text of the letter and a complete list of signatories is available at http://bit.ly/2GE4qrl.
TANGO Study In February 2018, ViiV Healthcare announced the start of a forty-eight-week phase III study designed to determine whether adults with HIV-1 who have achieved a suppressed viral load on a tenofovir alafenamide fumarate (TAF)-based regimen of at least three drugs are able to maintain that viral suppression after switching to a two-drug regimen (2DR) of dolutegravir (Tivicay) and lamivudine (Epivir). The TANGO study seeks to enroll approximately 550 adults with HIV-1, from clinical trial sites in North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. ViiV Healthcare hopes to explore how to reduce the number of drugs to which a patient is exposed without sacrificing the success achieved with three-drug regimens, the predominant method of treatment since the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) twenty-plus years ago. Successful viral suppression on a two-drug regimen could combat long-term toxicity by reducing patients’ intake of antivirals over a lifetime of treatment. TANGO will also quantify patient satisfaction as well as the efficacy, tolerability and safety of such a two-drug regimen. John C. Pottage, Jr, MD, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer, ViiV Healthcare, said: “We are asking a simple question in the
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A&U • APRIL 2018
newsbreak TANGO study—can virally suppressed people with HIV reduce the number of medicines in their HIV treatment regimen while maintaining viral suppression?... We believe that with its high barrier to resistance, dolutegravir has the right clinical profile to be a core part of 2DRs for the treatment of HIV-1 and look forward to seeing the results of TANGO in 2019.” Regarding the two drugs to be tested in this study: Tivicay (dolutegravir) is an integrase strand transfer inhibitor (INSTI) for use in combination with other antiretroviral agents for the treatment of HIV. Integrase inhibitors block HIV replication by preventing the viral DNA from integrating into the genetic material of human immune cells (T-cells). This integration step in the HIV replication cycle is critical in establishing chronic infection, hence the importance of blocking integration. Epivir is a nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitor indicated in combination with other antiretroviral agents for the treatment of HIV-1 infection. ViiV Healthcare, majority owned by GSK, with Pfizer Inc. and Shionogi Limited as shareholders, is a global specialist HIV company dedicated to delivering advances in treatment and care for people living with HIV.
The Potential Harm of “Abstinence Only” Education In a blistering February 28, 2018, report on the resurgence and “rebranding” of federal abstinence-only sex education in public schools, the Guttmacher Institute decries the waste and potential harm of such programs. The federal government has spent more than $2 billion since 1996 on programs for young people that promote sexual abstinence outside of marriage (“abstinence-only” education). Federal funding for these programs ballooned under the George W. Bush administration, then dropped significantly under President Obama. During the Obama era, proponents of abstinence-only programs found themselves on the defensive, faced with abundant evidence that abstinence-only programs do not work to deter or delay sex among young people. In response, abstinence-only proponents have adopted a new rhetorical frame to sugar-coat their message. With the support of conservatives in Congress and the White House, proponents have tried to rebrand abstinence-only programs as “sexual risk avoidance” programs; many have co-opted—and turned upside-down—several other terms such as “evidence-based” and “medically accurate and complete,” and language on “healthy relationships” and “youth empowerment,” all of which are typically associated with broader, more inclusive programs that respect young people. The Guttmacher report lambastes “abstinence only” education as ineffective (“[A]ccording to scientific evidence amassed over the past 20 years, abstinence-only programs do not have a significant impact on the age of first sexual intercourse, number of sexual partners or other sexual behaviors”); unresponsive to the needs of young people (“withholding potentially life-saving sexual health information and skills, abstinence-only programs...[do] long-term damage by deterring condom and other contraceptive use among sexually active adolescents, increasing their risk of unintended pregnancy and STIs”); in violation of ethical principles; perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes; and stigmatizing sex, sexual health, and sexuality. Furthermore, by eschewing life-saving evidence-based information regarding condoms and other protective measures, “abstinence only” programs do not prepare young people to prevent their acquiring the HIV virus. The Guttmacher report, by Jesseca Boyer, concludes, “This effort to reinvigorate federal abstinence-only programs is dangerous and counterproductive. For decades, abstinence-only programs have failed to meet the needs and uphold the rights of young people. A name change and claims of raising the standard of behavior for all young people do nothing to correct these flaws. Young people deserve more than the same programs under a new name; it is past time to end federal funding for abstinence-only programs.” —Reporting by Hank Trout
Christopher Hewitt Award 2018 A&U Magazine is currently accepting entries for the sixth annual Christopher Hewitt Award. Named in honor of A&U’s first literary editor, the award showcases outstanding responses to the AIDS pandemic and the realities of individuals living with or affected by HIV/AIDS in the genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction. Winners will be selected by the following judges, by category: Noah Stetzer (poetry); Joy Gaines-Friedler (creative nonfiction); Bruce Ward (drama); and Chael Needle (fiction). The submission deadline is June 1, 2018. No entry fee is required. A $50 honorarium prize and publication will be awarded to each winner. How to Submit: Email Word (.doc or .docx files) of your work to Managing Editor Chael Needle at chaelneedle@mac.com. Please indicate in the subject line that your submission is for the Christopher Hewitt Award; include your name and genre in the subject line as well. Your name or any other personal identifying information should not appear on your manuscript. Multiple submissions are accepted, but please submit each separately. Guidelines: All submissions must be HIV/AIDS-related and previously unpublished. All styles are welcomed. Fiction and creative nonfiction should be 1,200 words or fewer, double-spaced. Drama may be an excerpt from a longer work or a ten-minute play (1,400– 1,600 words, no more than ten pages, Dramatists Guild format). We reserve the right to excerpt longer pieces for print, in consultation with the author; works in their entirety will be printed on the web. If any genre lacks a clear winner, fewer than four awards may be given. All entries will be considered for publication. For more information, log on to: http://bit.ly/2oDxN59. APRIL 2018 • A&U
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THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY BLANK
by Ruby Comer
Benjamin Farmer
Ruby illustration by Davidd Batalon; portrait photo by Gianni Becker; family photo courtesy B. Farmer
I
stir my Venti Caffe Latte, after adding chocolate powder and Stevia, and gawk out the Starbucks window. The crowd rushes by on 43rd Street, near Broadway. Yep, I’m back on Broadway, well, not the Great White Way, but I am in Manhattan. I’m here presenting one of my seminars; this time the topic is, “Safe and Social: Having Sex on the Internet.” Of course, one way to practice safe sex is to do it on the Internet, via Skype or some other media format. It’s not for everybody, but it certainly is an option. As I blend my coffee, though, I’m not thinking about this. Instead, I ponder about the straight community. What does a straight man think about the epidemic? Hmmm…. I hop on my cell and call my buddy, Benjamin Farmer. I met him on the set of The Falls trilogy—but I can’t recall which one. The director, Jon Garcia, had planned on shooting only one film, but it was so wildly popular that he wrote two more sequels about two male Mormons who fall in love. Ben plays Chris, one of the boys, and Nick Ferrucci plays RJ, his lover. The three films
Megan, Ben and Rocket
APRIL 2018 • A&U
were shot over seven years. Garcia is gay (ironically the two actors aren’t), and he wanted to make a statement about safer sex. In part three, condoms are quite visible on the bedroom nightstand. Benjamin, thirty-three, began performing at the age of three. Reared in Salem, Oregon, he attended New York’s American Musical and Dramatic Academy. He told me that he would have stayed in New York had it not been for a girl he fell for. He returned to the Pacific Northwest but after several years, he returned to the Big Apple. Now married to Megan since 2014, they have one child, a dog named Rocket! Ben can currently be seen in Season 3 of Showtime’s Billions and in the film The Texture of Falling, for which he won Best Supporting Actor at the Oregon Independent Film Festival. This talented chameleon can play sweet and innocent as well as blood and guts, from a father to a killer. He’s portrayed gay characters several times, like in the play As Is, about a gay couple living in New York City during the early AIDS crisis. Not living too awfully far from where I am, Ben soon joins me for a late afternoon tête-à-tête. Ruby Comer: It’s been a while since I’ve seen you. [I look him over, up and down, giving him the keen eye.] Is it really you—or is it your twin, Gabriel?! [He chuckles, and gives me a tight hug.] Okay, it’s you! What’s Gabe doing now? Benjamin Farmer: Gabriel works as a corrections officer at Oregon State Penitentiary! [He shines with pride.] He has a military background, and loves his job.
Good for him! Okay, I have to ask a cliché question. Tell a trick you guys pulled on someone. Well, for one full day, we convinced all of our teachers that I was Gabe, and Gabe was me. That was my first great acting role. [Ben grins, as he swizzles his hot chocolate with a shot of espresso.] Hee, Hee. Ya know…I want a straight man’s view, Ben! Tell me when you first heard about the disease. When I was seven or eight years old I was attending the local Boys & Girls Club. They sat all of us kids down in the gym and played a video called STOP: The Truth About HIV/AIDS and YOU. That was the first time I’d ever heard those words. [He takes a sip of his cocoa.] My parents weren’t pleased that the kids watched the video. How ya mean? I come from a religious and sheltered background. I was taught that homosexual-
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it must’ve been like to be alive in that time and place, specifically a gay man or woman in New York City during the height of the epidemic. Doctors knew so little about it. A lot of the treatments were unbearable. It was a terrifying time, and those who were sick must’ve felt helpless and afraid. If only more of your generation had that opportunity, Benjamin. It was not a fun time, I can tell you. Whom do you consider a leading person in the epidemic? Magic Johnson! He’s the first face I put with the epidemic. He’s done so much to raise awareness. There are also countless celebrities who have lived with the disease and created such amazing work and shared it with the world. Freddie Mercury of course comes to mind. Thanks to Hugh Jackman’s amazing work in The Boy From Oz, shining the spotlight on the talented Peter Allen, as well.
