A&U AUGUST 2015

AUGUST 2015 • ISSUE 250 • AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE

sheryl lee RALPH

DIVAS SIMPLY SINGING! TURNS 25

positive hope JOSHUA MIDDLETON FIGHTS HIV STIGMA ONE BLOG POST AT A TIME

ALL-AMERICAN ADVOCATE

SINGER STEVE GRAND PUTS SOUL INTO KNOWING YOUR STATUS

plus • Summer Reading • Michelle Hendley

What is STRIBILD? STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before.

STRIBILD can also replace current HIV-1 medicines for some adults who have an undetectable viral load (less than 50 copies/mL of virus in their blood) and whose healthcare provider determines that they meet certain other requirements. STRIBILD combines 4 medicines into 1 pill to be taken once a day with food.

STRIBILD is a complete single tablet regimen and should not be used with other HIV-1 medicines.

STRIBILD does not cure HIV-1 infection or AIDS. To control HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses you must keep taking STRIBILD. 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 STRIBILD? STRIBILD can cause serious side effects: • Build-up of an acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious medical emergency. Symptoms of lactic acidosis include feeling very weak or tired, unusual (not normal) muscle pain, trouble breathing, stomach pain with nausea or vomiting, feeling cold especially in your arms and legs, feeling dizzy or lightheaded, and/or a fast or irregular heartbeat.

• Serious liver problems. The liver may become large (hepatomegaly) and fatty (steatosis). Symptoms of liver problems include your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow (jaundice), dark “tea-colored” urine, light-colored bowel movements (stools), loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, and/or stomach pain.

• You may be more likely to get lactic acidosis or serious liver problems if you are female, very overweight (obese), or have been taking STRIBILD for a long time. In some cases, these serious conditions have led to death. Call your healthcare provider right away if you have any symptoms of these conditions.

• Worsening of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. If you also have HBV and stop taking STRIBILD, your hepatitis may suddenly get worse. Do not stop taking STRIBILD without first talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to monitor your health. STRIBILD is not approved for the treatment of HBV.

Who should not take STRIBILD? Do not take STRIBILD if you: • Take a medicine that contains: alfuzosin, dihydroergotamine, ergotamine, methylergonovine, cisapride, lovastatin, simvastatin, pimozide, sildenafil when used for lung problems (Revatio®), triazolam, oral midazolam, rifampin or the herbal supplement St. John’s wort.

• For a list of brand names for these medicines, please see the Brief Summary on the following pages.

• Take any other medicines to treat HIV-1 infection, or the medicine adefovir (Hepsera®).

What are the other possible side effects of STRIBILD? Serious side effects of STRIBILD may also include: • New or worse kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do regular blood and urine tests to check your kidneys before and during treatment with STRIBILD. If you develop kidney problems, your healthcare provider may tell you to stop taking STRIBILD. • Bone problems, including bone pain or bones getting soft or thin, which may lead to fractures. Your healthcare provider may do tests to check your bones.

• Changes in body fat can happen in people taking HIV-1 medicines.

• 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 STRIBILD. The most common side effects of STRIBILD include nausea and diarrhea. 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 STRIBILD? • All your health problems. Be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you have or had any kidney, bone, or liver problems, including hepatitis virus infection.

• All the medicines you take, including prescription and nonprescription medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. STRIBILD may affect the way other medicines work, and other medicines may affect how STRIBILD works. Keep a list of all your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist.

Do not start any new medicines while taking STRIBILD without first talking with your healthcare provider.

• If you take hormone-based birth control (pills, patches, rings, shots, etc).

• If you take antacids. Take antacids at least 2 hours before or after you take STRIBILD. • If you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if STRIBILD can harm your unborn baby. Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking STRIBILD. • If you are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed.

HIV-1 can be passed to the baby in breast milk. Also, some medicines in STRIBILD can pass into breast milk, and it is not known if this can harm the baby.

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 Brief Summary of full Prescribing Information with important warnings on the following pages. *STRIBILD is a combination of the medicines TRUVADA (emtricitabine and tenofovir disoproxil fumarate), TYBOST (cobicistat), and VITEKTA (elvitegravir).

STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before.

STRIBILD can also replace current HIV-1 medicines for some adults who have an undetectable viral load (less than 50 copies/mL of virus in their blood) and whose healthcare provider determines that they meet certain other requirements. STRIBILD does not cure HIV-1or AIDS.

I started my personal revolution Talk to your healthcare provider about HIV-1 treatment.

STRIBILD is a complete HIV-1 treatment in 1 pill, once a day that combines the medicines in TRUVADA + TYBOST + VITEKTA.* Ask if it’s right for you.

www.STRIBILD.com

Patient Information STRIBILD® (STRY-bild) (elvitegravir 150 mg/cobicistat 150 mg/emtricitabine 200 mg/ tenofovir disoproxil fumarate 300 mg) tablets Brief summary of full Prescribing Information. For more information, please see the full Prescribing Information, including Patient Information.

What is STRIBILD? • STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before. STRIBILD can also be used to replace current HIV-1 medicines for some adults who have an undetectable viral load (less than 50 copies/mL of virus in their blood), and have been on the same HIV-1 medicines for at least 6 months and have never failed past HIV-1 treatment, and whose healthcare provider determines that they meet certain other requirements.

• STRIBILD is a complete HIV-1 medicine and should not be used with any other HIV-1 medicines.

• STRIBILD does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS. You must stay on continuous HIV-1 therapy to control HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses.

• Ask your healthcare provider about how to prevent passing HIV-1 to others. Do not share or reuse needles, injection equipment, or personal items that can have blood or body fluids on them. Do not have sex without protection. Always practice safer sex by using a latex or polyurethane condom to lower the chance of sexual contact with semen, vaginal secretions, or blood.

What is the most important information I should know about STRIBILD? STRIBILD can cause serious side effects, including: 1. Build-up of lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis). Lactic acidosis can happen in some people who take STRIBILD or similar (nucleoside analogs) medicines. Lactic acidosis is a serious medical emergency that can lead to death. Lactic acidosis can be hard to identify early, because the symptoms could seem like symptoms of other health problems. Call your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following symptoms which could be signs of lactic acidosis: • feel very weak or tired • have unusual (not normal) muscle pain • have trouble breathing • have stomach pain with nausea or vomiting • feel cold, especially in your arms and legs • feel dizzy or lightheaded • have a fast or irregular heartbeat 2. Severe liver problems. Severe liver problems can happen in people who take STRIBILD. In some cases, these liver problems can lead to death. Your liver may become large (hepatomegaly) and you may develop fat in your liver (steatosis). Call your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following symptoms of liver problems: • your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow (jaundice) • dark “tea-colored” urine • light-colored bowel movements (stools) • loss of appetite for several days or longer • nausea • stomach pain You may be more likely to get lactic acidosis or severe liver problems if you are female, very overweight (obese), or have been taking STRIBILD for a long time.

3. Worsening of Hepatitis B infection. If you have hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and take STRIBILD, your HBV may get worse (flare-up) if you stop taking STRIBILD. A “flare-up” is when your HBV infection suddenly returns in a worse way than before.

• Do not run out of STRIBILD. Refill your prescription or talk to your healthcare provider before your STRIBILD is all gone • Do not stop taking STRIBILD without first talking to your healthcare provider • If you stop taking STRIBILD, 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 STRIBILD Who should not take STRIBILD? Do not take STRIBILD if you also take a medicine that contains: • adefovir (Hepsera®) • alfuzosin hydrochloride (Uroxatral®) • cisapride (Propulsid®, Propulsid Quicksolv®) • ergot-containing medicines, including: dihydroergotamine mesylate (D.H.E. 45®, Migranal®), ergotamine tartrate (Cafergot®, Migergot®, Ergostat®, Medihaler Ergotamine®, Wigraine®, Wigrettes®), and methylergonovine maleate (Ergotrate®, Methergine®) • lovastatin (Advicor®, Altoprev®, Mevacor®) • midazolam, when taken by mouth • pimozide (Orap®) • rifampin (Rifadin®, Rifamate®, Rifater®, Rimactane®) • sildenafil (Revatio®), when used for treating lung problems • simvastatin (Simcor®, Vytorin®, Zocor®) • triazolam (Halcion®) • the herb St. John’s wort Do not take STRIBILD if you also take any other HIV-1 medicines, including: • Other medicines that contain elvitegravir, cobicistat, emtricitabine, or tenofovir (Atripla®, Complera®, Emtriva®, Truvada®, Tybost®, Viread®, Vitekta®) • Other medicines that contain lamivudine or ritonavir (Combivir®, Epivir® or Epivir-HBV®, Epzicom®, Kaletra®, Norvir®, Triumeq®, Trizivir®) STRIBILD is not for use in people who are less than 18 years old.

What are the possible side effects of STRIBILD? STRIBILD may cause the following serious side effects: • See “What is the most important information I should know about STRIBILD?” • New or worse kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do blood and urine tests to check your kidneys before you start and while you are taking STRIBILD. Your healthcare provider may tell you to stop taking STRIBILD if you develop new or worse kidney problems.

• Bone problems can happen in some people who take STRIBILD. Bone problems include bone pain, softening or thinning (which may lead to fractures). Your healthcare provider may need to do tests to check your bones.

• Changes in body fat can happen in people who take HIV-1 medicine.

These changes may include increased amount of fat in the upper back and neck (“buffalo hump”), breast, and around the middle of your body (trunk).

Loss of fat from the legs, arms and face may also happen. The exact cause and long-term health effects of these conditions are not known.

• 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.

The most common side effects of STRIBILD include:

- disopyramide (Norpace®)

• Nausea

- estazolam

• Diarrhea

- ethosuximide (Zarontin®)

Tell your healthcare provider if you have any side effect that bothers you or that does not go away.

- flecainide (Tambocor®)

• These are not all the possible side effects of STRIBILD. For more information, ask your healthcare provider.

- fluticasone (Flovent®, Flonase®, Flovent Diskus®, Flovent HFA®, Veramyst®)

• Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.

- itraconazole (Sporanox®)

What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking STRIBILD? Tell your healthcare provider about all your medical conditions, including:

- flurazepam

- ketoconazole (Nizoral®) - lidocaine (Xylocaine®) - mexiletine - oxcarbazepine (Trileptal®)

• If you have or had any kidney, bone, or liver problems, including hepatitis B infection

- perphenazine

• If you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if STRIBILD can harm your unborn baby. Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking STRIBILD.

- phenytoin (Dilantin®, Phenytek®)

- 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.

• If you are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed if you take STRIBILD. - You should not breastfeed if you have HIV-1 because of the risk of passing HIV-1 to your baby.

- Two of the medicines in STRIBILD can pass to your baby in your breast milk. It is not known if the other medicines in STRIBILD 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, vitamins, and herbal supplements: • STRIBILD may affect the way other medicines work, and other medicines may affect how STRIBILD works.

• Be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you take any of the following medicines: - Hormone-based birth control (pills, patches, rings, shots, etc) - Antacid medicines that contain aluminum, magnesium hydroxide, or calcium carbonate. Take antacids at least 2 hours before or after you take STRIBILD - Medicines to treat depression, organ transplant rejection, or high blood pressure - amiodarone (Cordarone®, Pacerone®) - atorvastatin (Lipitor®, Caduet®) - bepridil hydrochloride (Vascor®, Bepadin®) - bosentan (Tracleer®) - buspirone - carbamazepine (Carbatrol®, Epitol®, Equetro®, Tegretol®) - clarithromycin (Biaxin®, Prevpac®) - clonazepam (Klonopin®) - clorazepate (Gen-xene®, Tranxene®) - colchicine (Colcrys®) - medicines that contain dexamethasone - diazepam (Valium®) - digoxin (Lanoxin®)

- phenobarbital (Luminal®) - propafenone (Rythmol®) - quinidine (Neudexta®) - rifabutin (Mycobutin®) - rifapentine (Priftin®) - risperidone (Risperdal®, Risperdal Consta®) - salmeterol (Serevent®) or salmeterol when taken in combination with fluticasone (Advair Diskus®, Advair HFA®) - sildenafil (Viagra®), tadalafil (Cialis®) or vardenafil (Levitra®, Staxyn®), for the treatment of erectile dysfunction (ED). If you get dizzy or faint (low blood pressure), have vision changes or have an erection that last longer than 4 hours, call your healthcare provider or get medical help right away.

- tadalafil (Adcirca®), for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension - thioridazine - voriconazole (Vfend®) - warfarin (Coumadin®, Jantoven®) - zolpidem (Ambien®, Edlular®, Intermezzo®, Zolpimist®) Know the medicines you take. Keep a list of all your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist when you get a new medicine. Do not start any new medicines while you are taking STRIBILD without first talking with your healthcare provider.

Keep STRIBILD and all medicines out of reach of children.

This Brief Summary summarizes the most important information about STRIBILD. If you would like more information, talk with your healthcare provider. You can also ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist for information about STRIBILD that is written for health professionals, or call 1-800-445-3235 or go to www.STRIBILD.com.

Issued: December 2014

COMPLERA, EMTRIVA, GILEAD, the GILEAD Logo, GSI, HEPSERA, STRIBILD, the STRIBILD Logo, TRUVADA, TYBOST, VIREAD, and VITEKTA are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. ATRIPLA is a trademark of Bristol-Myers Squibb & Gilead Sciences, LLC. All other marks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners. © 2015 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. STBC0180 03/15

We’re hitting the road for the sixth annual LifeRide for amfAR, a charity motorcycle ride benefiting the fight for a cure for HIV/AIDS. By the end of this year’s ride, Kiehl’s will have raised more than $1.2 million for amfAR, funding seven cure-related research projects.

Help us make AIDS history at CrowdRise.com/LifeRide2015

c o n t e n t s August 2015

38 Cover Tony-Nominated Actress & AIDS Activist Sheryl Lee Ralph Talks with A&U’s Chael Needle About Twenty-Five Years of DIVAS Simply Singing! and How We Can All Join the Fight Until We Bring the Curtain Down on AIDS

Departments

Features 30 Gallery A New Exhibition, Art AIDS America, Challenges the Art World

6

Frontdesk

8

Mailbox

9

NewsBreak

34 Pozitive Hope AIDS Activist Joshua Middleton Shares His Trials & Triumphs

16

Ruby’s Rap

viewfinder 20

Just*in Time

21

A Woman’s Voice

26

TYing It All Together

48 We’ll Journey Together A&U Celebrates Its 250th Issue

29

Brave New World

50 Apertures of Memory A&U’s 14th Annual Summer Reading Features Work by Raymond Luczak, Jameson Currier, Tom O’Leary, Mary Kathryn Vernon, Jim Nawrocki, and Emanuel Xavier from Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A&U.

56

Destination: Cure

57

Hep Talk

58

Vital Subjects

60

The Culture of AIDS

61

Lifelines

64

Survival Guide

44 Vocal Embrace Singer Steve Grand Brings HIV Prevention to the Heartland

cover by Sean Black

lifeguide

A&U Frontdesk

Always the Activist

A

ll I need is a vacation.” I hear that from a lot of my friends—including several AIDS activists who have been subscribing to A&U for close to twenty-five years and have been actively volunteering for such wonderful grass-roots organizations as Visual AIDS, God’s Love We Deliver, GMHC, and Project Angel Food. Being a volunteer for a quarter of a century is commendable. I think we are blessed to have so many heroes among us in the AIDS community.

One of those heroes is both a celebrity and a tireless activist for the HIV community. That person is this month’s cover story, Sheryl Lee Ralph. Her organization, The DIVA Foundation, has been raising awareness and belting out the best in blues, pop, gospel, rock and disco for a quarter of a century. Which must make her organization and her annual “divas get-together” one of the best in musical activism and one of the oldest in the war against AIDS. Although we’re not at the cure yet, it’s because of dynamos like Sheryl Lee Ralph that we have visibility for the cause. What better time for us to pause and remember so many fine musical talents that we have lost to AIDS? In Chael Needle’s interview with the the entertainment legend, Ms. Ralph doesn’t let us forget how the stigma attached to the epidemic was often rooted in homophobia. But it meant something else in terms of the way society ignored the inevitable fallout from this kind of ignorance: “I saw clearly that if sex in any way could be a death sentence for men, then women couldn’t be far behind. If it became a woman’s disease, it had the power to become a child’s disease.”