ity was both a choice and a sin. [Benjamin places his elbow on the table, propping up his ruddy, good lookin’ face with his hand, then adds an afterthought.] Only much later did I learn that there were some religious communities that claimed God created AIDS to kill-off homosexuals. I never heard that in my community or church. Yes, sadly, there were “ignorants” who said that. How did your upbringing play out with regards to sex? I became sexually active relatively late in life. It wasn’t until college that I began my exploration. My girlfriend and I at the time were more concerned about getting pregnant. STDs were never a concern. Did you always wear protection? Not always. But actually, things never progressed to that point, so…hands and mouth were used with creativity. And why not?! Some religious zealots believe that teaching children about protecting themselves against STDs promotes sexual activity in children. What do you think? People are going to have sex—period. We need to educate to ensure there’s as little disease in our communities as possible. If parents and private schools devoted half the energy they put into teaching abstinence and instead teach: “How to better protect oneself and communicate effectively with one’s partner,” we’d all be better off. We simply have to change the narrative! Hear, hear! Indeed! Should condoms be
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available in public schools, including primary school? I believe they should…yes. When did you first get tested? In my late teens. My brother and I found out that you could get paid for donating plasma! In order to donate, they would run the usual blood tests, which included HIV. While waiting for the test I started thinking of all of the things my girlfriend and I had done together. [With his hand, Ben feathers through his gingery hair.] I still donate blood, about twice a year. Do you think most Americans still think of AIDS as a “gay disease”? Looking back on all of the history, plus some of the plays and work I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of, there’s a small part of me that believes that to be true, especially among the less educated. I can’t help but think of fundamentalists in Southern states. [He succinctly looks down and continues.] It breaks my heart. I believe most people have a knee-jerk reaction when they hear the words HIV or AIDS. Speaking of plays, you were in a production of As Is. Ruby, I’m thankful for the work I’ve been able to do relating to HIV and AIDS, specifically this wonderful work by William H. Hoffman. It gave me such insight into what
What did you take away from your experience shooting The Falls trilogy? So. Many. Things. [He answers gradually and meticulously.] It’s given me some serious pause—again—about the house and community I grew up in. How blessed I am to have so many LGBTQ persons in my life, and to know that they were born the way they are, just like I was born the way I am. In the end, it’s taught me that love is love is love is love….[His smile brims with gratitude.] I hope we see you in more meaningful projects like The Falls trilogy. So what was the challenge of playing gay and kissing another straight guy? Nick’s facial hair! Kissing Nick was just as nerve-wracking as kissing any female co-star. It puts you in a very vulnerable place, but there was and is a lot of trust between Nick and myself. He’s a very lovable man and a tremendous actor. Any closing remarks? Then let’s go catch a foreign film. I wish my parents and teachers had talked more to me about HIV so that I could have had a better understanding. It was completely ignored in my community when I was growing up. Straighten up with Ben at /www.benjamin-farmer.com and on FaceBook and Twitter, as well. Ruby Comer is an independent journalist from the Midwest who is happy to call Hollywood her home away from home. Reach her by e-mail at MsRubyComer@aol.com. A&U • APRIL 2018
behind the scenes photo by Jamie Duke; The Falls photo courtesy Lake Productions
Top: Ben and Nick Ferrucci stroll through a street event on the set filming The Falls trilogy; right: a scene from The Falls trilogy
Be Kind
I
am standing in front of my bathroommirror. I have two 100-watt “Ultra White Natural Light” light bulbs just above my vanity, so that I can see every blemish. So there I am... bathed in waves of particles so bright I feel like I’m in one of those movies where the main character is in his early forties (sympathetic, and mildly attractive, but overwhelmingly flawed) and finds himself face to face with Destiny, or God, or some silly anthropomorphic entity played by Jim Carrey. And so they do that thing where the screen fades to white, and the leading everyman, with his wild red burly beard and a smile like a forest fire, is arms wide in an empty echoing soft white room. And love is everywhere, and God is smiling, and the charming lead with root-colored skin gets a chance to start again. And everything resets. And the director screams: “ACTION!” And I am back again staring at myself in the mirror. And my wings are broken and bandaged, and my halo is off-center and cracked, and the rhythm of the beat of my heart is now more like a Viennese waltz instead of its former synthetic dubstep party anthem...and I’m a little worse for wear. But across my mirror in cheap red NYC lipstick, are written the words: “You are loved” “Live long, and prosper.” and “Be kind.” I imagine some wiser version of me wrote it there on one of my stronger days, knowing that I would someday need to hear it. Or maybe it’s always been there; lingering from another soul’s lifetime— reincarnated from someone else’s story— some kind of karmic residue written in my own sloppy handwriting. Or the least likely: The words traveling from a loving universe of random order, crawled consonant-over-vowel onto my tiny bathroom mirror like my personal Charlotte’s Web. A message written by some magical protector doing her best to help save my life. And I read them out loud to the ether,
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just to see how it sounds to my ear: “You are loved” “Live long, and prosper.” and “Be kind.” And it was like an army of a hundred
million men. Affirmations are meant to reverberate, magnify, and transform. And like so many who have stumbled and lost their step—who broke into pieces once upon a night‚ or cried alone in a doctor’s office—and then despite the odds that were stacked against them decided to never give up! Add the name Corey Saucier to that list. Last week at a foundation for AIDS, where I get my healthcare, I had a doctor belittle me, deny me care, and act as if my story didn’t matter. And I know this happens a lot. I know I’m not the first. And because I’m an addict, and a whore, and a nig@er, and a f@g, and an on again off again lunatic who is infected with AIDS, some people tend to count me out. They tend to paint me into a narrow box—they tend to judge me off-hand, hold my name at the side of their mouth, and shake their heads at me.... And every once in a while I come across someone with perfect teeth and a 401k and a halo that has never been broken and tarnished in the mud. Someone who looks good on fine stationery paper—who knows all the tricks of the game, and plays their upper hand. Who despite their power, and their privilege, and the fact that they are supposed to help you, is just plain mean— Who’ll dress themselves in respectable
titles, hold their chin as if they don’t sin, and yet when they have you in the room alone, they are all talons and sharp teeth pressing you hard against brick walls. “Because who is going to believe the AIDS-infected Black guy who’s been ridden more times than a rusty Ferris wheel? Who will stand for the welfare queen who can’t handle his drugs; and believes in magic and metaphors?” Who will save me when I am vulnerable and struggling and seeking to be seen (again)? Me. The answer is me. I have to save myself. WE have to save ourselves! An old Black blind woman once said (she probably wasn’t blind, but it sounds better), “No one can give what they don’t have.” So don’t ask a person with no clothes to borrow their shirt. Or in this case I can’t ask those dwelling in ivory towers to help us still fighting in these trenches. And how can they? They have no idea how beautiful we are! And they seem to have forgotten that, Nig@er, Sl@t, F@g, Tr@nny, and Cr@zy are sometimes sacred words when you are dealing with HIV. Foundations that Care for the AIDS population were built from the legacy of Black Trans Quaalude-addicted Prostitutes who cruised the leather bars at night, and during the day fought bravely against a system of stuffy white ties and “acceptability politics” until our Doctors were forced to treat HIV clients with dignity and understanding, no matter their external circumstances. Because there will always be more of us then them! And though my wings may be wounded and splashed with a little dirt. “I deserve to be treated with respect!” Oooh. I think I’ll add that to my mirror. Love & light. Corey Saucier is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. He is a Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction and Non-Fiction and is currently penning his first novel. His musings and wanderings on Love, Life, and Nonsense can be found at www. justwords.tumblr.com. A&U • APRIL 2018
illustration by Timothy J. Haines
and the legacy of the name-called and downtrodden
Bringing hearts together since 1998
HIV+ Owned Since 1998
D
o you ParTy? I get this question all the time on apps like Grindr, Jack’d, Scruff or Growlr. Okay, more on Grindr. But I have the same reply no matter what app the person hits me up on, “I’m not interested.” Don’t get me wrong, back in my twenties, Papa was a rolling stoned, young man. Now I’m thirty-eight and I’m a little wiser and a less of a wild child. But I can say I’ve never ever tried meth and I have no intention to in the future. I can honestly say I don’t judge anyone who does meth, but I cannot give any part of myself to them. It’s not judgment, but I can’t trust the person on it. Being HIV-positive, I can only imagine how it interacts with one’s body. Instead of complaining about it, I’ve decided to educate myself and others on the detriments of meth to your HIV positive body. So, let’s first look at some basic information about meth. Meth is a shorter name for crystal methamphetamine (CM), also known as crystal meth. Meth is a highly addictive drug that is considered a stimulant. Meth can be injected, snorted, smoked, and/or swallowed. A lot of people insert it into their rectums as well. Meth is very inexpensive and can last as long as two days. For example, I knew of a man who drove high all the way from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., just because he wanted to meet a guy have sex and get more Meth. • Errors in judgment. Like a lot of drugs, meth lowers one’s inhibitions
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and ability to make sound decisions by impairing one’s judgment. When you’re high on meth, you are more likely to engage in riskier sex. • Dick soft? Sometimes, meth use is a cause of making your dick soft. Yeah, I said it. This can lead to people using erectile dysfunction medication on top of meth to stay hard. Your body might become dependent on the drug and the Viagra to stay hard for a longer period of time. • Bottoms up! Many people engage in bottoming when on crystal meth because they claim it feels better and they can take a bigger dick. Well, the ugly truth is that meth increases the risk for tissue tears in your ass because it causes mucosal dryness. • Sharing is not caring. When injecting meth, you do run the risk of transmitting HIV or other STIs like hepatitis C. • Hungry, bitch?! Meth reduces your appetite and weight. When you are HIV-positive it is important for you to eat. One, because it helps sustain nutrients in the body; two, your immune system needs fuel to fight off other infections; and, three, if you are on an anti-HIV treatment regimen, then you need to eat a certain number of calories with your HIV medication for it to be properly absorbed by your body. • Depression. Many people do drugs on a regular basis to try to get away from feelings of depression and isolation. When someone is on meth, they are not thinking about what in
their life is causing their depression or isolation. After a binge of being high for days on end, the user is often faced with a pummeling by those same feelings. • Internal effects. Meth gives you a high chance of a stroke or heart attack, because of its effects on the heart. Meth increases your heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature. • HIV into AIDS. Meth use accelerates HIV progression into an AIDS diagnosis. The National AIDS Treatment Advocacy Project revealed the outcomes of a controlled study from the University of California, San Diego, that discovered an unswerving connection between meth and T-cell activation and proliferation in HIV-positive men. The study participants who did use the drug in the study showed a higher risk of cognitive impairment and a faster development into AIDS-defining illnesses. Meth is a big problem in our community. But there are resources that can help you. In just about every major city there are rehabs/drug addiction treatment centers, and, if you don’t want to do that, then there are many support groups that focus on meth addiction. It is up to you if you want help or not. I’m nobody’s judge and I’m in no way trying to tell anyone how to live. Just know that if you engage in this activity, there are consequences. Your body is already fighting HIV, you don’t want it fighting against meth as well. ◊ A&U • APRIL 2018
photo by Don Harris © Don Harris Photographics, LLC. all rights reserved
Justin B. Terry-Smith, MPH, has been fighting the good fight since 1999. He’s garnered recognition and awards for his work, but he’s more concerned about looking for new ways to transform society for the better than resting on his laurels. He started up in gay rights and HIV activism in 2005, published an HIV-themed children’s book, I Have A Secret (Creative House Press) in 2011, and created his own award-winning video blog called, “Justin’s HIV Journal”: justinshivjournal. blogspot.com. Presently, he is working toward his doctorate in public health. Visit his main Web site at www.justinbsmith.com. He welcomes your questions at justinterrysmith@gmail.com.
Time for Therapy
keep mental health on the table
illustration by Timothy J. Haines
T
he burdens of being a public figure some days are heavy. In addition to being a full-time journalist, I’m also an avid LGBTQ activist, with a Twitter account that pulls in nearly 40 million impressions a month. My words have been shared through countless articles with millions of readers clicking like, sharing, and occasionally leaving some horrible comments. Those who don’t leave comments opt for sending me direct messages full of hate, bringing up my HIV status to attack, something that used to bother the less-confident me. I go to battle every day with the likes of white supremacy and masculinity to end up at home most nights, alone with just a glass of water, Law & Order re-runs, and my thoughts. I’m thinking it may be time to invest in going to therapy again. On the real, mental health is a topic that is still seen as a taboo in Black communities. I don’t invest in it the way I should, and I tend to bottle-up emotions or allow them to manifest in toxic ways that can be detrimental to myself and others. Lately I’ve thought about this subject much more as my platform and visibility continues to grow, making my words subject to more critique from the masses. But I also thought about what life was like before all the retweets and likes, when I worked a normal 9–5, and stayed off social media for the most part. Even then, I still had moments where I couldn’t process situations on my own and could have used therapy. I remember when I first moved from Richmond, Virginia, in 2013 because I had had enough of my life feeling like it was in a rut. I did some soul searching and found a new job at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. I loved my job, or so I thought I did for about two years when I ended up realizing that I still was not happy. I first decided to go to a support group in 2014. There I met other young Black gay people living with HIV, and started taking the steps to regain my happiness and most importantly my mental health. I did another career move at that time and decided to go into HIV work. I loved helping people. That one-on-one contact got APRIL 2018 • A&U
me back in the trenches where I belonged. It was at that time I started to write more and my audience began to grow. That is when I first sought out therapy, since there was a counselor who worked for our organization. It was refreshing to know that I could discuss some of the most confidential things and problems without fear of the information getting out. I could unpack trauma, and talk about it openly. The ability to have resources and options for how I could process and grow truly made me a new person. I really enjoyed that I didn’t always have to process out things alone with myself, and it helped me break past the barriers that the Black community often places on taking care of mental health, or going to therapy. Everyone goes through things in life and we honestly aren’t built to simply just handle them on our own. Talking with friends, family, or other people you may know is a great option, but sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes you need a third party who doesn’t know you or your story to sit there with you and help you process the emotions you have long kept in. Some of the things I battle with are heavy, yet some things that many would take as simple cause me the angst during my day. I get pill-fatigued often from taking my daily prescribed medicine. The actual action of taking the pill daily has become
boring to me. Despite me knowing what I need to take it for and why it is important that I take it at the same time every day, I just don’t feel like it sometimes. Talking about it with friends and family it’s like “take the damn pill,” which is correct but not problem-solving. Being able to talk with someone who can break down what is causing the fatigue, and ways to get past it, is sometimes necessary. The ability to see a therapist and process out the biggest of issues, to the littlest of problems I deal with is important, and I wish more tried it to learn about themselves and how to work on themselves. Since moving to NYC in August, I haven’t had much time for anything but working and building. I think that is the excuse many of us use when we are trying to avoid something that we know we need, but are too afraid to go all in on. Now that things are moving for me with my writing and activism, I think I need to give therapy another shot. I don’t have to take on all the burdens of the world, but the ones that I do can easily be fleshed out. George M. Johnson is a journalist and activist. He has written for Entertainment Tonight, Ebony, TheGrio, TeenVogue, NBC News, and several other major publications. He writes the Our Story, Our Time column for A&U. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram @iamgmjohnson.
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YOU MATTER AND SO DOES YOUR HEALTH
That’s why starting and staying on HIV-1 treatment is so important.
WHAT IS DESCOVY®?
DESCOVY is a prescription medicine that is used together with other HIV-1 medicines to treat HIV-1 in people who weigh at least 77 lbs (35kg). DESCOVY is not for use to help reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 infection. DESCOVY combines 2 medicines into 1 pill taken once a day. Because DESCOVY by itself is not a complete treatment for HIV-1, it must be used together with other HIV-1 medicines.