And in the early days it was also a disease that devastated our musical communities. Sylvester, Freddie Mercury, Klaus Nomi, Liberace, Eazy-E, Ofra Haza, Fela Kuti, Ricky Wilson of the B-52s, Sharon Redd, Dan Hartman, and Baltimora—the voices we have lost could go on for pages of this magazine. The performing arts have been devastated by AIDS. Thankfully, there are more to add to the list who are thriving and HIV-pos-

A M E R I C A’ S A I D S M A G A Z I N E issue 250 vol. 24 no. 8 August 2015 editorial offices: (518) 426-9010 fax: (518) 436-5354

itive, including hip-hop pioneer Tim’m West, Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Holly Johnson, Germany’s pop sensation Nadja Benaissa, Erasure’s Andy Bell, Styx’s Chuck Panozzo, and Judas Priest’s Rob Halford. There are probably many we don’t know about. The more pop, rock, and hip-hop entertainers who step out of the AIDS closet and into the spotlight will only destigmatize the disease even further and speed up the process for finding a cure. The fact that only fifteen million out of the forty-two million infected in the world today are receiving antiretrovirals is outrageous.

Hopefully this issue will be addressed at next year’s International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa. I was in attendance at the last presentation in Durban in 2000, where 30,000 scientists, activists, authors, artists, musical entertainers and educators appeared alongside the late Nelson Mandela, arguably the world’s most famous AIDS and human rights activist.

As we celebrate our 250th issue (check out our special feature), Sheryl Lee Ralph said something else that aligns with the DNA of A&U: “I am an artist and I know where my voice belongs. I believe in artistic activism and practice it always.” In this issue’s Summer Reading, we present selections from Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A&U—gems from our past that deserve a readership right now. In this month’s Gallery, Larry Buhl covers Art AIDS America, a new exhibition that brings together vital responses to the pandemic from the visual arts. Interviews with actress Michelle Hendley and singer Steve Grand also prove that the arts continue to be a launching pad for speaking out against the silence surrounding HIV/AIDS. They know that silence is purposeful— it’s meant to squelch the knowledge of what is hurting us. Our voices are more powerful, however; we know what can heal us.

DAVID WAGGONER

Editor in Chief & Publisher David Waggoner Managing Editor: Michael Needle Senior Editors: Dann Dulin, Sean Black Editor at Large: Chip Alfred Special Projects Editor: Lester Strong Literary Editor: Brent Calderwood Arts Editor: Alina Oswald 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, V. Anderson, Heather Arculeo, Larry Buhl, Ruby Comer, Nancy Ellegate, Diane Goettel, Sally Hessney, Keiko Lane, Angela Leroux-Lindsey, Sherri Lewis, Mark Rebernik, Dale Reynolds, Elizabeth Rodgers, David Rosenberg, Corey Saucier, Mariel Selbovitz, Justin B. Terry-Smith, Patricia Nell Warren, Chuck Willman, Jeannie Wraight, Robert Zukowski Art Director: Timothy J. Haines Contributing Photographers: Jordan Ancel, Davidd Batalon, Mark Bennington, Tom Bianchi, Sean Black, Adam Bouska, Brian Bowen Smith, Fred Brashear, Jr., Tim Courtney, Duane Cramer, Stephen Churchill Downes, Greg Gorman, Francis Hills, Renée Jacobs, 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 A&U (ISSN 1074-0872) is published by Art & Understanding, Inc., 25 Monroe St., Suite 205, Albany, NY 12210-2743, 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. ©2015 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 12210-2743, USA

Printed in USA • Visit our Web site at www.aumag.org

WE KNOW HIV/AIDS medication therapy But we also know you want a pharmacy that cares for the whole you.

That’s why the pharmacists at our HIV-specialized pharmacies offer complete, compassionate care for your individual needs now and in the years ahead. You can rely on us to provide services such as: • Expert guidance in managing HIV, combined with other conditions you may have • A range of immunizations to help you avoid illness*

To learn more, visit HIV.Walgreens.com. * Vaccines subject to availability. Not all vaccines available in all locations. State-, age- and health-related restrictions may apply.

©2014 Walgreen Co. All rights reserved.

14CS0018-A-0814

A&U Mailbox

x o b l i ma Peter Staley is a true American hero, not only for gay people but for all people fighting for human justice and compassion for people dying and suffering from a fatal disease [cover

JUNE 2015 • ISSUE 248 • AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE

peter

STALEY

ON THE HISTORY OF AIDS ACTIVISM, TREATMENT ACCESS & PrEP ADVOCACY

HIV IN INDIANA ADVOCATES RESPOND TO THE EPIDEMIC IN THE HOOSIER STATE

BRIGHTER HORIZONS ANTOINE B. CRAIGWELL PROMOTES SELF-CARE AMONG BLACK GAY MEN

plus • Linda Stein • Nicholas Downs • Fighting Pride Month Blues

story, “Direct Action,” by Lester Strong, June 2015]. He was there at the crux of the pandemic called AIDS and he has never stopped fighting to correct the wrongs of society and for the fight for gay men. He was there when the iconic group ACT UP was formed and became a leading member of that group.

He stated, “We had a viral epidemic that was allowed to take hold and start spreading rapidly because of who the virus was initially targeting.

America back then was a very homophobic country. Americans didn’t want to think about homosexuality, let alone discuss it. Then homosexual men started dying in ever-increasing numbers.” We can never forget. Thanks to Lester Strong for a powerful interview.

—Michael Stringly Tulsa, Oklahoma

8

thing from this disaster. Like getting real.

—Trina Trinidad Cleveland, Ohio

You Don’t Say I really loved Corey Saucier’s tongue-incheek [Brave New World, June 2015] column, “Things We Don’t Say Out Loud,” at least I think he was being tongue-in-cheek. It is really true about feeling paranoid when you are HIV-positive or have AIDS and you come down with some ailment and you think it is the end of the world and you are dying. I

“Peter Staley stated, ‘We had a viral epidemic that was allowed to take hold and start spreading rapidly because of who the virus was initially targeting. America back then was a very homophobic country. Americans didn’t want to think about homosexuality, let alone discuss it. Then homosexual men started dying in ever-increasing numbers.’ We can never forget....”

Not In Their Backyard I love the title of your article, “What’s the Matter with Indiana?” [by Larry Buhl, June 2015] because those are my sentiments exactly. I jumped out of my seat when I read that HIV infections had exploded in one county in Indiana. This is just so surreal. I mean, Indiana—that rural and very conservative state that just loves electing Republicans and is no friend to gay people or people with HIV/AIDS. (Remember Ryan White?) Then I read that the explosion was due to intravenous drug users. So it wasn’t about people “butt-fucking” but all about intravenous drug users.

How sad. Maybe Indiana will learn some-

have had that frightening fear. Believe me, it is really scary. Anyway I want to thank Corey Saucier for that insightful piece.

—Wendell R. Pittman Austin, Texas

Send e-mail to: mailbox@aumag.org Send letters to: Mailbox, A&U, 25 Monroe Street, Suite 205, Albany, NY 12210 Or click on “Mailbox” on our Web site’s home page: www.aumag.org Tweet Us @au_magazine Facebook: http://on.fb.me/AUFANPAGE All correspondence requires name, address, and daytime phone number for confirmation. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

A&U • AUGUST 2015

photo by Sean Black

Love Action

What a great interview with Peter Staley; I was really impressed by this man. I didn’t really know anything about him. Peter Staley is someone everyone around the globe should always treasure as a true pioneer in the health justice movement. We need more people like Peter Staley to lead us in the proper way in fighting for the rights of people affected by any horrible disease—not only AIDS. Great interview, A&U. —Mirabel Montenaza San Jose, California

NEWSBREAK Be Epic, Cure AIDS Three powerhouses in the arts—British visual artist Shantell Martin, actor Jay Ellis [A&U, May 2015], and model Andreja Pejic—are helping to promote amfAR’s Countdown to a Cure for AIDS initiative with a beach towel that’s certain to turn heads.

Martin has designed a sexy beach towel, swirled with one of Martin’s signature black-and-white illustrations and emblazoned with “Be Epic, Cure AIDS.” Ellis, who regularly participates in Kiehl’s LifeRide and other events to support amfAR, and Pejic, also a steadfast amfAR supporter, are showing how to wear the limited edition, exclusively designed towel with pride.

Countdown to a Cure for AIDS seeks to raise awareness and develop the scientific basis for a cure by 2020. By strategically investing in research, amfAR hopes to support the development of a broadly applicable cure. Inspired by the cure momentum augured by success with the Berlin Patient and the Visconti Cohort, amfAR created a “research roadmap” that spells out (literally) four key scientific roadblocks that are standing in our way: Chart the precise locations of viral reservoirs that persist in the body; Understand how HIV persists in the reservoirs; Record how much virus they hold; and Eliminate the virus.

So how can you purchase this stunning, 100-percent cotton towel? Priced at $40, the towel is being sold exclusively at Scoop NYC locations as well as on amfAR’s website. All of the proceeds will support research to find a cure for HIV/AIDS. And if you miss your chance to snag a towel, you can always provide a donation to the non-profit’s effort to cure HIV/AIDS. For more information, log on to: www.amfar.org.

photos by Marco Ovando

IAS 2015 Updates Important news presented at the 8th IAS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatement & Prevention, which convened from July 19–22, included information about the benefits of early antiretroviral therapy.

Final START trial findings, whose interim results earlier this year prompted the CDC to tout the benefits of early treatment, showed that individuals who start antiretroviral therapy immediately after HIV diagnosis, and while their CD4 cell counts were still above 350 cells/mm3, have much better health outcomes than those who wait to start treatment. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the findings of the Strategic Timing of Antiretroviral Treatment trial, which started wide enrollment in March 2011 and was halted in May 2015 because the beneficial results were so apparent, show that the persistent immunes system damage that HIV causes early on may be countered. Though more research needs to be conducted on aging and HIV (many of the participants were young), early treatment starters who participated in the study had a significantly lower risk of opportunistic illnesses, disease progression, and death than those in the deferred arm, a result consistent with other studies. As always, education about the potential toxicity and side effects of antiretroviral treatment is needed so that patients can make informed decisions about whether or not early treatment is right for them.

But, as the success of San Francisco’s RAPID program shows, treatment for everyone, regardless of CD4 cell count, should be accessible. Offering antiretroviral therapy on the same day as an individual is diagnosed with HIV leads to faster viral suppression and a high rate of treatment engagement; the program, part of the city’s Getting to Zero initiative and now expanding, has shown success.

In a median of fifty-six days, those participating in RAPID suppressed their virus, compared with 119 days for those participants in the universal antiretroviral therapy standard-of-care group and 283 days in CD4-guided treatment group. Viral suppression after three months on antiretrovirals was achieved by seventy-five percent of RAPID participants versus thirty-eight percent in the other two non-RAPID groups; after six months, the rates were ninety-five percent versus seventy-percent.

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

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A&U • AUGUST 2015

NewsBreak

Equals=Equals Started by Greg Owen, a U.K.-based advocate and writer, Equals=Equals is an anti-stigma campaign born out of the frustration that the world could be a kinder place and one that is more AIDS-aware and stigma-free. On Facebook and Twitter, posters have called him brave, but he demurs. “I really can’t take credit for being ‘brave.’ I’m just fighting back as much for me and my soul as for our positive friends and indeed our negative ones, too.”

Equals=Equals seeks to unite individuals across serostatus instead of pitting them in an “us/them” binary, laden as it has come to be with assumptions of morality and whose bodies deserve care and love. Shares Greg: “If we have something that’s positive, combined with something that’s negative, we neutralize that and they then become equal. And there in itself is a mission statement.”

Owen has turned to crowdfunding to help support the production and distribution of the “Equals” T-shirt. Wearing the T-shirt will help normalize conversations around HIV and allow HIV entrée into everyday situations so that it is accepted as a fact of life and normal. In particular, it seeks to defuse the “slut-shaming” of positive individuals so prevalent in some pockets of the gay male community. The campaign also aims to help individuals become educated about the importance of knowing your status and the new prevention science regarding PrEP and Treatment as Prevention through viral suppression. Requesting and wearing your free T-shirt is not limited to the U.K. Owen hopes that T-shirt-clad everyday people and celebrities alike will help enlarge the social media footprint of the campaign with selfies and groupies all over the globe.

A&U: Was there a specific moment that sparked the idea for the campaign or a straw that broke the camel’s back where you said, “Okay, I need to do something”?

Greg Owen: Yes, there were several straws and one tired ass camel! I suppose it was because I realised that there was sweet FA (Fuck All) that I could do about my life, as I knew it, being turned upside down and basically taken away from me. Losing my fiancé and my home because he shut down and couldn’t cope with his recent diagnosis and me remaining negative.

When I accepted that I couldn’t change that. I slowly then began to realize what I could change is the world that he now has to live in as “the positive guy.” Being at sex parties or just out socially and bearing witness to some of the vile, heartless, cruel, passive attacks and active bullying that the positive guys around me were dealing with regularly, on a daily basis, broke my heart a little bit more. And because my ex and I aren’t in touch anymore, it pained me so deeply to think that he was out there somewhere—alone, on the receiving end of that kind of unacceptable, archaic bullshit. Apologies for my colorful language—I’m Irish; we say it as it is.

What are the effects of HIV stigma, as you understand them?

HIV stigma and its impact, in my opinion, is the root cause of the continued rising spike in new HIV transmissions among those HIV “hot spot groups” that we are already aware of, i.e., gay men living in fast-paced urban areas. But we’re now seeing a rising spike in various other demographics, like heterosexual women in the fifty-plus age bracket. The reason I attribute stigma as being at the core of this is because we’re all conditioned to believe that none of us should even be talking about sex, even though all of us are having sex.

Somehow, even admitting that you’ve had a HIV test implies that you’re somehow unclean, dirty, irresponsible and reckless or a biological danger to those you are and have been intimate with.

Why did you decide to focus on normalizing the conversation around sex and HIV for this social media campaign?

Unless we shock people into being desensitized to HIV we can’t hope to be able to encourage them to test regularly and make testing commonplace, without fear of judgment from others. The key here is that the people most likely to transmit HIV are those that don’t yet know that they’ve contracted it. Therefore, if we’re not testing regularly, diagnosing early, and treating effectively those most likely to pass on the virus, then we have no chance of tipping the scale on this alarming, seemingly relentless rise in new transmissions. Not many people know that we have the tools available now to actually make a huge impact in stopping new HIV transmissions. If you’re positive and on meds, taking them correctly and are undetectable, then it’s practically impossible for you to pass on the virus. In the same thread, those at high risk of HIV infection have access to/or soon will have access to PrEP....So the combination of treatment (for poz guys) and PrEP (for neg guys) is a no brainer!

Anything else we haven’t covered?

The last thing I want to say is that although HIV and the impact of HIV bulldozing its way into my life almost ruined me and pushed me to a suicide attempt—thankfully a failed one—I now feel like I, and we, are already winning! HIV screwed up my life, but I fought back with the help and support of friends, family and community. And I look at all the people this activity is already reaching out to and supporting and helping and I can see nothing but positive things! Excuse the pun! Taking ownership of HIV’s presence in my life has allowed us to start to claw back an advantage—even on some small level. For that I am very grateful.

When this first phase of the campaign is completed, Owen plans to roll-out two other phases, both involving on-line support strategies.

For more information, check out the “Equals = Equals” Facebook page. If you are interested in helping to fund the campaign, log on to: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/equals-equals-the-hiv-anti-stigma-campaign.

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

15

Ruby Comer: What a beguiling place! Those animals are so damn cute. [Michelle heartily nods.] I think I made a friend with one of the lambs. Really. Michelle, as you know, I absolutely loved your performance in Boy Meets Girl—so much so that I’ve watched the film twice! [She graciously beams.] Tell me, what was your favorite scene?

Michelle Hendley: [She instantly

16

responds.] Definitely the car scene with “Robby”!

Michael [Welch) and I were able to play off one another really well, and it made for some incredible takes.

I can’t believe you guys shot that entire film in just two weeks! Shocking. What was your overall experience on the shoot?

An absolute privilege, Ruby. The cast was nice, talented, and most genuine. They were so willing to help out and throw me a few tips here and there. We all had fantastic chemistry on and off set.

I love that outdoor scene, more than half way through the film, between your character, Ricky, and David [Michael Galante], where he wrestles you to the ground in anger, revealing a secret—no spoiler alert here! What was it like shooting that scene and how many takes did you do?

Oh, I love it too. My favorite part was how, in that moment, Ricky didn’t have to hold back. She told David to fuck off. Like hiding their secret wasn’t enough, he had the audacity to confront her and try to pull some crap. She throws it right back in his face. Her life is in turmoil, and this man isn’t going to add more flames to her fire.

Like most of the scenes in the movie, we shot it fairly quickly. We only needed to practice how he was going to push me and how I was going to fall.

Divine! Did you get especially close to anyone while filming?

All of us still try to keep in contact, but I’ve seen Alex [Alexandra Turshen] whenever I visit New York. She’s very much my big sister in this industry.

Say, what comes to mind when I say the word “AIDS”?

The stigma those who are diagnosed must live with every day. People can be cruel.

How so?

People fear what they don’t understand, and when they’re afraid they lash out.