DESCOVY does not cure HIV-1 infection or AIDS. To control HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses, you must keep taking DESCOVY. Ask your healthcare provider if you have questions about how to reduce the risk of passing HIV-1 to others. Always practice safer sex and use condoms to lower the chance of sexual contact with body fluids. Never reuse or share needles or other items that have body fluids on them.
IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION
What is the most important information I should know about DESCOVY? DESCOVY may cause serious side effects: • Worsening of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. DESCOVY is not approved to treat HBV. If you have both HIV-1 and HBV and stop taking DESCOVY, your HBV may suddenly get worse. Do not stop taking DESCOVY without first talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to monitor your health. What are the other possible side effects of DESCOVY? Serious side effects of DESCOVY may also include: • Changes in your immune system. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any new symptoms after you start taking DESCOVY. • Kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do blood and urine tests to check your kidneys. Your healthcare provider may tell you to stop taking DESCOVY if you develop new or worse kidney problems. • Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious but rare medical emergency that
can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: weakness or being more tired than usual, unusual muscle pain, being short of breath or fast breathing, stomach pain with nausea and vomiting, cold or blue hands and feet, feel dizzy or lightheaded, or a fast or abnormal heartbeat. • Severe liver problems, which in rare cases can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow, dark “tea-colored” urine, light-colored stools, loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, or stomach-area pain. The most common side effect of DESCOVY is nausea. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any side effects that bother you or don’t go away. What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking DESCOVY? • All your health problems. Be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you have or have had any kidney or liver problems, including hepatitis virus infection. • All the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. Other medicines may affect how DESCOVY works. Keep a list of all your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist. Ask your healthcare provider if it is safe to take DESCOVY with all of your other medicines. • If you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if DESCOVY can harm your unborn baby. Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking DESCOVY. • If you are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed. HIV-1 can be passed to the baby in breast milk. You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088. Please see Important Facts about DESCOVY, including important warnings, on the following page.
Ask your healthcare provider if an HIV-1 treatment that contains DESCOVY® is right for you.
IMPORTANT FACTS
This is only a brief summary of important information about DESCOVY and does not replace talking to your healthcare provider about your condition and your treatment. ®
(des-KOH-vee) MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT DESCOVY
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS OF DESCOVY
DESCOVY may cause serious side effects, including: • Worsening of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. DESCOVY is not approved to treat HBV. If you have both HIV-1 and HBV, your HBV may suddenly get worse if you stop taking DESCOVY. Do not stop taking DESCOVY without first talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to check your health regularly for several months.
DESCOVY can cause serious side effects, including: • Those in the “Most Important Information About DESCOVY” section. • Changes in your immune system. • New or worse kidney problems, including kidney failure. • Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious but rare medical emergency that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: weakness or being more tired than usual, unusual muscle pain, being short of breath or fast breathing, stomach pain with nausea and vomiting, cold or blue hands and feet, feel dizzy or lightheaded, or a fast or abnormal heartbeat. • Severe liver problems, which in rare cases can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow, dark “tea-colored” urine, light-colored stools, loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, or stomach-area pain. The most common side effect of DESCOVY is nausea. These are not all the possible side effects of DESCOVY. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have any new symptoms while taking DESCOVY. Your healthcare provider will need to do tests to monitor your health before and during treatment with DESCOVY.
ABOUT DESCOVY • DESCOVY is a prescription medicine that is used together with other HIV-1 medicines to treat HIV-1 in people who weigh at least 77 lbs (35kg). DESCOVY is not for use to help reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 infection. • DESCOVY does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS. Ask your healthcare provider about how to prevent passing HIV-1 to others.
BEFORE TAKING DESCOVY Tell your healthcare provider if you: • Have or had any kidney or liver problems, including hepatitis infection. • Have any other medical condition. • Are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. • Are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed if you have HIV-1 because of the risk of passing HIV-1 to your baby. Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take: • Keep a list that includes all prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements, and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist. • Ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist about medicines that should not be taken with DESCOVY.
GET MORE INFORMATION • This is only a brief summary of important information about DESCOVY. Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist to learn more. • Go to DESCOVY.com or call 1-800-GILEAD-5 • If you need help paying for your medicine, visit DESCOVY.com for program information.
HOW TO TAKE DESCOVY • DESCOVY is a one pill, once a day HIV-1 medicine that is taken with other HIV-1 medicines. • Take DESCOVY with or without food.
DESCOVY, the DESCOVY Logo, LOVE WHAT’S INSIDE, GILEAD, and the GILEAD Logo are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. All other marks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners. Version date: September 2017 © 2017 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. DVYC0085 11/17
BLISS 2018 Special Guest Original Dreamgirl Jennifer Holliday Also featuring Frenchie Davis, Jason Stuart, Jonny Zywiciel and hosted by Dale Johannes.
Honoring Former Executive Director Bill Musick and Volunteer Kirsten Havrehed for 20 years of leadership and service. Sunday, May 6, 2018 from 4:30-8:00 p.m.
Julia Morgan Ballroom 465 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94104
Providing compassionate care to our community’s most vulnerable with advanced HIV since 1987 www.maitrisf.org
AN ASO IN ORANGE COUNTY DISMANTLES BARRIERS TO HIV CARE by Allie Oakes photographed exclusively for A&U by Sean Black
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know all too well how precious good health is and how any support becomes vital for those diagnosed, as well as their families. Three of my kids have had years of mysterious illnesses during which surviving each day was the only focus. Today, I am still a little triggered upon becoming aware of details of one who has poor health. That doesn’t stop me from learning more, it’s just something I notice. Yet, I was surprised by how moved I felt at the Gala held every January for Radiant Health Center (RHC) in Orange County, California. Jonathan Sweet and Garrett Brewer were on the planning committee and invited A&U’s Senior Editor Sean Black and me to this night of delicious food and great entertainment. The theme was Mardi Gras Masquerade so I threw on a sequined dress and like all guests, I wore a mask. I headed to the newly renovated Yost Theater in Santa Ana, California, where ladies teetered on stilts while guests arrived. Jonathan and Garrett, whom I already knew and was so excited to spend an evening with, quickly found Sean and me and began introducing us to some truly wonderful people with Radiant. As we all entered the venue, we were surprised by the chance to pause with a sweet fortune teller, who tied in perfectly with the Mardi Gras theme. A terrific Dixieland jazz band played while guests mingled. We then entered the festively decorated theater where we had the pleasure of eating the best meal I have had in a long time. The Royals put on an
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RADIANT
INDEED incredible drag show. Toni Malone and Michael Shapiro also provided really great entertainment. Everyone was fantastic! RHC’s Executive Director and CEO Phil Yaeger gave a heartfelt and enthusiastic message about the exciting and unusual things already happening at RHC, as well as their plans for the future. He pulled me right in with his passion for ending the epidemic. I eventually went to their location in Irvine, California, where I learned RHC was established in 1985 by fewer than ten volunteers. Today, RHC is Orange County’s “largest and most comprehensive nonprofit provider of services to those struggling with HIV/AIDS.” It was so compelling to hear Phil’s story of empathy put into APRIL 2018 • A&U
action that hasn’t stopped to this day. In the early nineties, upon Phil’s visit to his family home, he learned their neighbor and friend had passed away. He was unusually impacted when he realized the cause of death was AIDS-related and that the man’s family cared for him without any support, purposely isolating themselves because of the shame and stigma. The father took early retirement to care for his son until he passed. Eventually, Phil was so bothered by this reality that he dialed information and asked to be connected to “any AIDS organization.” He found AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County (now RHC). He began volunteering the next day. That was over twenty years ago. During my visit to RHC, Phil also gave
me a tour of their remarkable facility. The walls in several rooms display beautiful art. When I paused to look at art made by kids at an AIDS walk, Phil described to me what parts of one piece represented and it was so moving I began to cry. The pamphlet I found reiterated Phil’s words: “The words on the outside of the mural represent the negative feelings about HIV/ AIDS. The words surrounding the child’s body represent hope and protection that the children believe comes from knowledge and education about the disease.” Phil also shared that RHC has created a printable card everyone can access. This soon-to-be-available card acts as a tool to empower one with the awareness of the necessary steps required to access PEP. It
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portation management, they asked me to match up volunteers able to do food pantry delivery to clients. Within a couple months of volunteering, we received a grant from The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation for $25,000, half designated for food products for the pantry and the other half designated to hire a part-time food pantry coordinator. I was offered the position and was interested, but didn’t know how to survive part-time on $9/ hour. I juggled my hours, took the part-time job, and kept my full-time job. I thought, “Give me six months of doing both and I’ll figure out what to do.” Within three weeks, I knew I needed to be here. This wasn’t a dog-eat-dogworld. I wasn’t making some shareholder wealthy. I was helping people in need. Toward the end of Phil Yaeger, RHC Executive Director & CEO that six months, another part-time position opened for a volunteer coordinaalso acts as a tool for healthcare providers tor, and they gave me that role as well. who’ve not yet heard of PEP and might othMy career in the nonprofit world erwise turn someone away. I thought that began in 1993. Over the next fifteen was especially fantastic for youth who may years, I was a part of developing transnot be comfortable seeking help from careportation services for those in need givers, but who truly need to safely advocate of rides to medical and mental health for themselves in a medical setting. appointments. I also helped with developing a number of housing programs Allie Oakes: What did you do when you including a twenty-three-unit apartment began your work here? complex, built from new construction to Phil Yaeger: I started with filing, a simcompletion. Today we house people who ple task, but also important to the function were once homeless and are living with of the orgaHIV or AIDS and disabilities. The nization. I next piece we thought, “I focused on don’t care was prevenhow minor it tion, but for is, I’m going the first five to do it years, we were well, as well really helping as I can.” people die The work with dignity. became even more personal What did it as I began look like to to recognize help people die names on files. with dignity? Then, since Melisa Anejo, my background volunteer was in trans-
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Some people who were dying would be abandoned in our parking lot with an envelope pinned to their collar. Others were abandoned elsewhere. We trained volunteers, giving them the tools to [help clients face] the end of life. We didn’t want people dying without anybody to care for them. We focused on providing people with what bit of dignity we could in their final days. Then with treatment changing so much in 1995, our focus became preventing new infections and teaching HIV-positive people how to live longer, healthier, productive lives. How did that change your approach? We built up our wrap-around and support services, with the intention of becoming a one-stop-shop. We tried to remove all the barriers that would keep people from getting care and staying in treatment. People wouldn’t worry about getting medicine or a ride to the doctor if they couldn’t get food or pay rent. We developed a back-to-work program. We secured our first CDC grant and began providing HIV testing to get people aware of their status, and in care and treatment. Our focus has shifted to ending the epidemic. We go to various campuses and tell students that AIDS has only been around for thirty years, and we can end it. We know that we can end it for a couple of reasons. Seeking treatment is a part of prevention. Someone who is HIV-positive and in treatment can get their viral load to an undetectable level, meaning it is much more difficult for them to transmit the disease to somebody else. Some argue it is actually impossible to transmit HIV if a person is undetectable. When we talk about being undetectable, we talk about the need to continue to use safe sex practices, such as condoms and other precautions. The minute condoms are removed from the equation, there is risk of contracting other STIs, which then puts you at risk for higher rates of cancer and other diseases. What makes RHC unique? Our family program works directly with families and kids. Some kids are infected, while others are affected by a family member who is HIV-positive. Weekly support is found in Kids Club, where children can access art therapy, and speak freely about how HIV is impacting them. Generous donations from various donors allow us to offer several activities throughout the year, including year-long arts and sports programs as A&U • APRIL 2018
well as week long arts camp at Camp Hollywood Heart in Malibu with other positive and affected youth. We offer our families a camp in the mountains and to spend time during the year at theme parks and concerts, etc. We partner with Segerstrom Center for the Arts, and usually do at least one annual art program. We just hired a clinical social worker to teach families how to effectively handle issues, like substance abuse, or dropouts, on top of managing HIV. We have OC’s only Spanish-speaking support group for HIV-positive women. RHC even offers yoga. Again, we have tried to remove almost all barriers to accessing care, offering services already mentioned, plus counseling from our nutritionist and immediate access to tailored dietary needs at the food pantry where one can also leave with food for their pet. SOMOS is a prevention Janelle Gonzales and Maya Read, interns APRIL 2018 • A&U
program for Latino MSM, ages eighteen to twenty-nine, meeting regularly to educate participants about safe-sex practices, HIV testing, and PrEP. They hold an annual event where participants compete in various ways for the title of “Mr. SOMOS,” the next Latino HIV Prevention ambassador. Additionally, RHC is looking to expand into medical services.
incredible and powerful when combined with the many employees, vital volunteers, and generous donors that have come together through many services to powerfully act as the heart and soul of Radiant Health Center. It’s a great reminder that together, we can improve many lives when we take simple steps in whatever areas move us to serve those in need.
Phil’s humble devotion to improving countless lives is
For more information about Radiant Health, log on to: www.radianthealthcenters.org. Allie Oakes, forty-two, lives with her kids in Orange County, California. Her son, Cooper, surprised her by coming out at sixteen. She speaks and writes about the radical transformation that occurred in every area of her life when she began to see the LGBTQ community through the eyes of a mom. As a result, she founded Made of ONYX where the mission is to better the lives of LGBT+ youth and their parents. To learn more and connect on social media, visit, www.madeofonyx.com.
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Being BEING The Art of
Driven toward auteurs, good scripts, authentic roles and the “right” ensemble casts, art-house queen and veteran ally in the fight against AIDS Chloë Sevigny stays on her non-sellout course, smashing stigma on both sides of the screen
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en minutes into our phone conversation and I accidentally drop the call on the leading queen of contemporary independent cinema. The soon-to-be breakout ingénue Chloë Sevigny delivered one of the most painfully memorable screen portrayals of rape after having just discovered her contraction of HIV in her role as “15-year-old Jennie” in Larry Clark’s provocative 1995 masterpiece Kids, written by Chloë’s now longtime friend Harmony Korine. The same Oscar-nominee for her dramatic turn as Lana Tisdel in Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and the actress who sparked humanity as Clara in Thom Fitzgerald’s 3 Needles (2005), a three-part film costarring Sandra Oh [A&U, October 2004] and Olympia Dukakis, which focused on the worldwide AIDS crisis, a cause clearly dear to Sevigny’s heart. Seconds sluggishly morphed into long minutes as I replayed my inadvertent disconnect in my head. I had just hung up on one of the hardest-working artists in film, television, fashion and popular culture, and who had been working graciously with me through her publicist for nearly three years to make this interview happen simply because Chloë Sevigny is just that kind of human being. Prior to our first glance, through the lens of my camera, at
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one of her many HIV/AIDS fundraisers back in 2015, Sevigny (Seven-nee) was in the thick of filming “Hotel,” Season 5 of the FX’s smash-hit series American Horror Story, as Dr. Alex Lowe. With numerous roles in popular television shows over the years like Big Love (2006–2011) and Portlandia (2013), along with a non-stop vitality in cinema: Trees Lounge (1996), Palmetto (1998), Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998) and again his Love and Friendship (2016) both co-starring Kate Beckinsale, along with mainstream psychological draws American Psycho (2000) and Zodiac (2007), just to mention a few. Her acting career hasn’t ever waned. She’s my go-to secret weapon in the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon [A&U, August 2000]. Last year alone, Chloë co-starred in six major films, including Miguel Arteta’s adaptation of a Mike White screenplay, Beatriz at Dinner, with John Lithgow, Connie Britton and Salma Hayek, and The Snowman in dual roles opposite Michael Fassbender, with recurring guest spots in TV series Comrade Detective and Bloodline. And if that wasn’t enough, she squeezed-in two personal writing/ directorial projects Kitty (writing adaptation), and Carmen for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series, memorializing a side-splitting true story and Sevigny’s fondness of the work of director Gus Van Sant
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photo by Robby Klein/Contour by Getty Images
by Sean Black
APRIL 2018 • A&U
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Chloë Sevigny at amfAR’s Inspiration Gala, Los Angeles, in 2015
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and cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards (both for My Own Private Idaho). “To me, Carmen was very personal. It was a story about being an artist and giving so much of yourself and then sometimes getting rewarded and sometimes not.” She elaborates, kicking off the interesting tone of our phone interview. “There is this convenience store scene, which actually happened to me when I was working out in California. I walked into this place and there are these two squatter kids who totally objectify me and then they ask me if I could buy them some beer. This was a fucking hilarious scene.” Laughing together, Chloë (with the umlaut) and I first connected over the phone (prior to my f*up with an asterisk), literally breaking the ice as the forecasted winter ice storm in her current home, Manhattan, had just melted icy snowflakes into drizzle, and thus confirming Chloë’s New England acclimatization and her love affair with the Big Apple. “I am a snow-girl!” she boasts sassily before we commiserate over loved ones’ recent, “brutal” nasal surgeries. And here is the trick about interviews, for me especially. Chloë was every bit as lovely and down-to-earth as you’d hope she’d be, pulling off that genuine, girl-next-door sweetness and the high-school BFF coolness that everyone imagines. So I go off-script and pitch a question that clearly needed a more developed segue. “What is it that you hope to be remembered for?” was my clunky first question after scrap-
photo by Sean Black
“Chloë Sevigny is a real champion of the fight against AIDS...”
APRIL 2018 • A&U
ping the one I originally penned. “I will [only] be forty,” she scoffs jovially so I know she isn’t peeved but maybe just caught a little off-guard. “I don’t want to think about that yet,” she admits honestly. But then takes a longish, dramatic pause. “INTEGRITY!” she bolts back in a steady and emphatic voice. “Integrity, in [my] being.” Then I end the call (ugh!). Dialing back frantically, Chloë and I were quickly reconnected as my heart pounded palpably in my chest. “Hey, I lost you,” warmly chimed in Chloë, just after the second ring. Her friendly greeting and cheery, forgiving tone set me right at ease. Her gregarious air is signature and
part of why her fans love her so much when eyes meet at red-carpet venues, such as the one where we initially connected several years back, amfAR’s 2015 Los Angeles Inspiration Gala honoring Ryan Murphy. “Chloë Sevigny is a real champion of the fight against AIDS and has consistently used her celebrity to further the cause of HIV awareness and prevention,” shares amfAR Chief Executive Officer Kevin Robert Frost
when asked to comment on the star’s steadfast dedication to the cause. “She is a longtime supporter of amfAR, generously donating her time and lending her presence to many of our fundraising events over the years, and we are immensely grateful for her efforts to help us develop a cure for HIV.” Along with her appearances for amfAR Chloë has also been the face of M•A•C’s AIDS Fund when they recruited her for its tenth anniversary as one of the five new spokespersons for its Viva Glam line, along with Missy Elliott, Christina Aguilera, Linda Evangelista, and Boy George. Born and raised in Darien, Connecticut, Sevigny often took creative respite in nearby New York City. At just eighteen, one of these trips led her to an internship and a few modeling jobs for Sassy Magazine and x-girl, the urban clothing line created by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, thus kickstarting Sevigny’s march to fashion fame in the mid to late nineties. It was around the same time she made the cover of Interview magazine when writer Jay McInerney in The New Yorker hailed her as the “it girl,” which has stuck like glue. Her social media is aflutter with stylish snaps and the latest hot trends. Designing for fashion house Opening Ceremony, founded in 2002 by Carol Lim
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and Humberto Leon (now creatively spearheading Kenzo), Sevigny is keen on melding life-saving messaging into contemporary culture. “I did this collaboration with Opening Ceremony where we used Robert Mapplethorpe’s images [printed] on T-shirts and all of the proceeds went to his foundation. There are so many photographers [like Mapplethorpe] who’ve brought attention to the AIDS movement. I mean, [the early days] weren’t pretty but the work is very effective and moving. We hoped to reach younger generations that aren’t as aware of the disease and didn’t grow up in the time that we did. Working with them, I wanted to highlight that period of time and have them look at the images, be struck by them and then go and do research on their pocket computers and find out who he [Mapplethorpe] was and how he died. I was hoping to open up a conversation among young people through the power of a T-shirt campaign. Opening Ceremony has also done reissues of the original ACT UP T-shirts. They’re pretty active as far as
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trying to raise awareness goes.” Back during her early trips into New York City, Sevigny also spent a lot of her time watching the skateboarders who convened in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park. It was there that she met young aspiring director Harmony Korine, which led her to being cast as the lead in Korine and Larry Clark’s collaboration Kids. [See Larry Clark this issue’s Gallery.] About the director she shares in this time of the outing of abusive Hollywood power, “Larry Clark was very sensitive. He was really gentle with me. He was very encouraging. He set a really nice tone on set and knows how to make people feel comfortable and natural. I was really a big admirer of his work and I really believed the script and the story that we were trying to tell. I really adore Larry. I think he’s made better films since Kids. Bully is a great film, but that’s just my opinion.” Bully co-stars advocate Daniel Franzese [A&U, July 2015], a great friend of the HIV community as well. I asked Chloë, a veteran who has
worked with scads of brilliant people, to reveal things she’d like to see further improved in her industry. “I think there is stigma around the ‘indie actress’ title. People associate you with a certain type of film, and I think when you’re in that milieu it can be harder to break out of, into more mainstream roles. As an actor you want more opportunity and I think [typecasting] can limit those opportunities.” I marvel about Chloë Sevigny’s admirable humility. “That’s why an actor like Steve Buscemi is very much identified as an indie actor, but he’s also thought of as a character actor. He gets to do the crossover into more mainstream work all the time. And I feel like actresses don’t have that crossover as much as male actors.” For me Chloë transcends not only her roles like her male counterparts but I’d argue that she may be one of the leading forces in destigmatizing the genre itself. Her upcoming films are very mainstream, Lean On Pete and the long anticipated Lizzie, and she shares sneak peeks at both. “Well, Lean On Pete is about a boy who has lost his family and he’s on a quest for home, whatever that means. He runs into a bunch of different characters along that A&U • APRIL 2018
Lean On Pete photos by Scott Patrick Green, Courtesy A24; Lizzie photo by Eliza Morse
Left (top, bottom): Chloë Sevigny with Charlie Plummer in Lean On Pete; right: Sevigny with Kristin Stewart (left) in Lizzie.
journey. And my character is one of the people he comes into contact with, one of the few women portrayed in the film or the book. And she gives him some tough love. He’s of course, very attached to this horse. She leads him towards an important real-life lesson.” The young actor, Charlie Plummer, who plays Pete, just won best newcomer at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. “He is so amazing and of course, so is the filmmaker, Andrew Haigh who made Weekend [2011], Looking [2014], and recently 45 Years. “Charlotte Rampling is really accomplished. [45 Years] is very moving,” says Chloë. “I’ve always been attracted to original voices and auteurs for lack of a better word; towards writers/directors and just wanting to be a part of an ensemble more than searching or chasing specific leading roles. I think Lizzie is the first leading role I’ve ever had in my twenty-something-year career. So yeah, I guess I’ve just always been attracted to filmmakers that I believe in. I want to see them propel along with their careers and the stories that they want to tell. I’ve also had a really good run actually with first-time filmmakers, like Harmony, with Gummo, and Kimberly Peirce for Boys Don’t Cry.” Nearing the closing of our interview, APRIL 2018 • A&U
I attempt to sum up by asking how she originally came into the fight against HIV/ AIDS and whether or not it was her role in Kids that drew her in, she replies. “I mean, growing up when we did, I knew people with the disease and people died from it. It was something that I witnessed and so whenever anybody asked me to get involved, I try and give as much time and
energy as I can. I don’t know if I have or know what the specific genesis was, but it has always been in my consciousness.” Asked about her staying power all these years: “Don’t do drugs! “Jennie [Sevigny’s haunting Kids character] is totally compromised at the end [of
the film] because she doesn’t have her wits about her. “When I was growing up drugs were very prevalent and I always knew that perhaps I would like them too much, so I stayed away from them. Luckily, I grew up with a really strong family resolve and I’m not an addict, thank the Lord. I have lots of friends who are and struggle with it. I think that the stigma around addiction and mental health has to be lifted and there needs to be more programs and opportunities for people to get help in environments where they feel safe.” Whether delivering tough love on screen or in real life, Sevigny is continuing her sharp focus. “I will be working on another short [film] soon about five women in their thirties or early forties and their relationship to their agency and how they can manifest power.” “I’m just trying to do things that I really believe in and hopefully inspire others.” For more information about amfAR, log on to www.amfar.org. For more information about Chloë’s newly released film Lean On Pete, opening April 4, go to: https://a24films.com/films/lean-on-pete. Sean Black is a Senior Editor at A&U. He photographed Karamo Brown for the February cover story.