For the longest time, HIV and AIDS was considered a “gay disease.” Science has progressed and there’s more information out there, but the stigma still lingers.

[She stops to pet a furry grey cat that has brushed alongside her leg.] A couple of friends of mine live with the disease.

When did you first hear about the epidemic?

When I was in the sixth grade. We learned about sexually transmitted diseases.

According to the CDC, there is a high rate of infection within the trans community....

It does not surprise me. Many trans people live in exile and are left homeless and without employment. Such conditions often lead to an especially difficult life.

Any idea how we can reach out more to trans people, or for that matter anyone, about HIV prevention?

A&U • AUGUST 2015

Ruby illustration by Davidd Batalon; photo by Kyle Devlin

“G

roundbreaker.” “Firstrate.” “Superlative debut performance.” The critics have sung the praises for actress Michelle Hendley for her luminous appearance in the quirky dreamy film, Boy Meets Girl.

Move over Caitlyn Jenner—another trans woman is transcending!

Michelle gives a tender and brilliant performance. She even bares all. Bold girl. A native of Columbia, Missouri, the twenty-three-year-old will be moving to New York City to continue her acting career. “I’m looking forward to auditions and getting into the grind. It’s all very exciting and super nerve racking, but I think it will all work out fine. I got this.”

After attending Truman State University for one year as an art major, Michelle decided to enroll in cosmetology school.

Currently, she works by day as a hairstylist and by night, the ambitious “Show Me State” resident delivers pizza! Over the past several years, Michelle has documented her captivating journey on her YouTube channel. Don’t miss it. Through it all, she’s had the support of family and friends.

Michelle is in town for a few days and we take a day trip from Los Angeles to Farm Sanctuary, a non-profit animal rescue group. We kibitz while sitting at a sunbaked picnic table under large trees in the intimate entrance area. The majestic Sierra Pelona Mountains dot the background. We finish the tour after meeting and greeting pigs, lambs, cows, and chickens.

MICHELLE HENDLEY

Boy Meets Girl

Excellent point, Missy. When we met at the premiere of Boy Meets Girl, you mentioned that you hadn’t been involved with the HIV community yet but would like to.

Yes. [Michelle looks off a moment, eyeing the pomegranate-colored bougainvillea that lines the parking lot.] At some point I’d like to work with Broadway Cares.

I’ve heard some wonderful things about them.

Broadway Cares is an iconic organization! Maybe you’ll land a Broadway show and be in their annual Broadway Bares. You’ve been naked once for the masses—let’s do it again! [She smirks, stares at me playfully then hiccups in a succession of giggles.] At what age did you know you were trans and what has it been like for you?

I suppose I have always known I was trans, but I didn’t always know its name. I used to pretend every single day that I was a girl. I remember imagining myself with a long ponytail in gym class when I was in the first grade. I would change my outfit throughout the day: a jumper at recess, a ball gown for the classroom. It was those secret pretend games that got me through the day before I could go home to be with

18

my dolls and dress-up clothes. [She takes an extended breath.] Later in high school I heard the word “transgender” for the first time. I initially resisted believing that the word described me, but I just kept thinking about it over and over until it really made sense.

How did you come out?

I first came out to my friends around the age of eighteen, and they were all totally cool with it. I officially came out as trans to my parents a year later. I was fairly certain they would be supportive and understanding. I was less optimistic when it came to the rest of my family, but as it turned out they were also very supportive and accommodating to my new found identity.

In fact, nobody was surprised to hear that I identified as a woman. [Michelle pleasantly sighs.] I am so very fortunate to have so much love in my life. I could not have asked for a better family.

Thank your lucky stars—and kudos to them!

Michelle, when did you first get tested?

Right after my first sexual encounter. I think I was eighteen. I’m kind of a late bloomer. [She shrugs, chuckles, and gently rolls her expressive browns to and fro.] I make a point to get checked whenever I have an impromptu sexual encounter, or if I’m starting a

relationship. Just as a sign of good faith, you know?

Right-oh. Tell me, do you always have protected sex?

Not with long-term boyfriends, but hook-ups for sure! I like to get checked together before we have sex. Even if we are both certain we are negative, it’s nice to see on paper that neither of us was wrong.

Now when you date someone, when do you tell them you’re trans?

That is information I prefer to get out on the table prior to the first date. I don’t care to waste my time with guys who won’t be cool with my situation.

What’s the most challenging thing right now for you being transgender?

Personally, I want to make sure I am representing my community as a transgender actress in a positive and informative light. We are witnessing a trans revolution with our greater visibility. It’s so important that we educate and bring attention to trans issues.

Any final thoughts about the epidemic, before we go over to the barn and pet that three-month-old calf? I can’t stand it. He’s so a..dor..a..ble!

I think a lot of misconceptions about the epidemic have been nullified with the advent of the Internet. The more information we can share about the epidemic— and those affected by the disease—the better off we’ll all be.

Follow Michelle Hendley on Twitter @chellehendley.

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 • AUGUST 2015

selfie courtesy M. Hendley; Boy Meets Girl photos by Bramacharia

We need to continue providing sexual health education in our schools.

By informing our children, we can better prepare them for adulthood. As far as reaching out to trans people in particular, I think the trans community must be acknowledged as a valued part of society before change can be made.

Bringing hearts together since 1998

P zMatch.c m

Hey Justin— This is the first time I’ve written to you so please forgive me if I ramble. I started PrEP because my boyfriend is HIV-positive and I am HIV-negative and plan to stay that way. I’m black and he is white, and our friends are a reflection of us.

What I mean to say is that we have a diverse group of friends.

I went to my doctor right after PrEP came out and he and I talked about it. We both agreed that going on PrEP would be a good idea for me. At first I had some stomach pain when I went on PrEP the first time but it subsided. I think of myself as an educated man and knowledgeable about PrEP, but there is something I don’t understand. Why is it that it seems Black gay men are not being educated on PrEP? —Educated Black Man My fellow educated Black man, you pose a very interesting question. In public health we often accidentally think that one advertisement is going to work for all communities. But this is not always so.

When PrEP first came out, public health professionals made sure that it was geared toward the target population, gay men and men who have sex with men (MSM). The reason why is because these groups have higher HIV incidence rates than a lot of other populations. Pub-

20

lic health professionals who work in the HIV field must find places where Black gay men and MSM frequent, so that they can disseminate information on public health issues, causes, information, etc.

The lack of PrEP education may be due to limited resources. In major cities information on PrEP might be more available because of the resources that that city has.

But leadership is key when it comes to spreading the word about PrEP. We have to also rely on community leaders of certain demographics to come out in support of PrEP. The reason why is because those same community leaders are examples that people follow and some or most of them are advocates for change in their own communities. Their communities also trust those community leaders more than they trust anyone else who tells them about or how to prevent a public health issue.

Let me take this opportunity to not only suggest something not only to you, Educated Black Man, but all Black gay men and MSM that are on PrEP. Now is the time for you to become community leaders. The more and more that you speak to the Black gay and MSM community the more information they are going to be able to get the information that they need on PrEP, thereby protecting themselves from HIV. A lot of people will not do this because they are

scared of the stigma that is associated with taking PrEP. Fuck that and fuck PrEP stigma.

But, honestly, you’ve noticed a hole—now fill it (no pun intended). By hole I mean the one in the public health arena. I’ve always had a high respect for anyone who sees an issue and doesn’t merely talk about it but puts a plan of action in place. I don’t know you at all but I think that you might want to seriously take some time and think of what it would mean to your community if you came out as an Advocate/Activist for PrEP. I’m not sure what state you are in, but if this is the path that you want to go down, then I suggest contacting a local and more powerful non-profit that is advocating for PrEP. Get information from that organization on PrEP and begin to ask places if you can disseminate information.

This is your community and it needs you. We must all band together to stop the stigma that stifles our community to create a healthier tomorrow.

We need to be able to step up and stand out. Finally, I will leave you with these very wise words from the civil rights activist and another Educated Black Man, Bayard Rustin: “We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” ◊

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 jsmithco98@hotmail.com.

A&U • AUGUST 2015

Love, Interrupted hiv discrimination affects a new family in kansas

illustration by Timothy J. Haines

R

ecently, I came across an article, on Facebook regarding a family, in Wichita, Kansas, that was torn apart because of HIV. As I continued to read, it only infuriated me more. How can one’s HIV status be a factor in child custody situations?

Is this another type of criminalization, through family law, that individuals are facing due to their status? I know that Facebook can sometimes portray things incorrectly, so I had to find out firsthand what this story was really about.

I initially contacted Donna and Henry through Facebook, and found out that this in fact was a true story. Donna had lost parental custody of her sixteenyear-old son and eight-year-old daughter because she was engaged to Henry, who is HIV-positive. The judge originally ruled it as “HIV posing a risk to the children,” basing her information on a letter written by the children’s doctor in Kansas, and paperwork provided from the lawyer explaining the risk. The letter used by the doctor, documented back in the 1980s, stated that, “in a few cases, HIV has been transmitted when there was unprotected contact between infected blood and broken skin and mucous membranes.”

After getting the initial information, I felt empowered to help this family in any way I could. I myself am originally from Kansas, a mother, and HIV-positive; this could have easily happened to me. I could never have imagined that I had come from such a place that would be so naïve to contraction and transmission of HIV. This has to change, and both Donna and Henry will be fighting and advocating for that change. They want to use and share their story to start that battle.

Donna was born in Vietnam and raised in Wichita, Kansas, where she currently resides. She met Henry approximately seven years ago and remained friends with him over the years. She had learned of Henry’s status prior to developing a relationship with him, but she held no judgments because she was well educated in the field. Henry and Donna began a long-distance relationship, and AUGUST 2015 • A&U

in April of 2015 Henry relocated to be closer to her.

From that point on their relationship blossomed and they got engaged; however, Donna’s ex-husband did not feel the same and did not accept the relationship.

Donna’s ex-husband did a criminal background check on Henry, stalked his Facebook account, and eventually discovered Henry’s status. He then filed a petition to modify custody on May 28, 2015. It had not even been two months before the judge removed the children from Donna’s custody because of Henry’s HIV status. This callous and irrational move in part by the judge fractured Donna’s relationship with her children, her fiancé, and herself.

Donna’s ordered visitation was impossible to have put into place before the next hearing, so unfortunately she was unable to visit her children during the time of removal. Her son is angry, and refuses to speak to her, and her daughter is feeling the effects of child abandonment and parental alienation.

Donna has experienced extreme depression, loss in appetite, and dropped out of school because she was trying to cope with the loss of her children.

Donna felt stigmatized just for loving someone who is HIV-positive, and Henry even offered to leave just so she would not have to go through this any longer.

Henry feels hurt, not only because his status caused such heartache for the one he loves, but because of the stigma and ignorance of others. He is depressed, anguished, mentally exhausted, and isolated. This situation did not just break Donna’s family apart, but Henry’s father disowned him because of the situation.

Henry says he feels like a leper. However, Donna and Henry do not regret contacting the media, regarding this issue, because it allowed them to find representation, with O’Hara & O’Hara, that they originally could not find.

The struggle has been overwhelming, but Donna and Henry feel much supported overall, and, although there are individuals in their community who are not supportive, they feel that this is a perfect opportunity to educate others.

They are turning this negative situation into a positive one by trying to file discrimination charges and fight to have family law policies, surrounding HIV, amended. “We will continue fighting, we will not give up. We will advocate for change…we need the support,” they told me.

Donna and Henry want to thank all of the advocates who have reached out to help them, and they are grateful for the support.

If you would like to help Donna and Henry, they have a petition posted on Change.org at http://chn.ge/1fKzbMT, and a GoFundMe account at http:// www.gofundme.com/Save_Our_Family, to help with legal support.

You can also contact Henry via Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ HenryCalderonJr?fref=nf.

Heather Arculeo, a positive woman since 2007, works to educate, advocate, and empower others to make a change because “change is possible even if the transformation seems impossible.” She wants to continue to make a difference in the HIV community because she is not only a peer, a mother, a sister, a wife, an aunt, and a daughter, but also an example to other women living with HIV.

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COMPLERA is a prescription medicine for adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before and who have no more than 100,000 copies/mL of virus in their blood. COMPLERA can also replace current HIV-1 medicines for some adults who have an undetectable viral load (less than 50 copies/mL) and whose healthcare provider determines that they meet certain other requirements. COMPLERA combines 3 medicines into 1 pill to be taken once a day with food. COMPLERA should not be used with other HIV-1 medicines.

Just the

one

for me

COMPLERA is a complete HIV-1 treatment that combines the medicines in TRUVADA + EDURANT in only 1 pill a day.*

Ask your healthcare provider if COMPLERA may be the one for you. *COMPLERA is a combination of the medicines in TRUVADA (emtricitabine and tenofovir disoproxil fumarate) and EDURANT (rilpivirine).

Pill shown is not actual size.

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A&U • JULY 2015

COMPLERA does not cure HIV-1 infection or AIDS.

To control HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses you must keep taking COMPLERA. 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.

It is not known if COMPLERA is safe and effective in children under 18 years old.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION What is the most important information I should know about COMPLERA?

COMPLERA can cause serious side effects: • Build-up of an acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious medical emergency. Symptoms of lactic acidosis include feeling very weak or tired, unusual (not normal) muscle pain, trouble breathing, stomach pain with nausea or vomiting, feeling cold especially in your arms and legs, feeling dizzy or lightheaded, and/or a fast or irregular heartbeat.

• Serious liver problems. The liver may become large (hepatomegaly) and fatty (steatosis). Symptoms of liver problems include your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow (jaundice), dark “tea-colored” urine, light-colored bowel movements (stools), loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, and/or stomach pain.

• You may be more likely to get lactic acidosis or serious liver problems if you are female, very overweight (obese), or have been taking COMPLERA for a long time. In some cases, these serious conditions have led to death. Call your healthcare provider right away if you have any symptoms of these conditions.

• Worsening of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. If you also have HBV and stop taking COMPLERA, your hepatitis may suddenly get worse. Do not stop taking COMPLERA without first talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to monitor your health. COMPLERA is not approved for the treatment of HBV.

Who should not take COMPLERA?

Do not take COMPLERA if you: • Take a medicine that contains: adefovir (Hepsera), lamivudine (Epivir-HBV), carbamazepine (Carbatrol, Equetro, Tegretol, TegretolXR, Teril, Epitol), oxcarbazepine (Trileptal), phenobarbital (Luminal), phenytoin (Dilantin, Dilantin-125, Phenytek), rifampin (Rifater, Rifamate, Rimactane, Rifadin), rifapentine (Priftin), dexlansoprazole (Dexilant), esomeprazole (Nexium, Vimovo), lansoprazole (Prevacid), omeprazole (Prilosec, Zegerid), pantoprazole sodium (Protonix), rabeprazole (Aciphex), more than 1 dose of the steroid medicine dexamethasone or dexamethasone sodium phosphate, or the herbal supplement St. John’s wort.

• Take any other medicines to treat HIV-1 infection, unless recommended by your healthcare provider.

What are the other possible side effects of COMPLERA?

Serious side effects of COMPLERA may also include: • Severe skin rash and allergic reactions. Call your doctor right away if you get a rash. Some rashes and allergic reactions may need to be treated in a hospital. Stop taking COMPLERA and get medical help right away if you get a rash with any of the following symptoms: severe allergic reactions causing a swollen face, lips, mouth, tongue or throat which may lead to difficulty swallowing or breathing; mouth sores or blisters on your body; inflamed eye (conjunctivitis); fever, dark urine or pain on the right side of the stomach-area (abdominal pain).

• New or worse kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do blood tests to check your kidneys before starting treatment with COMPLERA. If you have had kidney problems, or take other medicines that may cause kidney problems, your healthcare provider may also check your kidneys during treatment with COMPLERA.

Depression or mood changes. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have any of the following symptoms: feeling sad or hopeless, feeling anxious or restless, have thoughts of hurting yourself (suicide) or have tried to hurt yourself.

• Changes in liver enzymes: People who have had hepatitis B or C, or who have had changes in their liver function tests in the past may have an increased risk for liver problems while taking COMPLERA. Some people without prior liver disease may also be at risk. Your healthcare provider may do tests to check your liver enzymes before and during treatment with COMPLERA. • Bone problems, including bone pain or bones getting soft or thin, which may lead to fractures. Your healthcare provider may do tests to check your bones.

• Changes in body fat can happen in people taking HIV-1 medicines.

• 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 COMPLERA. •

The most common side effects of COMPLERA include trouble sleeping (insomnia), abnormal dreams, headache, dizziness, diarrhea, nausea, rash, tiredness, and depression. Other common side effects include vomiting, stomach pain or discomfort, skin discoloration (small spots or freckles), and pain. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any side effects that bother you or do not go away.

What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking COMPLERA?

All your health problems. Be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you have or had any kidney, mental health, bone, or liver problems, including hepatitis virus infection.

• All the medicines you take, including prescription and nonprescription medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements.

COMPLERA may affect the way other medicines work, and other medicines may affect how COMPLERA works. Keep a list of all your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist.

Do not start any new medicines while taking COMPLERA without first talking with your healthcare provider.

• If you take rifabutin (Mycobutin). Talk to your healthcare provider about the right amount of rilpivirine (Edurant) you should take.

• If you take antacids. Take antacids at least 2 hours before or at least 4 hours after you take COMPLERA. • If you take stomach acid blockers. Take acid blockers at least 12 hours before or at least 4 hours after you take COMPLERA. Ask your healthcare provider if your acid blocker is okay to take, as some acid blockers should never be taken with COMPLERA. • If you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if COMPLERA can harm your unborn baby. Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking COMPLERA. • If you are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed. HIV-1 can be passed to the baby in breast milk. Also, some medicines in COMPLERA can pass into breast milk, and it is not known if this can harm the baby.

•

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 Brief Summary of full Prescribing Information with important warnings on the following pages.

Brief Summary of full Prescribing Information COMPLERA® (kom-PLEH-rah) (emtricitabine 200 mg, rilpivirine 25 mg, tenofovir disoproxil fumarate 300 mg) tablets Brief summary of full Prescribing Information. For more information, please see the full Prescribing Information, including Patient Information.

What is COMPLERA? • COMPLERA is a prescription medicine used as a complete HIV-1 treatment in one pill a day. COMPLERA is for adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before and who have no more than 100,000 copies/mL of virus in their blood (this is called ‘viral load’). Complera can also replace current HIV-1 medicines for some adults who have an undetectable viral load (less than 50 copies/mL) and whose healthcare provider determines that they meet certain other requirements.

• COMPLERA is a complete HIV-1 medicine and should not be used with any other HIV-1 medicines.

• COMPLERA should always be taken with food. A protein drink does not replace food.

• COMPLERA does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS. You must stay on continuous HIV-1 therapy to control HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses.

• Ask your healthcare provider about how to prevent passing HIV-1 to others. Do not share or reuse needles, injection equipment, or personal items that can have blood or body fluids on them. Do not have sex without protection. Always practice safer sex by using a latex or polyurethane condom to lower the chance of sexual contact with semen, vaginal secretions, or blood.

What is the most important information I should know about COMPLERA? COMPLERA can cause serious side effects, including: • Build-up of an acid in your blood (lactic acidosis). Lactic acidosis can happen in some people who take COMPLERA or similar (nucleoside analogs) medicines. Lactic acidosis is a serious medical emergency that can lead to death. Lactic acidosis can be hard to identify early, because the symptoms could seem like symptoms of other health problems. Call your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following symptoms which could be signs of lactic acidosis: – feel very weak or tired – have unusual (not normal) muscle pain – have trouble breathing – having stomach pain with nausea or vomiting – feel cold, especially in your arms and legs – feel dizzy or lightheaded – have a fast or irregular heartbeat • Severe liver problems. Severe liver problems can happen in people who take COMPLERA. In some cases, these liver problems can lead to death. Your liver may become large (hepatomegaly) and you may develop fat in your liver (steatosis). Call your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following symptoms of liver problems: – your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow (jaundice) – dark “tea-colored” urine – light-colored bowel movements (stools) – loss of appetite for several days or longer – nausea – stomach pain • You may be more likely to get lactic acidosis or severe liver problems if you are female, very overweight (obese), or have been taking COMPLERA for a long time.

• Worsening of Hepatitis B infection. If you have hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and take COMPLERA, your HBV may get worse (flare-up) if you stop taking COMPLERA. A “flare-up” is when your HBV infection suddenly returns in a worse way than before. COMPLERA is not approved for the treatment of HBV, so you must discuss your HBV with your healthcare provider.

– Do not run out of COMPLERA. Refill your prescription or talk to your healthcare provider before your COMPLERA is all gone.

– Do not stop taking COMPLERA without first talking to your healthcare provider.

– If you stop taking COMPLERA, your healthcare provider will need to check your health often and do blood tests regularly to check your HBV infection. Tell your healthcare provider about any new or unusual symptoms you may have after you stop taking COMPLERA. Who should not take COMPLERA? Do not take COMPLERA if you also take any of the following medicines: • Medicines used for seizures: carbamazepine (Carbatrol, Equetro, Tegretol, Tegretol-XR, Teril, Epitol); oxcarbazepine (Trileptal); phenobarbital (Luminal); phenytoin (Dilantin, Dilantin-125, Phenytek) • Medicines used for tuberculosis: rifampin (Rifater, Rifamate, Rimactane, Rifadin); rifapentine (Priftin) • Certain medicines used to block stomach acid called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs): dexlansoprazole (Dexilant); esomeprazole (Nexium, Vimovo); lansoprazole (Prevacid); omeprazole (Prilosec, Zegerid); pantoprazole sodium (Protonix); rabeprazole (Aciphex) • Certain steroid medicines: More than 1 dose of dexamethasone or dexamethasone sodium phosphate • Certain herbal supplements: St. John’s wort • Certain hepatitis medicines: adefovir (Hepsera), lamivudine (Epivir-HBV) Do not take COMPLERA if you also take any other HIV-1 medicines, including: • Other medicines that contain emtricitabine or tenofovir (ATRIPLA, EMTRIVA, STRIBILD, TRUVADA, VIREAD) • Other medicines that contain lamivudine (Combivir, Epivir, Epzicom, Triumeq, Trizivir) • rilpivirine (Edurant), unless you are also taking rifabutin (Mycobutin) COMPLERA is not for use in people who are less than 18 years old.

What are the possible side effects of COMPLERA? COMPLERA may cause the following serious side effects: • See “What is the most important information I should know about COMPLERA?” • Severe skin rash and allergic reactions. Skin rash is a common side effect of COMPLERA but it can also be serious. Call your doctor right away if you get a rash. In some cases, rash and allergic reaction may need to be treated in a hospital. Stop taking COMPLERA and call your doctor or get medical help right away if you get a rash with any of the following symptoms: – severe allergic reactions causing a swollen face, lips, mouth, tongue or throat, which may cause difficulty swallowing or breathing – mouth sores or blisters on your body – inflamed eye (conjunctivitis) – fever, dark urine or pain on the right side of the stomach-area (abdominal pain) • New or worse kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do blood and urine tests to check your kidneys before you start and while you are taking COMPLERA. If you have had kidney problems in the past or need to take another medicine that can cause kidney problems, your healthcare provider may need to do blood tests to check your kidneys during your treatment with COMPLERA.

• Depression or mood changes. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have any of the following symptoms: – feeling sad or hopeless – feeling anxious or restless – have thoughts of hurting yourself (suicide) or have tried to hurt yourself • Change in liver enzymes. People with a history of hepatitis B or C virus infection or who have certain liver enzyme changes may have an increased risk of developing new or worsening liver problems during treatment with COMPLERA. Liver problems can also happen during treatment with COMPLERA in people without a history of liver disease.

Your healthcare provider may need to do tests to check your liver enzymes before and during treatment with COMPLERA. • Bone problems can happen in some people who take COMPLERA. Bone problems include bone pain, softening or thinning (which may lead to fractures). Your healthcare provider may need to do tests to check your bones.

• Changes in body fat can happen in people taking HIV-1 medicine.

These changes may include increased amount of fat in the upper back and neck (“buffalo hump”), breast, and around the main part of your body (trunk). Loss of fat from the legs, arms and face may also happen.

The cause and long term health effect of these conditions are not known.

• 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 if you start having any new symptoms after starting your HIV-1 medicine.

The most common side effects of COMPLERA include: • Trouble sleeping (insomnia), abnormal dreams, headache, dizziness, diarrhea, nausea, rash, tiredness, depression Additional common side effects include: • Vomiting, stomach pain or discomfort, skin discoloration (small spots or freckles), pain Tell your healthcare provider if you have any side effect that bothers you or that does not go away.

• These are not all the possible side effects of COMPLERA. For more information, ask your healthcare provider.

• Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.

What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking COMPLERA? Tell your healthcare provider about all your medical conditions, including: • If you have or had any kidney, mental health, bone, or liver problems, including hepatitis B or C infection.

• If you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if COMPLERA can harm your unborn child.

– 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 to your healthcare provider about how you can take part in this registry.

• If you are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed if you take COMPLERA. – You should not breastfeed if you have HIV-1 because of the risk of passing HIV-1 to your baby.

– Two of the medicines in COMPLERA can pass to your baby in your breast milk. It is not known if this could harm your baby.

– Talk to 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, vitamins, and herbal supplements: • COMPLERA may affect the way other medicines work, and other medicines may affect how COMPLERA works.

• If you take certain medicines with COMPLERA, the amount of COMPLERA in your body may be too low and it may not work to help control your HIV-1 infection. The HIV-1 virus in your body may become resistant to COMPLERA or other HIV-1 medicines that are like it.

• Be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you take any of the following medicines: – Rifabutin (Mycobutin), a medicine to treat some bacterial infections.

Talk to your healthcare provider about the right amount of rilpivirine (Edurant) you should take.

– Antacid medicines that contain aluminum, magnesium hydroxide, or calcium carbonate. Take antacids at least 2 hours before or at least 4 hours after you take COMPLERA. – Certain medicines to block the acid in your stomach, including cimetidine (Tagamet), famotidine (Pepcid), nizatidine (Axid), or ranitidine hydrochloride (Zantac). Take the acid blocker at least 12 hours before or at least 4 hours after you take COMPLERA. Some acid blocking medicines should never be taken with COMPLERA (see “Who should not take COMPLERA?” for a list of these medicines).

– Medicines that can affect how your kidneys work, including acyclovir (Zovirax), cidofovir (Vistide), ganciclovir (Cytovene IV, Vitrasert), valacyclovir (Valtrex), and valganciclovir (Valcyte).

– clarithromycin (Biaxin) – erythromycin (E-Mycin, Eryc, Ery-Tab, PCE, Pediazole, Ilosone) – fluconazole (Diflucan) – itraconazole (Sporanox) – ketoconazole (Nizoral) – methadone (Dolophine) – posaconazole (Noxafil) – telithromycin (Ketek) – voriconazole (Vfend) Know the medicines you take. Keep a list of all your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist when you get a new medicine. Do not start any new medicines while you are taking COMPLERA without first talking with your healthcare provider.

Keep COMPLERA and all medicines out of reach of children.

This Brief Summary summarizes the most important information about COMPLERA. If you would like more information, talk with your healthcare provider. You can also ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist for information about COMPLERA that is written for health professionals, or call 1-800-445-3235 or go to www.COMPLERA.com.

Revised: May 2015

COMPLERA, the COMPLERA Logo, EMTRIVA, GILEAD, the GILEAD Logo, GSI, HEPSERA, STRIBILD, TRUVADA, VIREAD, and VISTIDE are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. ATRIPLA is a trademark of Bristol-Myers Squibb & Gilead Sciences, LLC. All other marks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.

©2015 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. CPAC0167 06/15

Be the Trumpet let your hiv-awareness voice be heard

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s it just me or do people really see what I see? Do people really understand that after fifty years of HIV in America the stigma still stands as if HIV was just introduced into this country? I wonder how is it that a teenager in the United States could grow up here for fifteen, sixteen, or even seventeen years and is completely clueless about HIV. Last weekend, I was shocked to have learned that someone close to me has a grandchild who never heard of HIV and he is fifteen. The only words that I have for that are, we as adults have dropped the ball and if we do not get back on track we will succeed in failing our young people.

So, what is the irony behind this ignorance? My thoughts are that stigma has shut the mouths of the people. Again, I say that these are simply my thoughts. In the black community, and I can discuss this because these are some of the things that I had to face as a black woman living in Dallas, Texas, following the traditions of the African-American culture not to ever speak about HIV or question our partner about their status and believing because I am faithful in church that it will never happen to me. Especially now that I am aware of my HIV-positive diagnosis I started SAAVED, Inc., in hopes of tackling some of these ethical issues surrounding HIV/AIDS. I remember growing up completely unaware of HIV—it was a subject you didn’t talk about. I had a male cousin who was homosexual and by the time I was eight or nine years of age he had gotten very sick. I remember my mother and grandmother going to visit him, and my brother and I were told to stay in the living room and not to go into the back room where he was. Of course we were obedient, but as I was going into the living area to sit down I looked down the hall and saw him lying there and the image of him that I saw overshadows any other image that I can remember of him. The blisters and sores that covered his small frame of a body still haunt me today. We were told that he was very sick and when I begun to ask questions the only answer that I received, as I was

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tapped on the shoulder and patted on the head, was “just pray for him.”

When he died the secret of AIDS in our family died with him until I told my grandmother that I was HIV-positive and his secret was brought back to life. It was as if you spoke of it or had any questions pertaining to it then naturally you had it and therefore you were a disgrace. Never mind obtaining knowledge to inform yourself about what is going on in our world that has caused a pandemic that is affecting everyone whether they are HIV-positive or not. In some black families, you didn’t need a HIV test to determine if you were HIV-positive; all you had to do was talk about it and you were labeled.

I am tired of hearing in African-American communities that HIV is a gay person’s disease and when you tell them otherwise, then they are looking at you as if you are the one that is clueless.

However, I must say that I get a kick out of informing them that HIV can be contracted by anyone who indulges in the activity of having good, wonderful, hot and steamy sex or by those who have boring sex. At that point, I tend to obtain their attention.

The point of this column is that everyone needs to become informed of their HIV status, obtain the knowledge about this disease, and become a community activist because our young people are growing up thinking that they are invincible and completely untouchable. Let your voice be heard! Become the instrument that filters the information throughout your community.

Also, there are many HIV/AIDS organizations throughout the USA that need volunteers to help expand the work that they are doing in the community.

In Dallas, Texas, SAAVED has partnered with some great organizations such as Legacy Counseling Services and AIDS Arms to offer services to those who

are living with HIV/AIDS. Although many organizations are collaborating in order to effectively serve the HIV/ AIDS community we still need your help. You can help by volunteering to pass out pamphlets, hosting workshops, planning fundraisers, or simply giving your time and expertise. However, if you are too scared to show your face and would rather be of assistance behind the scenes, then choose an organization in your community to make a donation to.

Just remember, that the HIV community needs you, our young people need to hear your voice and every community around the globe needs your words to sound off as clashing cymbals that are getting everyone’s attention.

Be the trumpet, sound the alarm, and let your voice be heard.

Tyeshia Alston is a native of Dallas, Texas, and an HIV/AIDS activist, who “will go anywhere where people will listen.” She has done everything from travel to D.C. to speak with legislators about better healthcare access and how the disease has impacted communities to serving on panels for NMAC and other organizations and bringing her message to talk shows. In 2005 at the age of twenty-five, Alston was diagnosed with HIV and she has been on a mission since 2006 to educate people (especially our youth) about HIV/AIDS. Visit www. saaved.org to learn more about her community-based work. Also, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to email Ms. Alston at saaved2heal@gmail.com.

A&U • AUGUST 2015

5pm Hilton Chicago’s Grand Ballroom | 7:30pm Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University PERFORMANCES BY Giordano Dance Chicago, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Joffrey Ballet, River North Dance Chicago, Chicago Human Rhythm Project, Same Planet Different World, C5 presenting a world premiere, and choreographer Randy Duncan’s highly acclaimed work STAND BY ME with special music arrangement by Ira Antelis EMCEES Joey Bland and Tim Mason from “The Second City” BENEFICIARIES AIDS Foundation of Chicago and The Dancers’ Fund GALA LEVEL TICKETS $250-$600

|

PERFORMANCE LEVEL TICKETS $15-$75

www.DanceforLifeChicago.org | 312-922-5812 /DanceForLifeChicago

@danceforlifeChi

M E D IA PART NER S JULY 2015 • A&U

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PHOTOGRAPHY Sandro | DANCERS Joshua Blake Carter, Giordano Dance Chicago, Jessica Tong, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Derrick Agnoletti, Joffrey Ballet

Saturday, August 15, 2015

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A&U • AUGUST 2015

These Are the Facts let’s unpack the tragedy of tiger mandingo

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o this is the thing…you can’t tell who has HIV by looking. That we already know. That we learned in primary school in the nineties.

“Anyone can have HIV.” That is

a fact.

Fact number two: People lie.

Your mother should have told you this when you were six years-old. People lie all the time. In fact eighty percent of people lie at least three times in the first five minutes of meeting a new person.

And the third thing—the most important thing—the thing that we should all remember—is that no one and I do mean NO ONE can “give” you HIV. Sex is consensual. If you accepted a penis without a condom into your body you also accept the known risk that accompanies that behavior. And if at some point after said interaction you become HIV-positive, the responsibility lies solely on your shoulders.