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IN HIS WORDS His masculine, gravelly voice, weighted by mounting years, American art hero and cinematic bad-boy Larry Clark elucidates his passion for living while bearing witness to loss & the impermanence of his Oklahoma roots by Sean Black
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hen we connect in late August by phone Larry Clark is completely at ease, yet strikingly present. He is in a familiar place. He is home. The renegade filmmaker sits loyally vigilant at the bedside of a dying friend surrounded by loved ones and family. The nurturing and comfort conveyed to me over the telephone is in sharp contrast to the scripted, unnerving drama depicted over two decades ago in his debut film Kids (1995) that completely shook the yuppified cultural landscape of the time. At the time Clark’s work blurred real life with fiction bringing a much-needed awareness to the pre-HAART days of AIDS. Prior to Kids, Clark was already highly regarded for his revolutionary photographic body of work,
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including books Tulsa (1971), Teenage Lust (1982), and The Perfect Childhood (1992). Later, his films Bully (2001) and Ken Park (2002) prompted dramatic responses from the MPAA censorship board. He just completed his latest film Marfa Girl 2 (2017), a sequel continuing to fuel his incessant drive to “refine his unique vision and art.” The foreword of his seminal book Tulsa (1971) perhaps best describes the artist in his own words: “I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1943. When I was sixteen I started shooting amphetamine. I shot with my friends everyday for three years and then left town, but I’ve gone back through the years. Once the needle goes in it never comes out.” A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Photographers’ Fellowship in
1973 and the Creative Arts Public Service Photographers’ Grant in 1980, Clark has seen his work included in numerous collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. A retrospective of Clark’s work, “Kiss the past hello,” was held at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the fall of 2010. Auction house Paddle8 described Clark’s work as exploring “themes of emerging masculinity and the ways in which mass media can form a skewed perception of young adults.” About one A&U • APRIL 2018
A&U Gallery
Larry Clark, Untitled, 1971, gelatin silver print, 14 by 11 inches (35.56 by 27.94 cm) © Larry Clark; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York APRIL 2018 • A&U
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Larry Clark, Untitled, 1963, gelatin silver print, 11 by 14 inches (27.94 by 35.56 cm) © Larry Clark; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
Larry Clark, Untitled, 1971, gelatin silver print, 11 by 14 inches (27.94 by 35.56 cm) © Larry Clark; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
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A&U Gallery of his most iconic portraits of a sitter, the bio continues, “Billy Mann reveals the raw emotion and power that Clark captures; illuminating the stifling effects culture has on this population.” Revealing the ever presence of raw emotion witnessed through a precise,
cancer now. He’s in my Tulsa book. There’s this picture of a long-haired, Native American kid smiling with a big ole toothy, beautiful smile. He’s sixty-two [now] and has ten kids. He’s got grandkids and even great-grandkids now. This past Sunday, there was everybody from people my age,
Sean Black: Larry, I am sorry and I am glad you’ve got your buddies there with you; people that know you and you know them and have that kind of great history. People, too, whom you’ve documented so intimately and powerfully in your work. Are you taping? Yes. Good, good, good. You should definitely tape because I ramble on. What motivated you growing up in Tulsa? Well, there’s a theater called the Circle Theater that I used to go to when I was a kid back in the ’50s. Every Saturday there’d be a triple feature. So I saw every movie ever made, I think, before everybody was watching TV. It’s interesting that you mention the Circle Theater because it sounds like your life then is coming full circle and with the history you are sharing with me it sounds like you never really can leave Tulsa, can you? No, you can’t. The whole idea when I made the Tulsa Larry Clark, Dead 1970, book, the whole 1968, gelatin silver thing was beprint, 14 by 11 inches cause it was this (35.56 by 27.94 cm) © circle. When we Larry Clark; Courtesy of were teenagers, the artist and Luhring myself, Stevie, Augustine, New York David and Billy, we were these fifteen-year-old kids, kind of repeating the lives of the generations before us so that was the circle that keeps repeating and we keep coming back.
photographic eye, Clark talks candidly with A&U about the reasoning for yet another return home to Tulsa. Larry Clark: Stevie is all ate up with APRIL 2018 • A&U
seventy-four, down to newborns. It was pretty cool. Plus, David Allen, also in my book, is here alive and kicking. And he just came over a few minutes ago. I’m going to have lunch with him tomorrow.
I’ve read that your mother was a studio photographer specializing in portraits of babies. Who or what most influenced your career in photography and film growing up in Tulsa? My mother got a job in this little photography place where they were doing baby photography. She was so good at it that she and my father [later] started a little mom-and-pop business. She went out every morning early and would drive around to all the little towns in Oklahoma and Kansas to photograph babies in their homes. When I was fifteen, I was forced into helping her. At first I was just carrying equipment and then pretty soon I was going out on the calls, knocking on doors and taking pictures. When I was fifteen or sixteen years-old, I was actually taking baby pictures and going in and putting the continued on page 54
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Poetry
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Mariological Recitative of Mystical Pharmacology Mary, mother mine, o comfort of us mortals! Virgin of virgins, pray for us. “You are going to die,” Dr. Bowers said. (Solo: arrogante) “You’ll die, like my brother you will. Brain cancer, he has. You and he. Dead. Six months from now. Less, maybe.” Then Dr. Marrero died in a car crash: a drunk driver on Highway 1. (Chorus, largo disperato) T cells at 138. AZT, Flucanazole, Bactrim DS, Videx, ddI. Mother of divine grace, pray for us. (Solo: timoroso) “You’re here on a lark, don’t fool yourself,” said a new doctor when the one before him collapsed with a stroke. (Chorus, largo e troppo funebre) T cells at 50, with a viral load > 25000. Flucanazole, Bactrim DS, 3TC, Combivir. Incorruptible Mother, pray for us. “I’m giving you no hope,” the doctor ordered his chest opened and stabbed with an intravenous catheter. “But you’ll go blind,”
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said the retinologist. (Chorus, larghissimo) At 36 your T cells, viral load at 32000. Flucanazole, Bactrim DS, Sulfadiazine, Ganciclovir IV, Neurontin. Mother of Good Counsel, pray for us. (Solo: allegro, ma con avarizia) “We’ll buy your life policy, $250 thousand for $90 thousand and that helps with your treatment, because you’re not leaving any of it to anyone, are you?” It does you no good if you’re dead. And it’s only one. You have two more you can leave to... A niece? The free clinic? ASPCA?” So said the viatical company and he sold it. (Chorus, largo, ma con speranza) T cells at 180 CD4, viral load >6500: Sustiva, Isentress, Epivir, Ganciclovir IV, Sulfadiazine, Neurontin, Lyrica. Mirror of Justice, pray for us. (Solo: allegro vero) “Astonishing! You give me hope. This is what we want to achieve and it’s possible when the patients do their share
A&U • APRIL 2018
and take their medication,” so said Dr. Claudio, reinstated after his retirement when his only son died of the infection’s simple complications. (Chorus, allegro, ma scettico) CD4 at 215, viral load at <300. Norvir, Crixivan, Tivicay, Sustiva, Lyrica. Mother Most Admirable, pray for us. (Solo: giocoso) “I’d kiss you, but I’m not into men, ha ha ha, no offense. I’m so proud what we have achieved together,” said Dr. Claudio and kissed him anyway on his forehead. (Chorus, allegro, ma non troppo) CD4 at 425, undetectable viral load. Triumeq. Solace of the Afflicted, pray for us. (Solo: grandioso) “You are going to live. We all die sooner or later, but you, you’re like Sisyphus, you won’t let the boulder crush you. You are going to live,” said Dr. Claudio. (Chorus, brevissimo, con brio ma con attenzione e misurato:) CD4 at 550, undetectable viral load. Triumeq. Ark of the Covenant, pray for us. Queen of Christians who judge, pray for us. Mother of those who no longer believe, pray for us. Throne of unending anguish, pray for us. Mother of the truncated paroxysm, pray for us. Patron of saving inhibitors, pray for us. Queen of the gold it takes to remain alive, pray for us. Refuge of those who sin because they are human, pray for us. Comfort of the damned and accursed, pray for us. APRIL 2018 • A&U
Mother of the Precious Blood that shall not be donated, that shall not be shared, that shall be wiped off with bleach, that shall be drawn, that shall be analyzed, that shall have atrophied cells, pray for us. Give us this day our daily caramelized bile, turn it into ointment turn it into light, turn it into bread of life, turn it into calm, turn it into pleasure, turn it into humanity. And lead us not into temptation as long as we can sublimate, as long as we can repress, as long as we can deny ourselves, as long as we are not undetectable, as long as we don’t develop resistance, as long as pharmacogenic anemia strikes, as long as our viscera are not turning, as long as we have a rash with pruritus, as long as we can become eunuchs and when we do fall into temptation be mother most gracious, be mother most prudent be worthy of praise and leave us alone, for though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death and de profundis clamem, Gilead is my shepherd: I shall not want. —Joseph F. Delgado
Joseph F. Delgado is a former professor of Spanish literature and linguistics at the universities of Minnesota, Puerto Rico and South Carolina. He is the author of Coming of Queer Age in Puerto Rico: The Curse of Memory and, among other works of fiction, Edging: A Queer Anthology and Man of His Dreams. His AIDS-themed short story “Mr. Doppler Is Survived by Those Who Loved Him” became the basis for his film Mr. Doppler’s Effect. His Spanish-language novel Puerto Rican Laments presents the impact of AIDS on a Latino family.
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l i t Still S att a k Risk s i R Playwright Tim Pinckney Examines AIDS Activism Then & Now and the Rewriting of Our History
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by Hank Trout
e first meet Kevin, ex-actor and AIDS activist in his mid-forties, in New York City in 2005 when he stumbles into his friend Marcus’s apartment, covered in grime after slipping on something on the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue and falling into the gutter. He had been on his way to meet Byron, the Development Director of the (fictitious) Manhattan AIDS Project, an organization which Kevin’s ex-partner Eric Mason had helped to found. Kevin has learned that MAP plans to honor all of their founders at a huge fundraising gala… all except Eric, whose incendiary articles in The New York Times and the New York Native ruffled all the wrong feathers and whose take-no-prisoners activism opened apparently unhealable wounds within the organization. Kevin, who has stubbornly and loudly retained all the anger and urgency he felt during the Plague Years, both before and after he lost Eric to trust-funded Christopher, sets out to make sure that Eric is not ignored at this gala. Thus begins Tim Pinckney’s emotionally charged new play, Still at Risk, which recently received its world premiere and enjoyed a very successful run at the renowned New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco. With a cast of five on a minimalist stage, Still at Risk examines the problem of what we do now that the war we waged during the Plague Years—a combination of ACT UP-style guerilla theatrics and solid scientific research—has morphed into a less urgent, less in-your-face “checkbook activism.” No character in the play gets off unscathed for their foibles and limitations, but Pinckney treats those foibles and limitations with compassion and understanding. Himself a veteran of the battles of the Plague Years, Pinckney has written several plays before Still at Risk, including Message to Michael, which was staged at NCTC during its
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1999–2000 season, and several others. He is a member of The Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, Actors’ Equity, and the Dramatists’ Guild. After ten years as an actor (“I was a big ole ham-bone actor!” he recently confided to A&U), Tim gave up his acting career and joined the GMHC in New York. “When my friend David got sick, everything changed, it turned my life upside down. That’s when I joined GMHC. It was a terrifying time—the bodies were piling up around us. I did intake for GMHC. I worked with some of the best people I’ll ever know at GMHC, but there were limits to what we could do, there was a limited number of clients we could serve. Every Monday morning, we got calls from more clients than we could handle in a week and I would have to tell these guys, sorry, you’ll have to call back next week. It was heartbreaking.” One of Pinckney’s coping mechanisms was his sense of humor. “If I hadn’t had a crazily dark humor, that period would have been even more difficult,” he said. It’s a sense of humor that David shared. For instance, Tim said that when he was helping David plan for his own burial, he had to tell David, “We can’t get you laid out like Judy Garland, but we did get you the spot where Joan Crawford was,” much to David’s delight. He also talked about how David and he had shared a single suit, each wearing it when they needed it. David had originally planned to be buried in his ACT UP T-shirt and a black leather jacket, but for the sake of his family’s feelings, he decided to be buried in the suit. “But what am I going to wear to the funeral?” Pinckney wanted to know. “On the morning of the funeral, I was in Macy’s buying a new suit.” That darkish sense of humor creeps into Still at Risk and jolts the play. At one point, Kevin is talking with his friend Susan, a
fellow veteran of the AIDS wars, who have just met for the first time in ten years. “You and I haven’t been in touch since…Jesus… since when?” Kevin asks Susan. “Since Reagan was alive and could still tell you his name and address,” she replies. Later in the conversation, when they’re talking about Eric’s having angered everyone with his blazing-hot writing, Susan says, “Well, everyone was pretty fucking pissed off about that first article. Larry Kramer wouldn’t talk to him, for Christ’s sake.” Although the play is very funny—the play is about smart, articulate, artistic gay folks in New York City; how could it not be funny?— its themes are deadly serious. Kevin personifies many of those themes. For instance, what role does Kevin’s unrelenting anger have to play in today’s AIDS activism, now that the bodies aren’t piling up as fast and the sense of fear and the urgency have dissipated? Has that anger—so essential in the early days of the Plague Years when our government was totally indifferent to us and the scientific community far too slow—has that anger, which many of us still harbor, become obsolete, more a hindrance than a help, more off-putting than productive? Is that anger holding Kevin back, affecting his relationships? Still? Another theme of the play is, how do we guard against the rewriting of our history? Pinckney seems keenly aware of the danger of allowing anyone, even our own community, to rewrite the history of the Plague Years. Kevin rightly sees MAP’s decision to exclude Eric from the gala honorees as an attempt to remove Eric from the history of MAP and thus from our history. From talking with Pinckney, I suspect that he finds that revisionism as unconscionable as I do. “I would hate to see us get too assimilated. I’m very proud of our tough history, of our rebel status. I don’t want us to lose that. A&U • APRIL 2018
playwright photo by Sean Turi; production photos by Lois Tema
Clockwise from top: Playwright Tim Pinckney; (left to right) Marcus (William Giammona), Susan (Desiree Rogers), Byron (J. Conrad Frank), Christopher (Matt Weimer), Kevin (Scott Cox); Christopher meets with Byron to discuss the upcoming gala event. Although he characterizes the work he did as strictly behind-the-scenes (“I could never be the megaphone guy”), I could hear in his voice that he has deep-rooted respect for the rabble-rousers. “I’m very proud of all that ACT UP achieved. I mean, in addition to all the attention they got for us with the die-ins and everything, ACT UP also made us all become experts about the science of the virus. We led the scientific community. And even though we rarely get credit for it, we also changed charities, changed the ways they raise money. Whenever you see some group doing a 10k run fundraiser or a walkathon, that’s us, we started that.” Pinckney’s other role in the war was APRIL 2018 • A&U
caregiver to David. He recalled a conversation with his friend Ron Goldberg, a New York activist featured in How to Survive a Plague, in which he thanked Goldberg for his bravery and activism. Goldberg assured him that we all did all we could. “You took care of people,” he reminded Pinckney. The story reinforced for me something I’ve heard several times over the last few years from quite a lot of other long-term survivors, both HIV-positive and negative. We all did what we could, some on the front lines of the battlefield, some at home quietly caring for a dying partner. It’s a lesson that Kevin needs to learn, along with his friends. And maybe some of them do.