Because to go over the facts again: 1. You can’t tell who has HIV by looking.

2. People lie all the time about everything.

3. Unprotected sex requires personal consent.

We are not wide-eyed creatures innocently frolicking through forests of candy-coated penises. This is not some Disney cartoon where we relinquish our responsibility just because we were “kissed” by an HIV-positive prince. Adults are responsible for their own protection, because outside of the context of rape (and we are not talking about rape), no one can “give” you anything without your expressed or implied consent; however, just a few months ago a young man was convicted of just that.

Michael Johnson was slammed with thirty years to life for “recklessly infecting

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

another with HIV.” As if it is possible to just maliciously slap someone on the back with the virus and suddenly they have it. It does not work that way. The likelihood of seroconversion is not a simple science of “one exposure equals one infection”—and even if it were, someone has to open their legs first. And many many eager white boys opened their legs for this young black HIV-positive man who went by the handle of Tiger Mandingo.

This is the thing that terrifies me. I’m black. I’m attractive. I have a big penis. I like sex with white guys. I sometimes wear my sexuality on my sleeve like a leather daddy in a pride parade. I don’t always make the best sexual choices. And most incriminating…even though I am HIV-positive, I don’t always use condoms. I don’t always use condoms because I’m an adult and I live in America. And in this country we have the freedom to make complicated morally ambiguous choices for ourselves.

Disclosure is obviously a huge part of my vocabulary (and perhaps part of my saving grace), but at least one of the people Michael Johnson was convicted of “attempting to recklessly infect with HIV” was well aware of his status on the multiple occasions they had sex. And yet, still this young black HIV-positive man was convicted of a thirty-year sentence. Am I next? Is some jilted lover that I dated a million years ago going to decide that they no longer want to take responsibility for our interactions and press charges against my known HIV status? In fact what’s to stop someone who I have never had sex with (but only passed casually in a bathhouse) from pressing charges falsely? And God knows I’ve been with more people than I can actually remember, so then even the idea of what is fact becomes fuzzy.

Luckily I live in California which is an “intention” state. One would have to prove that I intentionally intended to infect someone with HIV, which obviously, based on the rules stated above, is nigh impossible in a consensual interaction. But for how long am I safe? How long until the witch-hunt comes for all of us? How long

until making love becomes a jail sentence?

How long until making mature complicated personal decisions about how and with whom we choose to have consensual sex becomes a matter for the courts? It is already happening!! And I promise you the young handsome black man named Michael Johnson who was vilified and crucified as Tiger Mandingo is only the first to fall.

What if I’m next?

I admit it. This is not a well thought out article in a magazine. This is a personal rant! A frantic call to action! An irate bell ringing in the night! Let us not let this go unchallenged. The easy thing to do is to say that we are not like him. He was a sex worker, he was a whore, he was dishonest about his status, he was sloppy, and stupid, and callous, and he had lots and lots of partners….But imagine the things they will say about you once the torch is lit and the fair citizens of the city are chasing you through the streets.

This is what they will say about me: “He was a whore, he was deliberately unsafe when having sex (he even wrote articles about it), he used phone apps to find sexual partners, he dated guys who were negative, he was sloppy, he was stupid, he was callous and he had lots and lots of partners….”

And they will say the same thing about you.

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.

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TABOO

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Art AIDS America touches the art world’s third rail

by Larry Buhl

T

he curators of Art AIDS America, which opened with a sneak preview in West Hollywood in June, say the show is about what the gatekeepers of the art world still consider the disease as third rail of American art.

That is, HIV/AIDS. More specifically, what spooks the top of the art world hierarchy is portraying HIV/AIDS as a disease that’s changed but still here, and has pervaded a wide swath of American culture.

The West Hollywood exhibit, split between the West Hollywood Library and the ONE Gallery, contains about a third of the art included in the full show, which opens October 3 at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington.

The partnership with West Hollywood is significant because that city was founded thirty years ago partly in response to a lack of response to the AIDS crisis by surrounding Los Angeles and L.A. County.

From Tacoma the full exhibit moves to the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, Georgia, in 2016 before closing at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. The dates of the post-Tacoma shows are still tentative.

Some big names are supporting the exhibit, including The Andy War-

hol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, The David Geffen Foundation, and Gilead Sciences, Inc. But it took almost ten years to find money and venues for the exhibit, according to co-curators Jonathan D. Katz and Rock Hushka.

One would assume with their backgrounds—Katz co-curated the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery, and Hushka reconstituted Hide/Seek at the Tacoma Art Museum where he’s the curator—would make the exhibit an easier sell. Sadly, no.

“Hundreds of museum directors said no, and one came out and said ‘love the idea but AIDS is such a downer,’” says Katz, who is director of the doctoral program in visual culture studies at State University of New York at Buffalo.

Katz adds that the response of the art world—as opposed to the artists— is still that AIDS as a topic was a “literal dead end.”

Hushka agrees. “Many exhibitions have this arc where there is an artist response to a crisis and then a happy ending,” he says.

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A&U Gallery

“But with HIV/AIDS, there’s no resolution. There’s no happy ending yet.

It’s happier now, and that’s part of the complexity of the endeavor. We don’t have hundreds of people dying every week, but another person seroconverts every ten minutes.”

Hushka and Katz say the choice of pieces in Art AIDS America, which spans the earliest days of the crisis to the present, underscores a point that AIDS has been an active and shaping force in American culture, not a tragic tangent.

And definitely not over.

Katz has more pointed criticism of the art world gatekeepers who are skittish about what they consider difficult subject matter. “Art museums rely on AUGUST 2015 • A&U

boards of directors, their wealthiest donors. It’s about keeping a very narrow class, a point one percent happy. Many of them have an investment in keeping a social hierarchy. They are big- and small-c conservative.”

Culture wars and post-modernism Katz wanted the show to be acknowledgement of the role of AIDS in the development and definition of American art, and how it influenced the work of artists who had no idea that the social and political codes they deploy had roots in AIDS. “At the moment AIDS presented itself in the early eighties there were two powerful forces arrayed against any

Tino Rodriguez, born Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, Mexico, 1965, Eternal Lovers, 2010, oil on wood, 18 by 24 inches. Private collection art about AIDS. There was an orthodox post-modernism ruling the roost in the eighties, the idea we no longer have authors because meaning is a product of the viewer. Expressiveness was considered old-fashioned and making a statement was a futile gesture, because it will always be subject to the viewers’ understanding.

“The second force was the widespread homophobia and AIDS phobia,” he adds.

Those forces combined to produce a dominant strain in American art today,

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which Katz says tends to be anti-authorial and unexpressive with its intent camouflaged. And that approach goes beyond so-called “AIDS art.”

Take the 2003 video by Rudy Lemke, called “The Uninvited.” Comprised of hand-made shadow puppets, the narrative is ostensibly about the Vietnam war and regret through the lens of a homeless veteran with AIDS. The viewer is supposed to stand between the projector and the projection on the wall so their shadows mingle with the puppets, in an attempt to refute the “othering” of people with HIV/AIDS, inviting an empathetic relationship with the homeless vet with AIDS by seeing themselves mingled with his shadow.

But you don’t have to see the piece that way, Katz says. “It has a specific AIDS content under the nose of dominant culture. If it was overtly about AIDS it would have had no chance of museum display.”

Kia Labeija, born New York, NY 1990.

24, 2014, Inkjet print, 16 by 24 inches.

Courtesy of the artist

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Undetectable, but pervasive Hushka says that in many of the words in the exhibit the AIDS narrative is hard to parse, and therefore able to circulate freely amid the dominant art culture.

“We wanted to show the impact of the activist impulse and how it infiltrated the gallery system, the museum system either by camouflage or disguise,” Hushka says. He adds that at the same time, he wanted to find works that showed how people deal with HIV in their art that “permeates every aspect of their thinking,” using art historical methods that are parallel how HIV is suppressed by antiretrovirals, but still active.

“At the moment when the attempt to police AIDS was most pronounced, a number of artists made work that was the functional equivalent of untitled, and then with a narrative title behind it,” Katz says.

There are many such works in Art AIDS America. Like Untitled (Placebo), a 1991 piece by Cuban-born American

artist Félix González-Torres, which consists of 1,200 pounds of shiny silver wrapped candies. Why that specific number? Those familiar with HIV/ AIDS terms would know that 1,200 is a normal count for CD4 cells.

Fine arts photographer and filmmaker Ann P. Meredith has two photos in Art AIDS America that were originally part of an exhibit “Women with HIV 1987-1997.” She tells A&U that in 1987 the Eye Gallery in San Francisco was starting a photo exhibit on HIV/AIDS in 1987.

“I wanted to cover women with HIV because nobody was doing women then, but nobody I found wanted to have their photos taken. Nobody. They were scared. They were having children taken from them, which was against the law.”

With little more than a week until the opening and still no subjects to photograph, Meredith was going to put up empty frames with statistics. Then she got lucky. While driving from San Francisco to New York she stopped to visit family in Louisiana and saw a bill-

A&U • AUGUST 2015

A&U Gallery

board saying that AIDS was God’s wrath against homosexuality. Fortunately, she had her camera equipment handy.

“There is still a fear of telling the truth in the art world. And a feeling of, if they don’t see it [HIV/AIDS] they don’t have to think about it.”

Joey Terrill, a thirtyfive-year asymptomatic survivor of HIV, tells A&U that his art is personal. The painting he shares in the exhibit is a garish still life that puts HIV onto a dinner table, with oversized blue pills with the GILEAD name next to a Hershey’s bar and Heinz ketchup. There is also a Mexican blanket to underscore Terrell’s Chicano heritage.

Bill Jacobson, born Norwich, Connecticut, 1955, Interim Portrait #373, 1992, Chromogenic color print, 24 by 20 inches.

Courtesy of the artist

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

Thomas Haukaas, born San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1950, Tribal Affiliation: Sicangu Lakota, More Time Expected, 2002, handmade ink and pencil on antique ledger paper, 16 1/2 by 27 1/2 inches. Tacoma Art Museum, Gift of Greg Kucera and Larry Yocom in honor of Rock Hushka, 2008.10 “I began my still life series because of my ambivalence about the new AIDS cocktail when it came out. The implication was that HIV drugs are products, like coke, and American consumer goods.”

Katz suggests that an in-your-face show about HIV/AIDS—the kind of work that most people think of as “AIDS art,” agitprop—might have been an easier sell. “AIDS Agitprop is safe and circumscribed today,” because it’s historical, over, and locked in a time capsule.

That’s the opposite of the real-life experience of the disease today, thirty-four years into the crisis, and far from the complexity and nuance that the curators sought in Art AIDS America.

Larry Buhl wrote about PrEP education in the July issue.

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Pozitive Steps Activist Joshua Middleton Wants the World to Know We Are All Brothers & Sisters in This Fight Together

by Robert Kingett photographed exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

W

hen people think of a blog, they usually think “diary” or “journal.” Folks like Joshua Middleton, however, are blogging to educate others about a new way of living and to give thoughts about HIV.

Pozitive Hope is a blog that chronicles the life of Joshua Middleton, a straight man living with HIV. The blog includes his thoughts on events, reflections, funny stories, and a healthy dash of wisdom.

Even though the blog is a glimpse into life with HIV as a heterosexual man, the blog is also an informal resource for people to obtain basic information. For instance, the page that is titled “Newly Diagnosed” has links to various outside resources, such as “International Places For People With HIV/AIDS, and the people who love us,” an on-line group founded by Maria Mejia that he helps moderate.

Pozitive Hope, however, mostly details the journey of Joshua. Posts outline various reflections, moments of joy and heartbreak, and inspirational cheers that any reader can embrace. What Joshua learns about HIV, and about his thoughts and feelings, he shares.

“I was once very ignorant about HIV and [ignorance] is this virus’s best friend.

When I found out I was positive, it made

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me come to terms with how wrong I truly was. It wasn’t the TV commercial showing someone withering away of opportunistic infections due to advanced HIV progression; it was a virus that now resides in my body,” Joshua says during our interview.

One hard lesson he had to learn was about taking care of himself, not just getting tested.

“I would regularly get tested for HIV among other sexually transmitted infections but what I wasn’t doing was taking precautions to ensure the outcome of those tests,” he shares.

On social media, he also helps to destigmatize HIV and promotes the importance of sexual health: “I make sure that people are aware that I am not someone here to judge, tear down, or give a lecture about what people should or shouldn’t have done. I am simply someone living with HIV that has made decisions in the past that have landed me in this spot and, regardless of how I or others have come to this journey, we are all brothers and sisters in the fight together.”

He continues: “Educating the public that this is not only a condition that affects gay men or other stereotyped groups is by far the largest hurdle to overcome. The ignorance in people’s minds is so deeply embedded that challenging that stereotype is hard for people to accept at times. As someone who is also an LGBT ally, I feel that I have to be an advocate for multiple, different communities when speaking of my HIV status. When I tell people I am HIV-positive, it’s natural for me to say, ‘Oh by the way, I am heterosexual’ afterward or I can feel the judgment already starting to set in. Even when I do say that I am a heterosexual living with the condition it then turns into a conversation of how I must

have slept with every girl under the sun.

The judgment surrounding HIV is overwhelming and I’ve experienced it, believe it or not, from the negative and positive communities, as well.

People think that I have to be lying, [that] there is no way that I, as a straight man, could be living with HIV. This is absolutely true and getting people to get out of thinking in terms of ‘risk groups’ and more in the way of ‘we are all at risk’ [is difficult]; [it] is a hard concept for people to understand.”

Born in Las Vegas, and raised in both Nevada and California, Joshua has kept the thriving, tenacious spirit that he has always had, even as a child. Growing up, his jokes and buzzing personality coursed through his friendships like an electric current. He also embodied peace within himself and tried to bring this calm to others when needed. These two sides might seem to clash on the battlefield of life, but he made them work together. He’s become the humorous peacemaker whose hobbies included and continue to be traveling, writing, dance, theater, public speaking, and learning new things, like languages (Spanish, in particular).

People can make bad decisions, however. After he broke up with a woman who was going to live the white picket fence dream with him, he started to have one-night stands with women he sometimes didn’t even recall or remember.

He would regularly get tested for STDs but didn’t think one of them would come back positive.

And conversations about sexual health didn’t really exist among his circle of friends. “I never really sat down and had A&U • AUGUST 2015

that one-on-one talk with anyone because to my knowledge no one I knew was positive. Low risk to many heterosexuals means no risk; therefore it wasn’t even a concern to be brought up,” he says. “It is such a hush-hush subject in the straight community due to a variety of reasons, including lack of people being open about their status out of fear of judgment, not knowing their status, and the stereotypes that surround HIV. In addition I don’t think most in the heterosexual community are as open about what is going on between the sheets as many of my LGBT friends.”

He adds: “Everyone thinks they are invincible from this virus but being straight adds a whole other level of comfort, one could say, and that is what is causing so many new infections within the hetero community. Although heterosexuals make up the majority of those living with HIV worldwide, the overwhelming stereotype of it being a gay-only condition has stuck in the minds of so many, and, despite what the statistics show, this still remains a prevalent way of thinking for many heterosexuals. I don’t think they didn’t talk to me specifically about my risks of HIV on purpose, but simply they like so many held that idea that this cannot happen to one if straight. When

appointment to see my primary care physician because I started to get symptoms of pink eye. I thought I got it because I am a bail bonds agent and am constantly working in and out of jails. While I was at the doctor, I figured I would get my annual HIV test since I was already there.”

The test came back positive. “Sometimes I will see someone put up a post when recently diagnosed and it reminds me so much of myself when I was in that dark time of my life,” he says about the Facebook group he helps to moderate.

“The process of seeing that person grow and approach their virus head-on, and to not let it define them and to be able to move on with their life is a fulfilling feeling and one of the reasons I also got involved with activism.”

Alongside his blog and Facebook group work, he also hosts a YouTube channel that raises AIDS awareness.

On-line activism is not all he’s doing. He’s an Ambassador for DAB The AIDS Bear Project, and he regularly speaks at events.

“My goal is to help make sure that those living with HIV now get the emotional support needed in coping with this diagnosis,” he shares. “Talking to others living with HIV was a game changer for me in the sense that it made me realize I was not alone in this battle.

Without the support of so many that heard me out I would not be where I am today.”

Emotions can be tricky, though.

Joshua is not angry about what happened. Why? He says that the reason is because there isn’t anyone to blame but himself. He clarified in our interview the importance of Joshua and his mother responsibility and feelings, it comes to speaking about sex with at the heart of everything. your friends when straight, it gets to the “I do not personally feel any anger depth of how good the sex was and that towards the girl that infected me; we were is about it!” both at fault. I am not 100 percent sure In his blog, he writes, “I made an if it was my ex-girlfriend or another girl

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that I hooked up with and that helped me majorly move past that point as there was never anyone to sit and point the finger at,” he says. Having reflected on the matter, tossing it around in his head, weighing everything out, he posed a question to answer this question: “Does it really matter? I mean, really, here I am HIV-positive and what good is it going to do me to have a name of someone that is only going to cause anger inside me and toxic feelings?”