That’s all the plot you’re getting out of me. Suffice to say that there are incidents in the second act that genuinely surprise. There is conflict but there are no “bad guys.” The dialogue is completely natural and believable throughout the play—it sounds the way people actually speak, which, any writer can assure you, is very difficult to get right. And the combination of serious subject matter with crisp, witty talk is as satisfying as a warm New York City bagel on a winter morning. It is delightful and seriously good. For more information on the New Conservatory Theatre Center, log on to www.nctcsf.org. Although there are no specific plans at the moment, Tim Pinckney hopes to bring Still at Risk to the boards in his hometown New York City soon. For information about the playwright, log on to: timpinckney.com. Hank Trout is an A&U Editor At Large.
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PUSHING DEAD A Film by Tom E. Brown Explores Long-Term Surviving—With a Sense of Humor by Hank Trout
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he first thing I noticed about filmmaker Tom E. Brown was his impossibly clear blue eyes. When we sat down to chat at lunch recently, even our startled waiter remarked on Tom’s luminous eyes before he took our order. And then when Tom smiled, those eyes glowed with intelligence and a rapier-sharp sense of humor. I’ve rarely felt such an instant liking for an interview subject. We met to discuss Tom’s compelling, heart-bruising yet laugh-out-loud funny film Pushing Dead, “an AIDS comedy,” fresh off the festival circuit and ready for wide distribution in April 2018. Yes, you read that correctly: “an AIDS comedy.” For a long-term HIV survivor
Nobody goes through life without humor. And as a writer, that’s all I do, comedy...”
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play was another matter. “I kept hearing that ‘nobody wants another AIDS movie,’” but eventually, with the backing of Sundance and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, he completed the film. The protagonist Dan Schauble (James Roday, Psych) is a twenty-two-year HIV survivor living check-to-check as a bouncer at a dive bar in San Francisco, a tiny nightclub where he also promotes poetry slams that no one attends. When Dan deposits a $100 birthday present from his mother into his checking account, it is just enough to boost his account above his healthcare insurance’s acceptable income limits for prescription coverage. Unable to scrounge the $3,000 co-pay, Dan must navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of state-sponsored insurance to get his medications. Meanwhile, the nightclub owner Bob [Danny Glover, (A&U, June 2002)] has a rancorous split from his wife and business partner Dot (Khandi Alexan-
der, Treme, Scandal), and is spending nights at Dan’s apartment, where Dan lives with no-nonsense Paula (Robin Weigert, Deadwood, Sons of Anarchy), a massage therapist with her own relationship problems. Dan has eschewed the dating scene, dreading that inevitable “I’m HIV-positive” conversation, until he meets Mike (Tom Riley, Da Vinci’s Demons) who just might be “the one.” Mike too is HIV-positive, although he has been diagnosed much more recently than Dan. After just a couple of dates, Mike informs Dan in a gut-wrenching telephone call that he is not ready for a relationship with someone who has been positive for so long—we sense that Mike understandably fears that Dan, having lived with the virus for so long, might die much sooner than he. And this is a comedy?! AIDS; monstrous, heartless bureaucracy; inadequate health insurance; marital break-ups; relationship frustrations; muggings; HIV stigma—these are A&U • APRIL 2018
photos by Frazer Bradshaw
like myself, that phrase was quite jarring when I first read it—the words “AIDS” and “comedy” mashed up into a brain-rattling oxymoron. “I started writing the AIDS film that I was craving—a film without IV bags and skin lesions. I wanted to make a different kind of AIDS movie, a comedy—in which nobody dies,” Tom has said. “After all,” he explained to me, “nobody goes through life without humor. And as a writer, that’s all I do, comedy; I’m not interested in writing humorless drama.” Tom had already written and directed three short “AIDS comedies” (Don’t Run, Johnny; Rubber Gloves; and Das Clown) when he began writing Pushing Dead in 2000. He writes fast, he said, completing the first draft in five weeks. He workshopped the screenplay at the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Labs (one of only a handful of screenplays selected out of some 3,600 submitted). Financing the completed screen-
Director Tom E. Brown
Danny Glover and James Roday in Pushing Dead the ingredients for a “comedy”? How is that possible? How does a filmmaker work with such serious material—issues like the cruel, petty bureaucracy administering healthcare insurance; the loss of love and companionship; the ugliness of stigma and rejection, even from within our own community, even from another HIV-positive man—and make us laugh out loud? In Brown’s case, with a whole lot of heart and compassion. For one thing, by letting us glimpse them at their most vulnerable, their most human, in scene after scene Brown shows us these characters navigating major roadblocks—my wife left me; I have AIDS and can’t get my meds, or a date; I’m in love with a stuffed animal (more on that later)—with great care and, yes, a sense of humor. In one scene, Dan and Bob are sitting at the bar portioning out their daily medication intake, Dan’s for HIV, Bob’s for “old man stuff.” Comparing their daily prescription intake, Bob says, “I win. Eight bottles—you, seven.” Dan picks up one of Bob’s bottles. “This is a multivitamin,” he objects. “Multivitamins don’t count. Therefore, it is a tie.” The scene is at once funny and a sad reminder of Dan’s and Bob’s dependence on life-saving drugs, as well as a heart-warming glimpse into the depth of the friendship between these two very different men. Roday and Glover—who both give poignant performances throughout the film—handle the scene with incredible tenderness and sly humor. Now, about that stuffed animal…. Dan brings home for Paula a stuffed white monkey with a troll-like face that is, frankly, both frighteningly repulsive and kinda cute. When Dan thrusts the monkey in Paula’s face as she opens the door, she shrieks in horror and disdain, and throws APRIL 2018 • A&U
the monkey to the ground. But then, gradually, Paula grows from revulsion to the monkey (keeping it in a corner on the floor), to a grudging acceptance (moving it to the living room chair), to a kind of fascination (talking with it), to a genuine love for it—it becomes a welcome companion, a respite from her horrible dating experiences. Watching the
“Pushing Dead has already garnered a boatload of awards on the festival circuit” brilliant Reigert undergo that transformation is a wonderful sight to behold! A scene of Paula bathing the monkey in the sink and talking to it is a comedy miracle. Other scenes from the film are also unexpectedly funny-sad. For instance, the scenes in which the drugstore pharmacist must reject Dan’s prescription for meds are rife with frustration, exasperation, and in the actress playing the pharmacist’s “don’t you dare try to pull that on me” humor. As Tom pointed out to me, with the Affordable Care Act in jeopardy under the current administration, the scenes are even more relevant than when they were written and filmed, the situation even more exasperating. The resolution of Dan’s insurance problem—which I will not reveal!—is unexpected, a comedic solution arising out of a truly horrible event. It is an entirely satisfying, surprising, and uplifting resolution we do not see coming—but happily cheer. Pushing Dead has already garnered a boatload of awards on the festival circuit— best feature recognition at the Ashland
Independent Film Festival 2017, the Roze Filmdagen 2017, Amsterdam, FilmOut San Diego 2017, and other festivals in San Francisco, Seattle, and Orlando, as well as acting awards for all three of the primary actors (Roday, Glover, and Weigert, as well as the supporting cast, all give pitch-perfect, memorable performances) and a best director award for Brown at Santo Domingo OutFest 2017. Brown’s other films have screened at the American Museum of Natural History, the Walker Art Center, and the Guggenheim; have run at hundreds of international film festivals; and been televised on PBS, Bravo, and The Independent Film Channel. As soon as Pushing Dead becomes available on VOD or cable or online streaming, it will also, I’m certain, garner a broad appreciative audience. As it should. For although on its surface Pushing Dead is about a specific long-term HIV survivor navigating circumstances unique to surviving with HIV, in a much broader sense it is a wise and beautifully humane story about our need for connection with other human beings, our need to rely upon and love each other as we cope with the painful, laughable absurdities of life. That the film tackles these deadly serious issues with such a light touch is a tribute to Tom Brown’s skill and compassion as a writer and director. It is a difficult task he has set himself, this laughing through the tears, and he accomplishes it with grace and style. Tom’s uncannily limpid blue eyes have obviously cried and laughed in equal portion, and we filmgoers are all the richer for it. For more information about the film, log on to: www.pushingdead.com. Hank Trout is an Editor at Large at A&U.
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o i t c
Fiction
i F
by Martin Shaw
The Inanimate Me
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here’s only one rotten apple in this hospital, an old-school homophobic male nurse who’s pheromonic orchestration of testosterone is thwarted by the stench of Hugo Boss aftershave. He throws daggers at me when administering my medicine. I swallow hard. My brother doesn’t visit me much, nor does my dad, not in spirit anyway— it’s flown to the local pub, or to a football match. Mum’s the only one who sits by my side all day waffling about chocolate and perfume: my favorite subjects. She stops talking as that horrible male nurse enters and puts my half-filled urine bottle on his trolley before he leaves. He is rather nice looking though: small bottom and a body shaped like the victory-v sign of Sir Winston Churchill. Mum’s just finished talking about fruit bases and honey, another favorite of mine. The door huffs open. Surprise-surprise! My dad slopes in with my brother behind him dressed to watch a football match—it’s the boys in blue against the boys in red. How heterosexual. Dad tells me, everyone sends their regards, even the cat and dog, just like that David Bowie record: love Bowie. Oh, that male nurse has just come back in. He changes my saline, my Celine Dion I call it, although ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” is a proffered local anesthetic on my personal stereo. My brother and dad leave with more of a robust goodbye than their hello, and now mum gets up to leave, too. She wipes my brow and kisses me, saying she needs to feed the dog. I listen for the click of her flat heels on the polished floor in the corridor and imagine her strides to the carpark below my window. ‘Love you mum,’ I say to myself. That horrible male nurse comes in again! “Need to take your temp,” he says. I smile and open my mouth ready for the thermometer. He places it on my tongue and pretends to fiddle with my Celine Dion, waiting for the mercury to rise. “Don’t worry, I’m not dying on your shift,” I say, when he takes the thermometer out and reads the scale. “Pardon?” “Me, ‘not dying’—on your shift.” A few moments of quiet makes the air even more stifling. “How’s the Freddie Mercury doing?” I ask. He gives me a wry smile. “And, another one bites the dust,” he says.
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Martin Shaw, fifty-two, has been writing for around ten years. Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, he then grew up in the Lincolnshire fens before moving to Cleethorpes. After being published in many ezines, he now has his printed word appearing in the traditional press.