Open dialogue is the key, he says.

“Never let trust or the feelings of a heated moment override rational thinking to allow something to happen that could affect the rest of one’s life. A few minutes of unprotected sex is not worth a life sentence of HIV. Whether in a A&U • AUGUST 2015

relationship, marriage, partnership, it is important to continue to keep that conversation open regarding HIV among other STIs because at the end of the day we can only be 100-percent sure about what we are doing. We cannot rely on other people to protect our own sexual health; we need to take that step ourselves. I am a firm believer in knowing one’s status and if you are going to sleep with someone that does not know their status then you need to use protection in order to assure your own health. Whether that be through the use of condoms, PrEP, or treatment as prevention, the more risk reduction strategies one can utilize, the better.

“I think through my situation I know different decisions should have been made but at this point I can’t wave a AUGUST 2015 • A&U

magic wand and make the past go away. It is all about picking up the pieces now and moving forward in life to share my story with others so hopefully in that heat of the moment, a second thought will cross their mind, and sexual health will be at the forefront.”

Indeed, Joshua is still learning and giving back. In his blog, his reflective entries explore the depth of his emotions.

Even though he has learned a lot ever since he was diagnosed at twenty-two, he feels one lesson, in particular, will stick with everybody even if they have not experienced it yet.

“It is a time when taking a medicine every single day simply to continue living life and seeing the doctor on a regular basis should seem years away, in the far future,”

he shares. “I’ve learned that our health is never promised; it’s up to us to ensure that we take the proper steps to protect it.”

Visit Joshua Middleton’s blog by logging on to: www.pozitivehope.com.

Robert Kingett is a journalist and author who writes and speaks about many subjects including LGBT and disability rights. His journalism work has appeared in several magazines, websites, and anthologies. He is the creator of Gaming Glimpse Magazine, a monthly publication that explores diversity in the gaming community as well as the founder of the Accessible Netflix Project. His memoir, entitled Off the Grid, is an account of living blindly without the Internet.You can find him on his personal blog at https://blindjournalist.wordpress.com.

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W

O G N N G O N S I S TIM’S C I V

hen you read a book on Kindle, you can see what other readers have highlighted, and one of the most popular passages in Redefining Diva: Life Lessons from the Original Dreamgirl, by Sheryl Lee Ralph, is this: “a real Diva never backs down against great odds. A real Diva knows that she must take every opportunity and run with it.” She is writing about auditioning for Sidney Poitier for his 1977 film A Piece of the Action— yes, she won the part—but it equally applies to her work in the fight against AIDS, which crystallized in her founding of The DIVA Foundation and DIVAS Simply Singing!, an event that this October is turning twenty-five.

Sheryl Lee Ralph never backed down—and the odds were indeed great.

In the 1980s, she met resistance when she started speaking out in support of individuals living with HIV/ AIDS. At the time, she was already combining her art and activism, joining the Young Black Professionals and starting a toy drive with the Denzel Washingtons to bring holiday cheer to children across South Central, so AIDS advocacy was simply another way to lend her

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voice, time, and energy.

Not everyone agreed with her choice, however. “I remember clearly people in the industry telling me not to talk about HIV/AIDS because I wasn’t a big enough star for that. Leave it to Elizabeth Taylor [they said]. Someone once told me that real stars pick ‘safe’ topics and causes to support. There was nothing safe about what I was doing. As I think about those times now, it still hurts,” she says.

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OF S R YEA AIDS E V I F T Y- ROUND N E N T W ILENCE A O S ECT THE S L F E H R BREAK P L A EE R ICES TO L L Y VO ER H E S R T U TIVIS TO NURT ack C A & Bl G T N S I ean I S T P y b AR HEL A&U & for y S l DIVAael Neehdleed exclusive

by Cohtograp ph

Industry insiders clearly must have underestimated the power of who they were tying to guide—this was Sheryl Lee Ralph, who graduated Rutgers University at nineteen, who then went on to wow theater-goers in her Tony and Drama Desk Award-nommed turn as the original Deena in Dreamgirls. Whatever parts she may have lost for being an outspoken AIDS activist, we’ll never know, but we do know that Ralph did not alienate her audience— built and sustained through the years on television with roles on It’s a Living, Designing Women, Moesha, Barbershop, and more recently on Nickelodeon’s Instant Mom and Showtime’s Ray Donovan, and in films like The Mighty Quinn (Ralph almost makes time stop with her living-room performance of a Bob Marley tune), To Sleep with Anger (she won Best Supporting Actress at the Independent Spirit Awards), Mistress, and The Distinguished Gentleman, to name a few. She never forgot the stage, either, returning for Thoroughly Modern Millie and Applause.

She never backed down because Elizabeth Taylor herself inspired Ralph to carry on and nurture her activist voice amid the naysayers. “She was very clear in telling me to not pay any attention to these people

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

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because some of them couldn’t find their ass from a hole in the ground,” Ralph says. “I’ll never forget that! You know, be true to who you are. Be true to yourself.”

She never backed down because her dedication to be Divinely Inspired, Victoriously Aware, that is, a DIVA, was indeed unshakable. “I sing a song before every speech I give and the words are, ‘I am an endangered species but I sing no victim’s song. I am a woman. I am an artist and I know where my voice belongs,’” she notes. “I believe in artistic activism and practice it always.”

She never backed down because her motivation to be Victoriously AIDS Aware was wrought from love and pain.

“As a young woman living my dreams as a star on Broadway in the groundbreaking musical Dreamgirls, it was heartbreaking for me to lose so many friends in the midst of this storm that was just claiming lives up and down Broadway and in our cast, too,” she shares.

“People just got sick and died. It was never a pretty death. They used to say it was the death without dignity, as people lost weight, their hair, and, very often, their minds to dementia. It took a lot to decide to care for your friends, go visit them at home or in the hospital. If you told people that you had visited someone they knew to be sick, they’d often look at you differently not knowing if they should touch you for fear that now you were one of ‘those’ people, those

infected people.”

She never backed down because her bedrock was solid, strengthened by a loving family and in particular, as she writes in her book, by the “fearless women who came before” who “would not let the world define them”— her mother, of course, but also Nina Simone, Gran Ma Becky, Nana, Mrs. Brown, Auntie Carolyn, singer and actress Rosalind Cash, actress Virginia Capers, former Essence editor-in-chief Susan Taylor, South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba, and former Congressperson Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, among others.

“It is very difficult to protect yourself, even stand up for yourself when you are being crippled by lack. Lack of money, information, care. It is even more difficult when you are sick,” she says about the need to make empowerment a collaborative process.

“In the sixties, as a child, I saw fearless women stand up against racism, sexism and poverty. They found their voices when there were many who would try to drown them out. But they stood strong against guns, bats, bullets, lynchings and the life-threatening words of the ignorance of others that came at them from all angles and they persevered so that I might speak in my own voice today.

“So when as a young woman I saw how my friends were being stigmatized and marginalized in their time of sickness and great need, I had to put my fear aside and speak up. It didnt make me very popular in some circles. But I

have learned that what other people think of me is none of my business.”

She found her voice when others were trying to drown her out because she knew what was at stake if she and others remained silent about the devastation. “I saw clearly that if sex in any way could be a death sentence for men, then women couldn’t be far behind. If it became a woman’s disease, it had the power to become a child’s disease.

“You can imagine the kinds of things greater minds said to me and about before sharing these thoughts of mine.

Someone said I was Chicken Little with my stories of ‘The sky is falling.’

[But] I knew that it doesn’t matter if you are gay or straight, there is a natural connection between males and females. No matter what, we still need each other to survive,” she says, deftly summarizing that HIV exploits the richness and variety of human relationships.

“There has recently been a HIV/ AIDS [spike] in Indiana, causing the governor to pronounce a state health emergency due to intravenous drug use. AIDS is testing our humanity once again as this disease has now hit Middle American children and it will be as unkind to them as it has been to those before,” she says.

Later, she returned to the subject of Indiana again: “[When I heard] I thought, my god, Middle America is fast becoming the capital of HIV and AIDS in America. It’s moved from urban areas, people that we [as a society] don’t really care about, poor black and Hispanic people, poor people,

...as a young woman I saw how my friends were being stigmatized and marginalized in their time of sickness and great need, I had to put my fear aside and speak up.

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[and] now its poor white people, poor people, white sons and daughters dying a death without dignity....

It is horrible to see it, horrible, horrible. It is 100 percent preventable. It does not have to happen.”

For Ralph, one of the central questions about addressing AIDS is this: “Do we love our children enough to fight for them?

When are we going to break the silence around this disease stand up and say no more, we all deserve better?

Sex should be about enjoying and creating new life, not a death sentence or an impaired life. There is no cure, no happy ending, until we

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

love and respect each other for simply being who and what we are.”

In the early days, the love of her friends kept her on task. “I say

this often but when someone takes care of your wig, weave, weft and your wardrobe problems, you do anything to help them, especially when they are your friends. A DIVA needs her Glam Squad!”

But even without a Glam Squad, the beauty of her soul would still shine through. “I truly want a better world,” she says. “I believe that so much is possible if we simply care about others. How kind can mankind, womankind be? Too often we seem to choose to be unkind and very often cruel as if it makes us stronger. It is my hope and dream of a better world that always keeps me moving forward.”

The world became a little better in 1990, when Ralph founded The DIVA Foundation, a non-profit organization seeking to raise awareness about the disease and in particular its impact on women and children, to pay tribute to lost friends, and to change attitudes, to “get people to see and feel a different way than they thought,” she says. “We stand in [that] gap, bringing the arts and activism together, creating new and different ways for people to understand, feel, think about HIV/ AIDS, hep C, in a different way.”

At its core, being a diva is about redefining oneself and the world in positive, liberating ways and also about the celebration of voice. So it’s no surprise that the non-profit’s signature event is DIVAS Simply Singing!, bringing together singers and performers for a one-night-only extravaganza each year. This year, Ralph will also host a kick-off event on August 22 in Philadelphia, featuring Faith Evans, Kelly Price [A&U, April 2011], Melba Moore, among many others, in anticipation of the main event at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre in Los Angeles on October 24.

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Asked to encapsulate the spirit of the “longest consecutive running musical AIDS benefit in the country,” Ms. Ralph rewinds the clock to the beginning. “[At] the very first DIVAS, when everybody was telling me not to do it and I did it anyway, I looked on the stage and there was Debbie Allen, Mary Wilson of the Supremes, jazz diva Dianne Reeves, singer/songwriter Brenda Russell, Loretta Devine [A&U, January 2008], Jenifer Lewis [A&U, May 2005], just to name a few, [all] bringing their voice to the fight, to simply dare to care. I will never forget that.”

The special moments are too numerous to name, but Ralph adds another and another like charms on a bracelet: the years when Wild Orchid performed, “with the fancy blond in the middle who became Fergie”; the time Sharon Stone helped her put on her wig, which then fell off in the middle of Ralph’s performance; “or the time Whoopi Goldberg just walked out on stage and called me an angel. (It helped that I was also dressed like one too!)”

She adds: “There have been so many moments. There have been light and wonderful moments like when I knew Jennifer Hudson was going to win the Oscar and I said so on stage to heavy moments when a young man looked at me and said, ‘Miss Ralph, you saved my life. You came and you talked about what you would do and you told us to get tested. And I got tested and I’m positive but don’t cry for me because now I’m living my life the way I should have been living my life.’ When I met Rae Lewis Thornton and I heard her speak and that little spark that made me create Sometimes I Cry.” Sometimes I Cry: The Loves, Lives, and Losses of Women Infected and Affected by HIV/AIDS is a one-woman show, written and performed by Ralph, that was inspired by seeing the impact of HIV on African-American women in the early aughts when she first started working with The Black AIDS Institute as a speaker. The show is culled from her interviews with women living with HIV/AIDS, like Thornton. Ralph also mentions another project that spun from woman-centered experience—writing and directing the award-winning HIVthemed short film Secrets, starring Alfre Woodard. The film, produced by Ralph’s own Island Girl Productions, explores the effects of being left by your man for another man in the age of AIDS as well as the bonds of sisterhood.

Why is sisterhood, particularly among Black women, essential in the

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A&U • JULY 2015

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know your status because Sylvester didn’t and he died of AIDS,” she says about Mighty Real: A Fabulous Sylvester Musical. Brought to life by Anthony Wayne and Kendrell Bowman, with the help of coproducer Ralph, the musical celebrates the life and spirit of the original queen of disco and champions his unapologetic realness.

“He was proud of joining in, being a part of the group of people living with AIDS,” she says about one of the earliest celebrities to lend his or her voice to the AIDS cause, “and to be able to tell his story now with this music and have all folks show up and singing and dancing in the aisles and hearing the message that there is a power in knowing your status. It’s amazing.”

Working against out voices, however, is silence. “Silence, stigma, and shame,” Ralph says when asked about the barriers that seem to persist and persist. “Silence, stigma, and shame.

And the silence is killing us quicker than the disease and that’s such a shame.”

And that silence, combined with systemic racism, kills some bodies more quickly than others. African-Americans living with AIDS have shorter survival times compared to individuals of other racial/ethnic categorizations. The estimated rate of new infections among Black women is twenty times that of white women. Young gay and bi Black men are not linking to care and are impacted by HIV in disproportionate numbers. It’s easy to see how HIV/AIDS is a matter of health justice, and Ralph agrees, though she deftly points out we cannot think of diseases in isolation from their context or community. “HIV/ AIDS is absolutely a matter of health justice, cancer is health justice, diabetes is health justice, high blood pressure is health justice, cholesterol is health justice, breast cancer is health justice, prostate cancer is health justice—especially when you put color and culture and income on it, because if you are Black, Brown, Hispanic, or just plain old poor, you will die first of all of these diseases.”

Asked if she thinks it is productive to view HIV/AIDS through the lens of the Black Lives Matter movement, she answers: “Absolutely it is. I will never ever

“

fight against AIDS? “Because sometimes when you won’t fight for yourself you know that your sister will fight for you,” she responds. “And sisterhood is very important because there used to be a time when that woman, who might not have been your actual blood sister but the woman right next to you, the woman chained next to you as you made that journey across the oceans from your homeland of Africa to America, she became your sister, she became your family, and I think in many ways we just never have forgotten that. We’ve got to hold onto each other and, especially now, as this disease grows, sisters have got to become responsible for themselves and their sisters once again and talk about what’s going on....” Yes, she means, talk about the nitty gritty—sex, HIV, who’s sleeping with who. It comes back to finding your voice.

Encouraging others to celebrate their unique voice seems to find ever-new expressions.

In 2008, she and her husband, Pennylvania State Senator Vincent Hughes, started Test Together, a campaign that encourages couples to know their status as an essential first step. Ralph reminds that more progress is needed when it comes to sexual health empowerment. “When it comes to couples getting tested together, I still find that people—couples—are hesitant to talk about real important sex matters to each other. I don’t know why. I think everybody wants to have it, sex, that is, but they don’t want to talk about it.” Yet, she says, we must rise to the challenge and talk about HIV as individuals very often come to those moments of intimacy with a wealth of sexual experiences but a deficit of knowledge about their own bodies.

“My husband and I have found that when we talk openly, others seem to talk openly [as well], and I would encourage others to talk—have a conversation, talk to your friends, talk to your lover, talk to each other. There is real power in taking the test. There is real power in knowing your status. I always say spread love— don’t spread the disease.”

And last year she found a new way to combine art and activism through the singular, spectacular voice of Sylvester.

“Now I’m very very proud to be a part of producing Sylvester and through that we are being able to say to people get tested,

I would encourage others to talk—have a conversation, talk to your friends, talk to your lover, talk to each other. There is real power in taking the test.

MARCH 2015 • A&U

continued on page 62

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VOCAL EMBRACE Steve Grand Redefines American Values Through His Music & Sets His Own Standards for HIV Prevention

by Dann Dulin

Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

“To everyone out there—no matter where you live or where you’re from, no matter your age or race, the color of your skin, your sexuality or gender identity....to everyone out there who has ever been made to feel different, or immoral, or wrong, just for being who you are, this record is for you.

Nothing that you are is wrong. You are exactly who you were meant to be.”—Dedication by Steve Grand on his All American Boy album

T

hese words emanate from Steve Grand’s raw core. The singer-songwriter just released his first album in March. He’s earned the accolades.

After saving up $2,000 and maxing out his credit cards, Steve rallied his friends together to shoot a music video.