A&U • APRIL 2018
Questioning the Cure should we keep focusing on hiv vaccines?
illustration by Timothy J. Haines
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hen first discussing the potential of writing a monthly column on HIV cure, my editor here at A&U Magazine asked a very valid question. He wanted to know if I thought I would be able to find enough material for a monthly column. At that time, nearly five years ago, information on cure-related issues was somewhat scarce. This was the main reason I wanted to write Destination: Cure—to be able to gather and report the bits of scattered news, research, and breakthroughs on what was becoming an emerging field of research. Over the years I’ve had little trouble finding cure-related topics to focus on. In addition to scientific research, there were and still are many political, ethical, social, funding and policy issues that encompass “HIV cure.” Since beginning this column in 2013, I’ve attempted to focus on these issues as they continue to evolve. A lot has changed since my first column. We’ve come a long way, particularly in HIV reservoir research, scientific collaboration, and heightened funding. However, we still have a vast road ahead of us with many unanswered questions and dilemmas. For example, how do we know when we’ve found a cure or remission? Several researchers are working on biomarkers that can measure trace amounts of HIV in certain cells and reservoirs. Until these biomarkers are available, it would be difficult to declare a person cured or know if a therapy or cure strategy is successful. Debate continues about how long a person must remain off ARVs until they are considered in remission. HIV remission is different from an eradication cure, where HIV is completely removed from the body. HIV remission is currently defined similarly to cancer remission in terms of a person being able to remain illness-free without the use of ongoing treatment. Some researchers suggest borrowing the timeframe instituted in cancer patients to define when HIV remission has been achieved. This is normally five years. Perhaps one of the most important questions that continues to be asked by some is: Do we really still need a cure and is it ethical to continue to search for one? For many this is a no-brainer. However, there are those
APRIL 2018 • A&U
that argue about the necessity and fairness of spending money on an HIV cure. Some claim that since the approval of over thirty HIV antiretroviral medications have succeeded in turning HIV/AIDS from a deadly disease to a “manageable chronic illness,” that it’s time for HIV to take a backseat to other life- threatening illnesses. There are over 7,000 “rare diseases” affecting people in the United States. According to a fact sheet from The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD), “There are more Americans who live with a rare disease than ALL of those who have either HIV, Heart Disease or Stroke.” Only five percent of rare diseases have FDA-approved treatments. It’s likely that a tiny fraction of the HIV research budget, since the discovery of HIV, could have either cured or found treatments for a number of these diseases. This argument may be strengthened as U=U and PrEP allow HIV to become less transmittable and easier to protect against, particularly as ARVs become more available to a greater number of people in the developing world. So then, is it fair or necessary that such a large amount of resources, including those from government, commercial, foundation and private sector finances, continue to be used for HIV cure and remission efforts? On an ethical level, few of us are qualified to answer that. However, on a financial level, and in terms of human lives lost, the answer is unequivocally yes.
Despite a massive decrease of forty-eight percent in AIDS-related deaths since the global scale-up of ARVs, there were still 1.1 million deaths from HIV/AIDS-related causes in 2015. Despite over thirty years of research and many HIV therapies, millions of people will continue to die of AIDS and HIV- related illnesses. The U.S. government currently invests approximately $26 billion domestically, and $6.6 billion globally, to the fight against HIV/AIDS. The need for funding both in the U.S. and abroad is likely to only grow greater with each year. A cure or remission for HIV is the only means of eventually eliminating this financial burden and freeing up funding for other diseases. As such, the search must continue and questions regarding scientific, ethical, financial and logistic considerations of cure research will need to be fairly, intelligently and timely asked, confronted and resolved. Many questions remain, but as the puzzle slowly takes shape, we must maintain the momentum so many have come together to create. Jeannie Wraight is the former editor-in-chief and co-founder of HIV and HCV Haven (www.hivhaven. com) and a blogger and writer for TheBody.com. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Health People, a community-based organization in the South Bronx and an advisor to TRW (Teach me to Read and Write), a community-based organization in Kampala, Uganda. She lives with her husband in New York City.
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Epic Black Voices
hiv advocates daniel driffin & ken williams discuss tailoring care & prevention for black men
Daniel Driffin: The lives of black men are priceless The oldest of five kids, Driffin was raised in Rochester, New York. After he was graduated from Morris College with a degree in biology in 2008, he began working at a community health center in Florence, South Carolina, where he provided pre- and post-test HIV counseling to MSMs. After two years he moved to Atlanta, where he offered testing and evidence-based interventions to Black gay men. While in Atlanta, he took an opportunity to manage a five-year research study with University of Connecticut. When the study ended in 2015, he headed back to school full-time to complete his Master of Public Health at Morehouse. At that time he also co-founded Transforming HIV Resentment into Victories Everlasting (THRIVE) Support Services, an online support network for Black gay and bisexual men living with HIV. In 2016, Driffin was chosen to speak at the Democratic National Convention, the first out HIV-positive speaker at the DNC in sixteen years. He is on track to complete his MPH in the spring of 2018. In his Epic Voices video, Driffin says non-traditional approaches to the HIV/ AIDS crisis are needed. In an email interview with A&U, he expanded on that, saying that messages should be crafted to meet people where they’re at. “I think our systems of care have to be more sensitive in realizing that what you say to middle-aged men will be different to someone
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who is eighteen, unstably housed, and just learned they are living with HIV. We have to use languages centered on people and not our disease in our written and verbal communication.” He added that communicating with young people of color must include social media platforms. “We started a group in 2015 after meeting face-to-face with thir-
Protection,” which opens with, “I want to start an organization to save my life. If whales, snails, dogs, cats, Chrysler and Nixon can be saved, the lives of Black men are priceless and can be saved.” Driffin said that quote led him to an epiphany a few years back, that Black LGBTQ people need to tap into their reservoirs of skill to save their community.
Daniel Driffin
ty-four people. We have expanded to more than 750 supported through an online community and in-person events. Our largest face-to-face events see more than 150 people coming together around our lives and that may not always be HIV specific.” Driffin also gave a simple prescription for health services providers: Stay open longer. “I am in disbelief on how many agencies do not offer hours after 4:30 p.m. and wonder why ‘We can’t get people to our consumer caucus….’ If I am an hourly working from 9 a.m.–7 p.m., certainly I will miss your meeting and I will miss my medical appointment. We have to really embrace common sense much more.” Driffin said one of his favorite quotes is by African-American writer and activist Essex Hemphill, taken from “For My Own
“I remember being newly diagnosed in South Carolina and sitting in the provider office and seeing white men, Black women, and white women on the walls within pictures and even on magazines. I didn’t see me at all. I attend countless conferences in public health, HIV prevention, medication adherence and I see the same people on those walls and in those magazines representing and speaking on my behalf. After completing a social justice fellowship called Creating Responsible Intelligent Black Brothers Fellowship where mentors were provided to us who were Black, same-gender loving and educated, I said, ‘Oh, wow, I can do this for my community.’” Driffin added that a renewed wave of involvement from legislators and community members must be supported through A&U • APRIL 2018
photo courtesy D. Driffin
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n the amfAR Epic Voices online video series, influential members of the LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS community share personal insights on living with HIV and what they’re doing to fight the epidemic. A&U spoke with two Epic Voices contributors, Daniel Driffin and Ken Williams, both young Black men who speak directly and fiercely about the challenges facing gay, bi, MSM and trans people of color.
policy at all levels of community. “This includes test opportunities for men at their local health department or community-based organization. It includes the same men if they are testing negative to start PrEP immediately if they are interested, and those people living with HIV to start treatment immediately. It should be in a stigma-reducing or stigma free environment regardless of ability.” Ken Williams: HIV doesn’t own me. A self-described “video-hobbyist” and storyteller, Ken Williams grew up in Chicago and Beverly Hills with his two sisters and has been video blogging since graduating from Columbia College in Chicago. After he was diagnosed with HIV in 2010, Williams began dedicating his online
my HIV status on social media was the next step for me,” he told A&U. Williams has also worked in prevention/client services at Test Positive Aware Network in Chicago, and in 2016 he moved to Texas to work for the AIDS Foundation of Houston. He admitted that seven years of HIV advocacy began to wear him down. “Only having two hands, I slowed down tremendously and felt stressed that I couldn’t rescue everyone.” At his lowest moment, Alicia Keys showed up. In 2017, Williams was hosting NMAC’s second annual Biomedical Prevention Summit in New Orleans, and the Grammy-award winner was a guest speaker. Keys advocated having uncomfortable conversations about social justice and sexual health, and Williams thought she
photo courtesy K. Williams
Ken Williams
presence to issues affecting people living with HIV, especially among communities of color. Williams told A&U that he had been looking for a Black gay community online to help walk with him through his journey with HIV. When he couldn’t find one he decided to build one with his YouTube channel. His video blog, “Ken Like Barbie,” is a hub for self-expression and a sounding board. “I talk about my HIV status because I need the world to know that I exist,” Williams says with passion in one video. “It became my civic obligation to lend my voices to the conversation….HIV isn’t in control of me. HIV doesn’t own me.” “It took me about a year to open up and disclose my HIV status on YouTube but I knew early in my diagnosis that sharing APRIL 2018 • A&U
was a champion to use her celebrity for that cause. “And then I thought, there’s too much need for me to slow down, not when he have warriors like Alicia Keys, not when I know that my visibility begets the permission for other gay Black men living with HIV to be visible. For me, that was a sign to continue the work even more because the world is listening and being angered into action.” Williams said that efforts around HIV awareness/prevention in Black communities have been lead by people whose sensibilities, priorities and experiences have not been that of the Black experience, and that needs to change. “I think it would be a radical shift in how we as a country and we as a community address HIV in the Black community
to put more Black trans people into positions of leadership and by giving a stage to Black queer youth and Black women to affect systems of healthcare.” Southern Exposure In the February issue of A&U, Gregorio Millett, vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, suggested that the U.S. doesn’t just have a Black HIV problem. It has a Southern Black HIV problem. “In 2016, fifty-four percent of new diagnoses in the South were among African Americans, where on the West Coast only nineteen percent were among African Americans,” Millett said. “The South is still the locus of the Black population in the U.S. and it is where we also see the fewest states with Medicaid expansion.” Driffin said the South has a perfect storm of factors contributing to the Black HIV crisis. “When you factor in not having access to quality health insurance especially if these men are not working full-time, living in the South, where Medicaid was not expanded, an ever-present undertone of homophobia, stigma, mis-education and fear is the perfect concoction which takes our brothers out. Here in Georgia between 2011 and 2015 more than 600 Black same-gender loving men living with HIV died from some cause. Our data system isn’t sensitive enough to tease out the details, but this is a problem. We have to invest time and figure how do we need to save our people.” Williams said that the priorities of elected leaders and public officials must shift. “Black men are still dying in the South with HIV because unfortunately there isn’t enough leadership, at the local or federal levels, in our country, to say that we need to focus our efforts and resources in the South to curb and/or rid the HIV burden in black communities.” Both Driffin and Williams say that we shouldn’t accept that the South must continue to be the killing fields of Black LGBTQ Americans. The amfAR Epic Voices series can be found online at: www.curecountdown.org/epicvoices. Larry Buhl is a multimedia journalist, screenwriter, and novelist living in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter @LarryBuhl.
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E R U CULT S THE
AID OF
FILM
Pushing Dead
Directed by Tom E. Brown Bugsby Pictures/Chrismatic Film
D
anny Schauble (James Roday of Psych) is a writer who’s frequently at a loss for words—at least when it comes to putting them down on paper. In one-on-one conversation, he’s funny, quirky, and insightful. He lives with Paula (Robin Weigert), a massage therapist; holds poorly-attended poetry slams at the bar where he works as a bouncer; and drinks coffee from a mug bearing the words “Wanted dead or alive” and a face suspiciously like his own. His dead lover, Kevin, now shows up in his dreams with “an Uzi lobster claw” where one of his hands used to be. Danny, the antihero of Tom E. Brown’s award-winning film Pushing Dead, has also been living with HIV for twenty-two years. Thanks to a birthday check from his mom, he now has too much money in his bank account, a technicality that essentially locks him out of his healthcare plan. He deals with this as he deals with most things—with help from a few tried-and-true friends, coffee, and constant caustic banter. At one point, he’s sorting out pills in the bar with the owner, his friend Bob (Danny Glover): Bob’s are “old man stuff,” whereas Danny’s are his HIV meds, of course. “I win,” Bob deadpans. “Eight bottles—you, seven.” Danny picks up the bottle. “This is a multivitamin,” he says with mock solemnity. “Multivitamins don’t count. Therefore, it is a tie.” And there you have it: an entire scene about two men making cracks about the meds they need to make it through the day. It’s sad and funny all at once. There are a lot of moments like that in Pushing Dead plus some random quirky bits.