“All-American Boy,” a single about a man in love with his straight friend, is inspired by the crush thirteen-year-old Steve had on a fifteen-year-old counselor at Boy Scout summer camp. After uploading the video to YouTube, it quickly went viral. That was two years ago. Steve later did a Kickstarter campaign, acquiring over $200,000 more than his $81,000 goal. It was the crowdfunder’s third-highest success rate to date.

The album debuted on the Billboard 200 at Number 47 and sold 10,000 copies within a week. He’s appeared on CNN,

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Good Morning America, and Larry King Now. Steve has also appeared in many Pride parades around the country, as well as Pride festivities. He’ll be at Michigan Pride in Lansing at the end of August.

Steve released his CD on his own label, not often done in the entertainment business jungle, especially for a debut album. It could prove to be a smart career move.

Almost overnight, he was branded a “Country Western singer,” but Steve adamantly denies that moniker. “I’ve been saying I am not a part of the country community until I’m blue in the face,” he breathlessly bristles with exhaustion.

Granted, some of his eclectic tunes are in that genre; however, he also slides over to pop, R&B, rock, and even blues. “I’m not really concerned with how people label me, just as long as they listen to me!” He giggles. Steve’s a natural, and John Denver would have loved his homespun songs and heartfelt voice. Grand was inspired by the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stones, Blink 182, My Chemical Romance, Billy Joel, and Elton John.

Here’s what he states on his website about the song “All-American Boy”: “What made the story impactful was the apparent dichotomy of a same-sex love story set against a very Americana backdrop—old cars, whiskey, American flags, and friends by a campfire.”

Singing with passion, commitment, and truth, Steve decided to call his album All American Boy because of his dad. When he and his brother were kids, his father would brag to others, “These are my All

American boys.” They were Boy Scouts, played sports, and were good students.

When Steve discovered he way gay, he realized he no longer fit into that “All American” mold. By naming his album All American Boy, however, he’s recovered that identity.

Raised in a strict Catholic household in a blue-collar Chicago suburb (“I was taught that gay was horrible….”), Steve came out to his parents when he was eighteen, but they were not happy with the news. After briefly seeing a Christian therapist, he now has his parent’s support. He presently lives in his boyhood home with them to save money for his career. (He plans on relocating to the West Coast early next year.) At nineteen, he dabbled in modeling and beA&U • AUGUST 2015

came a cover model for a gay publication, exposing his well-developed body. “It was mostly about me proving to myself that I could be ‘one of those model guys,’” he says thoughtfully of the studly dreamboat photographs. “I did it and now I can move on. I’m not ashamed of those pictures.

But if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn’t. I’m in a different place now.” He didn’t get paid for the modeling work, with the exception of posing once for a prom ad that later appeared on a city billboard.

In Los Angeles to perform a couple of gigs and make some personal appearances, Steve is staying with friends. Dressed in jeans, an aquamarine T-shirt, and black socks, he looks every bit the Midwestern guy—wholesome, clean cut, and fresh.

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

Drinking diet Coke from a large bottle, he offers me a drink. I opt for a small can of Perrier and we settle in on the cozy porch, just outside the living room. The home is in a canyon, just a few stoplights away from the iconic Capitol Records building, long a symbol for hopeful musicians.

Kicked back in a woven cane chair, he appears at ease. I ask him what’s it like to be Steve Grand. “Never being satisfied with where you are at the moment and always looking to the next thing,” he instantly remarks. “I live with a level of anxiety about what’s going to happen next even though I’m very aware of ‘now.’ I’m trying to change because that’s no way to live. What I achieve professionally or don’t achieve doesn’t affect the way I feel about myself. I

don’t think I’m fuckin’ special,” he asserts, adding, “I feel lucky and grateful.”

Steve’s drive is tempered by his need to give. He’s performed at such fundraisers as the Oklahoma AIDS Walk, Point Foundation, and New York City’s Bailey House.

Like most singers who hope to reach others through their music, Steve aspires to higher ground by creating lyrics dealing with causes close to his heart: human rights, bullying, and HIV. Could there be a song in the pipelines about the epidemic?

“I’m always open to writing about whatever inspires me at the moment. I want to do justice to the topic,” he voices with sincere directness. “Whatever I write about, I want to make sure I get it right!”

Steve shifts, lifting his legs up on the

45

chair and crisscrosses them as he leans his elbows onto his thighs. He continues.

“Empathy is one of my assets. I feel it’s important to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. And it doesn’t take long to do that, maybe ten seconds?” he asks rhetorically. “Keeping an open mind is absolutely key. I know what it’s like to experience discrimination, to be misunderstood or misrepresented, not only because I’m gay but for other reasons, as well.

If you’re human, you’ve had all of these feelings. I think we have the responsibility

tion hotline. He revealed to Steve that many gay kids call in and several times the caller would bring up Steve’s name, explaining how he made a difference for them. “That’s one of the reasons I sing,” relates Steve, teary-eyed. He closes his eyes for a moment, exhaling a heavy sigh.

“I remember being that kid and I always wanted to feel like someone was speaking for me. Someone who made me feel okay for being who I was. I never had that,” he lightly broods, petting his friend’s dog who whisks by him. “In some small way, I hope

a time they were just starting to advance after the sexual revolution of the late sixties and seventies. I think around 20,000 people died from AIDS [in the U.S.] before President Reagan said anything.

[24,699 were reported dead by the end 1986.] That makes me so upset....” His square jaw and high cheekbones tighten and Steve’s peppercorn-brown eyes emblazen. A couple of shrill cawing crows land in one of the front lawn trees before they fly away. “You know, I can’t imagine being gay and growing up in that time.

to know better and to understand others. If you don’t, at least, give someone the benefit of the doubt. Most of the time, people deserve it.”

Though he has editorial model looks, there’s an aw-shucks way about him, as if he just stepped out of Mayberry. But don’t be fooled by such a simplistic stereotype.

Steve’s the real deal. The self-described pessimist (“Unfortunately I am!”) is authentic, insightful, and intelligent—and knows what he wants.

Not long ago, Steve attended a dinner in San Francisco with some of his nearly 5,000 Kickstarter backers. He met a guy who worked at a suicide preven-

I’m helping a few kids.”

At Steve’s album release party, he met a man who is living with HIV. The moving conversation led Steve to publicly speak out more about the issue. “This disease needs to be discussed freely, as people need to be seriously educated about it,” he declares vehemently, his hands briefly clasped together prayer-like, eyes darting upward. “I’m lucky to know a lot of people who lived through this nightmare and they’ve told me about what it was like to lose their friends.” He pauses, glancing out at the very tall shrub-fenced private yard. “This epidemic further cemented hatred of the gay community at

My success, in large part, is on the backs of people who have a lot of welts on them from that era.”

“I knew I was gay at thirteen,” he offers vibrantly. His first sexual encounter came as a high school freshman, with a guy who was a few years older.

No condoms were worn. “I listened to this person, I relied on him, and in the heat of the moment...I just didn’t know.

Afterwards, I was so scared.” Steve experienced guilt and vulnerability. “I grew up with a lot of shame about sex and sexuality,” explains Grand, summing up that he wasn’t properly educated about sex or STDs. “Looking back I can now

46

A&U • AUGUST 2015

see the reasons I wasn’t safe.” The next day Steve went to a clinic and got tested.

While waiting days for the results, he was paralyzed with worry. “I would go to the high school bathroom during classes and nervously call the clinic to see if the results were in. When they did come in, I was so relieved.”

He goes on. “In the heat of the moment you’re always going to make the decision that gives you maximum pleasure. Make the decision beforehand!” revs Steve, taking a beat then chuckles in a firm voice—“No sudden moves!” He takes a swig of Coke. “Abstinence is ineffective.

It’s bullshit. That philosophy puts people’s lives at risk. That did nothing to keep me from having sex. It only made me not ask the right questions and not get the education I needed.”

Steve gets tested regularly, though he’s always a bit fearful. “I think fear might keep people from getting tested and that is so dangerous. People are scared to face the truth. But not being tested, and you are infected, can only pass the disease onto others. You might as well know your status now, because at some point, you will have to face it.”

Currently single, Steve wants to be a dad someday. He admits to having a limited number of sexual partners. When he does date—the songster has a huge crush on Kevin Spacey and is addicted to Spacey’s series, House of Cards—he’s direct and upfront about STIs. “It’s a tricky thing to navigate. There’s discomfort,” he grants, crossing his feet at the ankles then spiritedly jiggles his foot. “You don’t want to be presumptuous right at the beginning because when you ask, then there’s an assumption that you’re going to have sex. It is a personal question but you have a right to know. I just ask, ‘What’s your status?’” he points out.

Steve automatically assumes that his date is HIV-positive. “I mean, you’re putting your health in their hands. C’mon....Be realistic here. When you’re involved with someone, there are risks.”

Grand mentions that he lately saw the film The Normal Heart. “I had to stop the DVD and just sob,” blurts Steve of the heart wrenching early days of the epidemic, written by Larry Kramer, whom he considers a hero. “I’m not all that educated about the epidemic, but for the millions of people who continue to lose their life to AIDS all over the world, we need to really shut up about shame around sex and pushing abstinence. Instead of handing out bibles to people in Africa, we need to hand out condoms.”

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

The sun dims its daylight rays and Steve will soon be on stage. While gathering our belongings and rearranging the patio chairs, he stops and shines that winning Colgate grin. “I feel like a kid in a sand box [with my newfound career].

Just excited to keep building and exploring. I don’t care about material things. I wear practically the same clothes,” jests the T-shirt and jeans kind of guy. “I just want my music to resonate with people,”

the singer expresses, then staccatos, “That’s my agenda. That’s what I care about.” Steve opens the screen door to let the dog in and soulfully concludes, “I want to make a difference….”

For more about Steve Grand, log on to: www. stevegrand.com. Abundant appreciation goes out to Mark, Kelly, and Davidd.

Dann Dulin is a Senior Editor of A&U.

47

We’ll Journey Together A&U Celebrates Its 250th Issue with a Rebroadcast of Some of the Voices that Still Resonate Today

A&U

started as Art & daughter, Tia, in a November 1998 interview.

Understanding When A&U interviewed him years later, in 1991, the first featured in the September 2013 issue, he had national HIV/ this to say: “I think HIV/AIDS is the most AIDS magazine. At the start, the magazine important thing that happened to me and it sought to archive the cultural output of those certainly formed me—and I don’t just mean who were dying of AIDS-related causes or who had already died. It was a space where “We may not know how to cure AIDS, marginalized voices could be heard—vital but we sure know how to stop the words and visual arts brought to the center of transmission of HIV. If we’d stop lying to the public conversation, issue by issue. It’s a ourselves and denying the facts we know space that is still needed. about AIDS, we could go a long way Individuals living with HIV/AIDS are still stymied by stigma, discrimination, crimtoward ending the epidemic, at least in inalization, and barriers to healthcare and this country. Martin Luther King [ Jr.] once emotional well-being. said something to the effect that ‘Nothing On the limits of other media to reprepains some people more than having to sent HIV/AIDS and engage an audience, think.’ But if we don’t do some hard thinkA&U’s founder, publisher and editor-in-chief David Waggoner opined in the October/ ing about AIDS and our own responsibility in this crisis, “I think [AIDS is] November 1993 issue: “What I think Art & a bad situation is only going to get worse. The demon we bringing poetry back to Understanding is able to accomplish that TV need to fight is AIDS, not each other,” writer and activist what it should be. Did can’t and the movies don’t, is speak honestly. you hear my reading at Keith Boykin shared in his January 2005 cover story A magazine of literature and art about AIDS interview about the potential of “down low” explanations The Pink Triangle? My personalizes the pandemic in a manner and voice was getting spent, a medium that is appealing, imaginative and to demonize Black men. because I kept crying. So I doesn’t have to compete with Roseanne for don’t really write anything the ratings.” which doesn’t make me cry. AIDS is a subject As we celebrate our 250th issue, join us my diagnosis. I mean, in many ways, the you can’t write about weeping,” shared writer in revisiting some of those who imagined a whole AIDS epidemic is who I am.”

Edward Field in the May/June 1993 issue. world beyond the AIDS status quo of inaction and apathy, who gave voice to what connects Interviewed about Presidential candidates “Over several recent years, we have us and what drives Al Gore and George W. Knock, Knock: Prevention Goes Door-to-Door • Enrique Sapene Hits New Heights focused on injection drug users, through the us apart, who advoBush before the 2000 support and evaluation of needle exchange cated for the specific election, activist, writer programs,” said Dr. Mathilde Krim [Decemneeds of individuals and artist Mary Fisher ber 2001] about the work of amfAR. “We are living with HIV/ [February 2001] offered: at war with Congress on this issue; needle AIDS that were “I’ll tell you that I am a Close to Home exchange works and does not encourage African-American often brushed aside, one-issue person at this Communities Fight AIDS drug use, but Congress still won’t help. Yet.” in Their Own Backyards and who shared point. Maybe two issues. I This Woman’s Work A Film Explores HIV & their journey so far New Motherhood in Zambia of living with HIV. plus A&U’s Tenth Annual Holiday Gift Guide

“It’s most often ordinary resources that have initiated and/or inspired some of the most extraordinary change,” noted Kenneth Cole [November 2011], about how every individual can make a difference in the fight against AIDS.

“I think I can fathom saying goodbye to any of my friends. I can fathom saying goodRefashions the Red Ribbon bye to the ocean, to career, and even doing so peacefully. am for serious, progresBut at this point I sive AIDS policy and for am not at a place nondiscrimination. Who where I can imagine saying goodbye to that does more of that?....Who will stick up for child,” said actor Michael Kearns and person me? Who will stick up for my sons? How will living with HIV about his newly adopted they be treated? Will they be respected?”

Kenneth Cole

$3.95 USA • $4.95 CANADA

48

“I think you can’t underestimate the value of living in the moment and letting go of self-sabotage. Those things are as important as any medication. You will not survive unless you believe you’ll survive,” shared author Joel Rothschild [October 2003] about living with HIV. On coming out about his HIV staA&U • AUGUST 2015

illustration by Timothy J. Haines

NOVEMBER 2011 • Issue 205 • AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE

tus, he noted encouragingly: “Each time we share our truth, we change the world. I have been open and honest about my HIV status from the first day. I think it is very important and healthy.”

Shared artist and advocate Joyce McDonald [July 2012]: “I survived the most embarrassing, humiliating, stressful time in 2009 that I’ve ever experienced since my HIV diagnosis. My low immune system was very low and the stress attacked my body really bad. I developed shingles and nerve damage. I experienced thirty-nine bouts of a shocking fireball that with- out a moment’s notice would shoot through my legs; I would scream out my lungs for Jesus to help me as my then-eighty-three year-old mother, a cancer survivor, would run and throw ice all over my legs. I was living a physically tortured life for three months; this ordeal left burn marks that scarred my legs. When I finally came out I knew I had survived the fire by praising God. Between the screams I did art. I have a whole collection.”

I am putting my face out there. I want to show people there is another face of HIV, a Hispanic female, one that is Catholic and lesbian, too, by the way,” shared activist Maria Mejia about breaking down stereotypes in the October 2011 issue.

On God, bullying, self-harm, and HIV/

In our June 2004 cover story interview, actor, photographer and playwright Ntare Mwine crystallized what we all know: “Perseverance is what fighting AIDS is all about.”

AIDS, author and public speaker Scott Fried [July 2014] commented: “So, it’s not just about “Fighting back against the pandemic HIV. It’s about the risks that we take in order to was certainly the greatest challenge facing feel that we’re safe in the world or that we have my generation of gay men. HIV/AIDS has a place in the world.” affected every aspect of our lives,” Cleve Jones [October 2008] said, weighing in about “There has been such a lack the impact of AIDS and of research done on HIV and the ways we began to address it, such as his women. Women tend to creation of The NAMES be diagnosed later because Project/AIDS Memorial Quilt. “The Quilt providdoctors still don’t recognize feed our community with a male symptoms,” noted actress mechanism to grieve colMorgan Fairchild [December lectively during a period of really staggering loss.

1997] about the gender gap in It linked us together in a AIDS research and treatment. creative expression that enabled a lot of families to heal.”

“We have a deeply moral obligation. [AIDS] South African supreme justice Edwin is genocide of global proportions. It is devCameron [December 2005], and author of astating the infrastructure of countries. And Witness to AIDS explained his own struggle we spend four times more on a civil war in with living with the virus: “Living with AIDS Colombia than to save forty million people is almost like a second career.” from AIDS....We spend equal to two jet fighters now on global AIDS...,” political strate“Many Hispanics see it as a moral disease, and that it is a curse from God. Because gist David Mixner pointed out about funding priorities in the July 2002 cover story. of these stigmas and myths people infected with HIV in the Latin community choose “Enough time has passed though since to live in shame and hiding and that’s why JULY 20152015 • A&U AUGUST • A&U

the crisis began that we as a culture can now pull it out and look at it. Yes, we can have our shame and outrage over it, but we can also start to integrate the experience into us in a more wholesome way,” noted Mark Ruffalo [May, 2014], actor and star of one of the biggest cultural events in recent years, HBO’s The Normal Heart.