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A strange unsettling little girl who appears to Danny and others, spouting stale adages. A traveling nightmare about a “creepy faux puppet” with a bleeding face. And Snowball, a white toy monkey that Paula talks to. This is a film about AIDS, and yet it’s not a film about AIDS. Brown, who was diagnosed back in 1985, has said that he “didn’t set out to make an AIDS movie or a dark comedy. I set out to make a movie about coping.” Danny is coping the best he can. Watching him, you find yourself laughing. Or wincing. Or both. It’s that real, even with all the quirky bits. —T.J. Banks
in one case, repeated exposure to HIV/ AIDS does not lead to infection, in another, a single exposure can lead to infection. This is the situation Ulfat, a young wife and university lecturer, finds herself in. She does not acquire HIV from her errant and ever unfaithful husband, but from Raju, her younger lover and student who himself acquired HIV from a singular visit to a brothel with his friends. Seeking the prohibitively expensive antiretrovirals that will save their lives, they fall into the unscrupulous sphere of an NGO promising treatment in exchange for participation in a clinical trial for a vaccine. The whole organization is a sham seeking money from eager backers and they end up taking their case to court. We also meet Elisabeth, a Catholic nun and counselor who works with HIV patients and promotes prevention in Delhi’s red-light district. The same Bishop who merely transfers a priest who has molested a young Indian boy censures her for distributing condoms to the prostitutes. This piece does have its technical flaws,
DRAMA
High Fidelity Transmission: The ABCs of the Politics of AIDS by Rajesh Talwar
I
ndia, which actually has a low percentage of its population living with HIV/AIDS, is third in the world for actual cases of HIV/ AIDS due to the sheer number of its people. One of the populations with the highest percentage of cases is that of the Indian sex workers, who transmit the virus to their male clients who in turn transmit the disease to their spouses and partners. Great strides have been made in prevention and treatment, but, in this very traditional culture, the subject is still often taboo. NGOs small and large have made great strides coupled with India’s government efforts, but the system is imperfect and like many institutions and organizations in this still developing country, there can be abuse and corruption. High Fidelity Transmission is an important play which tackles both these traditional misconceptions and how a system, purportedly there to help, can merely disguise its true motivation, financial gain. This play’s title refers to the fact that while
but it is well thought out and informative. One can only hope that it will be read and staged in the country of its origin and shine a light on a problem that’s not talked about enough within its culture. —John Francis Leonard
T.J. Banks is the author of Sketch People, A Time for Shadows, Catsong, Houdini, and other books. Catsong was the winner of the 2007 Merial Human-Animal Bond Award. John Francis Leonard writes the Bright Lights, Small City column for A&U. A&U • APRIL 2018
R
A Calendar of Events
ise Above AIDS, together! AIDS Walk OC is gearing up for its 32nd annual fundraising event. Setting a goal to #EndtheEpidemic by 2025, AIDS Walk OC is aiming to raise $350,000, the total surpassed by last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s event. The event offers a 5 km walk and Red Ribbon 5 km Fun Run, as well as opportunities to support and cheer the participants. Benefitting Radiant Health Centers, funds raised will help men, women, and children impacted by HIV/AIDS in Orange County access vital services, as well as prevention and education efforts in the region. Radiant Health Centers is the primary beneficiary of the walk; in addition, RHC has selected recipient agencies: Shan-
APRIL 2018 â&#x20AC;˘ A&U
ti Orange County, the Straight Talk Clinic, and LGBT Center Orange County. Any HIV-supportive organization is welcome to create a team and 100 percent of funds raised will be donated back to the organization. Date: Saturday, May 5; time: registration at 8:30 a.m., opening ceremony at 10:30 a.m.; location: William R. Mason Park, 18712 University Drive, Irvine, California. To register as an individual or a team, log on to: www. classy.org/event/aids-walk-orange-county-2018/e167291.
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Gallery
continued from page 41
dolls on my head, then they’d fall off and I’d go, “Uh-oh,” and the baby would laugh and I’d take the picture. But I hated it; the last thing [as a teenager] you wanted to do is have to act silly and shit. Anyway, it served me well because it put a camera in my hand. Then my goal in life at eighteen was to get out of Oklahoma. When I was eighteen my parents had sent me to this little photography school.
Larry Clark, Untitled, 1971, gelatin silver print, 14 by 11 inches (35.56 by 27.94 cm) © Larry Clark; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York It was a commercial photography school, a two-year art school. Kids in the photography school were just squirrelly. They’d call them nerds now, but they were really squirrelly kids with bowties and shit. I’d already been into sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. So I started hanging out with the artists [of other mediums] up on the second and third floors and I started using my camera to express myself differently. My first two girlfriends were painters and another
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good friend was a sculptor and a painter and great artist. I was probably influenced by that more. One day I met a buddy of mine and we went over to his house in Milwaukee and he had a copy of The New Yorker. I’d never seen that magazine before but I’ve read The New Yorker every day since and The New York Times, too. Then I moved to New York and you know the rest of the story. But that’s the beginning.
because they were my friends. And I’m photographing them in the most intimate moments of their lives and then showing them the pictures so if they don’t look good, then they’re not going to like me taking the pictures, right?
Thank you. You led the way for so many artists to be able to make hard images that were also intimate. How do you feel about intimate reportage? In my second year [of art school] there was this little, tiny theater, three blocks from the school that showed foreign films. By the time I was nineteen years old, I saw every Bergman film with Liv Ullmann and other great actors. One day I saw this film, it was John Cassavetes’ first film [as a director], Shadows. I’d never seen anything like that. But I’m watching it and I’m thinking this guy sees like I see. I owe everything to seeing that film, then Faces; that was later. When you watch Shadows you can see a kind of realism. Plus, the classic photographers. I think Walker Evans is the best photographer ever. Along with Harry Callahan, how he could just take a picture of someone walking in the street, but then there’d be someone else walking the other way [so there’d be this tension] right and left; Callahan really did it. I didn’t see Robert Frank until later. He and Edward Weston were two of my favorites as well.
You really did pave the way for artists to be able to reveal a certain kind of sublime beauty in tragic moments of reality. Tell me about how Kids came about? Well, I hung out with those “kids” for years, three years at least. And the story was all based on things that I’d witnessed along with a few things that other people had told me, but all based on reality. I had all of the stories in my notebook and then when I met Harmony [Korine] I showed it to him. He liked it and wrote the screenplay but I also needed a narrative. AIDS became my train coming for the heroine on the tracks and would the hero get there in time to save her? So that gave me the right [element of drama] to hang everything on.
You employ the same classic composition style? I’m using the play of light for drama with classic composition. I’m using what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment”; but more than that I’m trying to make the people look good, like movie stars
Oh, I absolutely agree. I don’t know how I did it, but everything seemed to come together.
Tell me about your early memories around HIV/AIDS? The summer before [shooting Kids], people started handing out condoms in schools in New York City. The Catholic Church was up in arms against it. Kids would have strips of condoms that they’d be wearing around their necks like necklaces and everybody is talking about safe sex and all the kids are aware of safe sex backwards and forwards. Man, they could talk your ear off about how to practice safe sex. But after maybe six or eight months, I was with them every day and finally they started talking about it, like, “That’s some bullshit, man, we don’t use condoms. I wouldn’t use a condom in a million fuckin’ years, man. They don’t feel good.” I tell this story about this one kid when I asked him what would happen if he gets a girl pregnant. And he looks at me and says, “It’s not my baby.” I mean, that was the answer. So with all the talk around safe sex because of HIV, I thought what if a girl after one time [of unprotected sex] got HIV? In hindsight were you glad that you decided to include the HIV in your film? Yes, I think it was a good thing because it woke a lot of Kids up. Sean Black, Senior Editor, interviewed and photographed Chloë Sevigny, who appeared in Kids, for this month’s cover story. A&U • APRIL 2018
APRIL 2018 â&#x20AC;¢ A&U
55
Survival Guide
[a portrait by sean black]
“The system is not broken, but it will break us, if we do not work together to dismantle institutionalized racial injustice and financial inequity, as well as protect the ACA, especially for those in the South, against religious businesses and individuals’ right to discriminate against the LGBT community.”
—Kiara St. James
Kiara St. James has been a community organizer and public speaker for over twenty years. She has been instrumental in changing shelter policies that were discriminatory towards the Trans community, and presented workshops concerning marginalized communities at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria, and the United Nations, as well as at other conferences and academic institutions. For the last seventeen years Kiara has also been coordinating meetings with legislators to discuss the importance of passing the Gender Expression Non Discrimination Act, a bill that will enrich the lives of all New Yorkers through creating culturally affirming spaces. Kiara is the founder and current executive director of the New York Transgender Advocacy Group (NYTAG, Inc.), a grassroots, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, that is Trans-led and intent on creating new opportunities for the Trans community, through various partnerships and innovative initiatives.
Sean Black is a Senior Editor of A&U. 56
A&U • APRIL 2018
TREATMENT LOWERS THE AMOUNT OF HIV IN YOUR BODY. AND HELPS LOWER THE CHANCE OF PASSING HIV ON.
There is no cure for HIV, but treatment can help protect your health and the people you care about. Talk to a healthcare provider and visit HelpStopTheVirus.com © 2016 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. UNBC3046 04/16
In adults with HIV on ART who have diarrhea not caused by an infection
IMPORTANT PATIENT INFORMATION This is only a summary. See complete Prescribing Information at Mytesi.com or by calling 1-844-722-8256. This does not take the place of talking with your doctor about your medical condition or treatment.
What Is Mytesi? Mytesi is a prescription medicine used to improve symptoms of noninfectious diarrhea (diarrhea not caused by a bacterial, viral, or parasitic infection) in adults living with HIV/AIDS on ART. Do Not Take Mytesi if you have diarrhea caused by an infection. Before you start Mytesi, your doctor and you should make sure your diarrhea is not caused by an infection (such as bacteria, virus, or parasite).
Possible Side Effects of Mytesi Include:
Tired of planning your life around diarrhea?
Enough is Enough Get relief. Pure and simple. Ask your doctor about Mytesi. Mytesi (crofelemer): • Is the only medicine FDA-approved to relieve diarrhea in people with HIV • Treats diarrhea differently by normalizing the flow of water in the GI tract • Has the same or fewer side effects as placebo in clinical studies • Comes from a tree sustainably harvested in the Amazon Rainforest What is Mytesi? Mytesi is a prescription medicine that helps relieve symptoms of diarrhea not caused by an infection (noninfectious) in adults living with HIV/AIDS on antiretroviral therapy (ART). Important Safety Information Mytesi is not approved to treat infectious diarrhea (diarrhea caused by bacteria, a virus, or a parasite). Before starting you on Mytesi, your healthcare provider will first be sure that you do not have infectious diarrhea. Otherwise, there is a risk you would not receive the right medicine and your infection could get worse. In clinical studies, the most common side effects that occurred more often than with placebo were upper respiratory tract (sinus, nose, and throat) infection (5.7%), bronchitis (3.9%), cough (3.5%), flatulence (3.1%), and increased bilirubin (3.1%). For Copay Savings Card and Patient Assistance, see Mytesi.com
Please see complete Prescribing Information at Mytesi.com. NP-390-9
RELIEF, PURE AND SIMPLE
• Upper respiratory tract infection (sinus, nose, and throat infection) • Bronchitis (swelling in the tubes that carry air to and from your lungs) • Cough • Flatulence (gas) • Increased bilirubin (a waste product when red blood cells break down) For a full list of side effects, please talk to your doctor. Tell your doctor if you have any side effect that bothers you or does not go away. You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.
Should I Take Mytesi If I Am:
Pregnant or Planning to Become Pregnant? • Studies in animals show that Mytesi could harm an unborn baby or affect the ability to become pregnant • There are no studies in pregnant women taking Mytesi • This drug should only be used during pregnancy if clearly needed A Nursing Mother? • It is not known whether Mytesi is passed through human breast milk • If you are nursing, you should tell your doctor before starting Mytesi • Your doctor will help you to decide whether to stop nursing or to stop taking Mytesi Under 18 or Over 65 Years of Age? • Mytesi has not been studied in children under 18 years of age • Mytesi studies did not include many people over the age of 65. So it is not clear if this age group will respond differently. Talk to your doctor to find out if Mytesi is right for you
What Should I Know About Taking Mytesi With Other Medicines? If you are taking any prescription or over-the-counter medicine, herbal supplements, or vitamins, tell your doctor before starting Mytesi.
What If I Have More Questions About Mytesi? For more information, please see the full Prescribing Information at Mytesi.com or speak to your doctor or pharmacist. To report side effects or make a product complaint or for additional information, call 1-844-722-8256.
Rx Only Manufactured by Patheon, Inc. for Napo Pharmaceuticals, Inc. San Francisco, CA 94105 Copyright © Napo Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Mytesi comes from the Croton lechleri tree harvested in South America.