Karen Pearl [May 2015], President and CEO of God’s Love We Deliver talked about

“Don’t ever think that it’s a death sentence. Do what you can! Don’t ever let it be in control,” advised Patti LaBelle [ June 2005], using her experience living with diabetes as a way to encourage those living with HIV. the dedication we all strive for: “We completely embrace the hope for an AIDS-free generation, and we’ll always be there for people who’re living with HIV and AIDS, and who need our help. The core operating principle is that we will never turn anybody away who needs us. If that changes tomorrow or in a year or ten years, we will be there, however long it takes.”

In the Spring 1992 issue, we published an excerpt from a journal kept by deceased AIDS activist Reverend Daniel Ritchie: “Do not patronize me, no gooey sentimentality.

I am not dead. I’m living with AIDS. “I breathe and feel just as you do. My life goes on even with limitations increasing with the disease.

“Be honest with me.

Tell me the truth. If I must fail let me fail with dignity.

Do not rob me anymore by making me a victim.

Rather empower me, encourage me to risk beyond all our fears.

“To love once again and go on living.

If you really care we’ll journey together. If not, then already our relationship’s dead.”

Quotes compiled from interviews by Chip Alfred, Cristina Beato-Lanz, Sean Black, Dann Dulin, Chris Hewitt, Chael Needle, Alina Oswald, B. Andrew Plant, Dale Reynolds, and Lester Strong.

49

Apertures of Memory

Selections from the Anthology, Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A&U

I

n 1991, A&U became the first national magazine dedicated to HIV/AIDS art, news, and culture—a recognition that people living with and affected by AIDS had become a demographic group, a community, and also a readership. Our aim was to inform as well as entertain, presenting new, fresh writing and art. There was an urgency to this work, as we watched lives being cut short, among them dozens and then hundreds of writers and artists.

By 2011, A&U was still going strong, with a print magazine widely available in libraries and schools, and a web and digital version reaching audiences in numbers we could never have imagined twenty years earlier. Medical and political awareness had grown too, and the face of AIDS had become increasingly visible and increasingly global. Today, our urgent mission is to reflect this diversity in the literature we publish, but perhaps also to reflect on and come to terms with a history that feels both eerily recent and a lifetime away.

Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A&U, edited by Chael Needle and Diane Goettel, represents this stock-taking, this reckoning. For our Summer Reading Issue, we’ve chosen a handful of pieces from the anthology, organized chronologically to illustrate how literary responses have evolved— AIDS as illness, AIDS as identity, AIDS as metaphor.

And while we’ve chosen to start the section with Raymond Luczak’s 2009 poem “Two Decades and Then Some” with its wry opener (“No one writes about the dead anymore”), it’s clear, as attested to in the work from the first twenty years, that the dead are very much alive. And that now, more than ever before, so are the survivors.

—Brent Calderwood, Literary Editor, A&U

Brent Calderwood is the author of The God of Longing (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), and has been A&U’s Literary Editor since 2011. His website is brentcalderwood.com.

50

Raymond Luczak

Two Decades and then Some

N

o one writes about the dead anymore.

The fear of infection and loss isn’t so dramatic now.

Pills are today’s answer to everything.

Each month brings us new findings, often conflicting with each other. No matter.

Progress, progress is being steadily made!

The last person I know who died of it went five years ago.

Nowadays men advertise condom-free encounters.

Death’s now a punch line to a joke that no one gets.

Two decades ago I stared, trying not to vomit when far too many patients lined up, the purple splotches tattooing their stick arms reaching out for God, Allah, Zeus—anything!

Their craggy faces cried surrender to the rivulets of toxins slithering like snakes inside their skins swelling pus by the hour.

But I was no Florence Nightingale.

I was too scared of quarantine with them.

Back then, no one could figure out anything.

These dying men became a circus of experiments, one toxic drug trial after another. Nurses wouldn’t enter their rooms with their trays of food. I saw friends wither away like bitter rosebushes in winter.

I fought nights not to masturbate. Mornings I found my body outlined in sweaty salts on my black futon sheets, scenes of a crime.

Long acquitted, I find the dead still sleeping in my bed.

Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of seventeen books, including five poetry collections such as Mute (A Midsummer Night’s Press) and How to Kill Poetry (Sibling Rivalry Press). A resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota, he is the editor of the literary fiction journal Jonathan and can be found on-line at raymondluczak.com.

A&U • AUGUST 2015

[1991–1995]

Jameson Currier Ribbons

F

or years Janet had trained to be an actress, taken classes in movement and speech, paid vocal coaches to help her with audition material, had photographs and resumes printed and reprinted. She had toured the country in a nonunion production of a revue of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s music, then gotten her Equity card with an off-Broadway play that had subsequently closed in one night.

Now, near forty, she was just growing into the types of character roles she had waited years to be able to perform. Her best friends were in the theater, wanted to be actors and designers and composers and writers; she met them in all parts of Manhattan for dinner and rehearsals, gossiped with them about new plays and musicals and backstage affairs. One evening, Janet went to a theater in the East Village to see her friend Allen perform Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, and, afterwards, in the lobby of the theater, a young man presented small loops of red ribbons to theater patrons to wear pinned on their clothing to promote an awareness of AIDS. Janet took a ribbon, her first, and pinned it proudly to her jacket. She had lost friends since the early days of the epidemic, had sung at more memorial services than she liked to remember, had volunteered at booths and benefits for Broadway Cares and Equity Fights AIDS. Now she was relieved that there was finally a way to show her support, silently, without having to constantly say, I’m sorry. Friends were always confiding in her about someone who was sick or leaving a show; now, at last, there was a way to express her compassion.

The next day, Janet auditioned for a role in a touring production of The Sound of Music, and, as she was singing the final phrase of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” her tooth, a capped one, flew out of her mouth. Embarrassed, Janet lisped her apologies to the musical director and retreated to the lobby where she commiserated with her friends. Billy, a friend Janet had met from a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, told Janet that a mutual friend of theirs, Reb, had died the day before. Stunned, Janet did not know how to respond, and she took another ribbon from a young man who was distributing them outside the rehearsal studio.

That day, Janet and Billy decided to go for lunch at a diner in Times Square, a place where they always went after auditions. There, Janet described to Billy an audition she had had the previous week where she forgot part of her monologue from The Glass Menagerie and began to ramble into a speech from Annie Hall. After their meals, Janet accidentally spilled a cup of coffee and stained her new blouse. Upset, Janet became annoyed when the waitress, a new one, could not bring her more napkins quick enough to wipe up the mess. When the waitress reappeared Janet asked where Sam, the regular waiter, was. Flustered, the waitress said she had heard he had been ill for a few weeks. At the cash register Janet took another red ribbon from a box on the counter and placed it inside her purse.

Sometimes Janet hated wearing her ribbon; to her it was AUGUST 2015 • A&U

neither a fashion statement nor a political act, but something she just had to do. Sometimes it made her feel shallow and insensitive; she always noticed the color was wrong and it threw off her hair, it clashed with every outfit she owned, but she continued to wear it to demonstrate her feelings, human feelings, feelings that she, too, was worried—worried not only for herself (she knew she was not immune to this virus) but also worried for her friends—friends who were defined as living in a high risk category.

Janet began noticing more and more ribbons, ribbons worn at auditions, at the theater, in bookstores and at the movies, on the subways and buses: satin, grosgrain, pavé, and rubied ones; even ribbons silkscreened onto clothing. At first Janet would study the faces of the other wearers, looking for some sort of sign as to how she should act: serious, solemn or proud, but then she reached a point where she never noticed faces, just ribbons in the distance: approaching, turning, following, retreating.

Days would pass between Janet’s auditions; her luck at the temporary typing or receptionist jobs she found to help pay her bills was not much better than what she found as an actress. She had answered phones in abandoned buildings, flooded offices, and at lopsided desks; she had typed phone books, police reports, and TV listings, and had even taken dictation, phonetically, in languages she could not speak. One of the worst jobs she ever had was the day she spent eight hours in a small, overheated room typing license plate numbers into a computer that kept shutting off and losing everything she had done; by the end of the day Janet had stored up so much anger and frustration that she stopped to complain to her supervisor on her way out. But Janet’s supervisor, a woman not much older than Janet, noticed the red ribbon pinned on Janet’s jacket and before Janet could even open her mouth to protest about the working conditions, the woman had pressed her hand lightly against the twirl of the fabric, and said she had lost her brother over two years ago. On her way home that evening, Janet stopped at a drug store and bought a spool of red ribbon and a box of safety pins.

Janet was aware that her ribbon would not feed anyone, would not end discrimination, provide funds or leadership or research for a cure for AIDS. But the things she saw, the words she could not speak, forced her to acknowledge her own emotions and fears. She cut a ribbon after reading the obituary of one of her favorite soap opera actors, cut another after noticing a homeless man with a sign that read he was ill, cut more when she passed a crowd of demonstrators protesting the rising price of medications. All these ribbons she began to keep in her purse; she could never give them out to other people. They were her ribbons. At one point, Janet joked there must be hundreds in her purse by now.

Sometimes, when reaching inside, she hoped she might prick herself on one of the pins—a way of keeping her anxiety and sympathy tangible with pain. In the evenings she began cutting more and more ribbons, the radio announced that almost one-third of the African population was infected, another reporter said Asia was destined to become a wasteland, infected immigrants were now being banned entry into her own country. And her purse, now a large bag, really, became crowded with more and more ribbons. When Allen told her one afternoon that his buddy had died, a young man who had moved from Memphis to Manhattan to be a comic and whom Allen had taken care of for over seven months, Janet could no longer cut just one ribbon—Allen had also confided that he,

51

too, was now infected.

And then one day Janet landed a role in a television commercial; she had been through three callbacks for a casting agent who was looking for a large woman who could tap dance in high heels. Janet was convinced that this was her opportunity, her chance, her moment to shine—really shine—as a performer. She arrived in Times Square, where filming was to take place, early one blustery spring morning. The wind was so irritating and chilly that morning that Janet huddled close to the archway of a building; garbage flew through the streets as fast as taxis. Janet waited for over an hour for the production crew to arrive, but when no one showed up, she went to a pay phone and called her answering service, only to find out that the director had died the evening before.

Wordless once again, Janet slammed the phone down, turned and walked toward the street, when the heel of her shoe missed the curb and she stumbled to the ground. Her purse, falling, slipped open and the wind lifted a river of red

[1996–2000]

Tom O’Leary Memorial Characters: STEPHEN SMITH: 38, acidic in his

humor and outlook on

life.

BILLY HODGE: 35, innocent until

provoked.

MARTIN STUART: 42 1996. Late Afternoon.

[Lights come up on The Common Room of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. Rear of stage is a long banquet table littered with food. BILLY HODGE stands alone, staring off.

STEPHEN SMITH enters.]

STEPHEN: William.

BILLY: Stephen.

STEPHEN: Delish food.

BILLY: I haven’t eaten.

STEPHEN: Try the wine. It’s frisky as a puppy.

BILLY: I keep meaning to eat. Something.

Small.

STEPHEN: One never knows if it’s bad form. Chowing down. There’s so much food.

BILLY: It’s a waste.

STEPHEN: Tragic.

BILLY: I’m sure they’ll donate it. To

52

ribbons skyward like a startled flock of birds. Janet can still recall her frightened scream then—her anger and bitterness and hurt and frustration—all tossed into the sky with an anguish for deliverance.

Years later, when I met her at an audition, Janet told me she still searched the ledges of buildings for signs of her lost ribbons, fluttering in the wind like heartbeats.

Jameson Currier is the author of four short story collections and six novels, including Where the Rainbow Ends and A Gathering Storm. In 2010 he founded Chelsea Station Editions, an independent press devoted to gay literature.

The press also serves as the home for Mr. Currier’s own writings which now span a career of more than four decades. Books published by the press have been honored by the Lambda Literary Foundation, the American Library Association GLBTRT Roundtable, the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Foundation, and the Rainbow Book Awards. This fall the press will publish Mr. Currier’s memoir, Until My Heart Stops, a collection of intimate writings, many focusing on the early years of the AIDS epidemic.

something.

STEPHEN: Everything gets donated to something these days.

[Pause.]

The music was just . . .

BILLY: Brahms.

STEPHEN: . . . perfection.

BILLY: Cello Sonatas.

STEPHEN: Perfect.

BILLY: Really.

STEPHEN: Exquisite.

BILLY: Brahms.

STEPHEN: I often think memorials are the only proof we have of civilization, now.

[Nearly uncomfortable pause.]

His mother looks nothing like him.

BILLY: No. STEPHEN: She’s big. Her head.

BILLY: His father’s head is small.

STEPHEN: Very.

BILLY: Small.

STEPHEN: Glass of wine?

BILLY: I keep looking at the food.

STEPHEN: Come to think of it, he never listened to Brahms.

BILLY: All this food, just begging for attention.

STEPHEN: So that’s what I have in common with food.

BILLY: His musical taste . . . to be honest . . .

STEPHEN: Was abysmal.

BILLY: He liked that woman with the season for a last name.

STEPHEN: Yes. That woman.

BILLY: [touching his head] The plethora of food is giving me a headache.

STEPHEN: She was always sharp on the phone. She didn’t believe in small talk.

“Joseph, it’s your mother. Call.”

BILLY: Even when I close my eyes I can still see the food.

[Pause.]

STEPHEN: So, how’s the TV business? Billy?

BILLY: What?

STEPHEN: How is the wide world of television?

BILLY: Oh. Fine.

STEPHEN: I see your Ms. Walters is combing down and over. Perfect choice.

BILLY: Thanks.

STEPHEN: No “Hi, Stephen, how’s the hair business?” No “Hi, Billy, how’s the television business? Your Ms. Walters is combing her hair down and over. Very becoming.” Nothing idle from that one.

That little one with the big head. Wine, Billy? Dry as dessert wine?

BILLY: Coffee.

STEPHEN: Ixnay. Lactose intolerant. Can’t stand it black. Had you met her?

BILLY: His parents didn’t come east during our . . .

STEPHEN: Moment of bliss?

BILLY: I don’t . . .

STEPHEN: Bumping of uglies?

BILLY: . . . think . . .

STEPHEN: Roll in the hay?

BILLY: No, they didn’t visit.

STEPHEN: Yes, Tucson as center of civilization. Oh, Binky is here.

BILLY: He’s gained weight. How lovely.

STEPHEN: Please, God, don’t let him A&U • AUGUST 2015

come over. One former lover’s former lover at a time.

BILLY: Are we all here?

STEPHEN: I haven’t seen Charles yet.

BILLY: Charles is in L.A. He has a great position with ICM. STEPHEN: The food here is rather blinding, now that you mention it.

BILLY: Had you met her?

STEPHEN: No. They were in the city for one day. On their way to County Cork. I made an excuse. Joey seemed relieved.

BILLY: He hated confrontation.

STEPHEN: Didn’t he just.

BILLY: She seems harmless now. His mother.

STEPHEN: Except for the large head.

Glass of wine?

BILLY: Sober. Two years. Three months. I thought everyone knew.

STEPHEN: Dear. One of the sober ones.

BILLY: It must be hell for his parents.

STEPHEN: I wouldn’t think your sobriety would affect them one way or the other.

BILLY: His passing.

STEPHEN: Oh. Yes. That.

BILLY: Michael is here.

STEPHEN: Yes. I see. If he’s expecting that hair color will bring back his long lost youth he’s mistaken.

BILLY: How many former boyfriends do you suppose there are?

STEPHEN: Oh, not many. Just enough to fill Noah’s Ark. BILLY: Joe was popular.

STEPHEN: Yes. BILLY: You heard his Elton John story.

STEPHEN: Not from him. He hid all of that from me. He thought I was this mature, settled figure. Thought I wouldn’t approve of his youthful indiscretions. I did hear the story eventually. One always hears those stories eventually.

BILLY: I hated that she never bothered to learn my name. Granted, our shelf life was just two years. Joe had a two year limit. As you know.

STEPHEN: Oh, look, Martin is still alive.

[They smile at an unseen

MARTIN.] BILLY: Joe would have been . . .

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

STEPHEN: Thirty-four. Just.

BILLY: Thirty-four. Yes. When I first laid eyes on him I actually said out loud, That is the best looking boy I’ve ever seen. He sparkled.

STEPHEN: One needed sunglasses.

[Pause.]

When you say two years, are you saying twenty-four full months on the dot?

BILLY: Perhaps a sandwich. They look so inconsequential.

STEPHEN: Wouldn’t it be nice to clear the air? Everyone else seemed to know at the time. Everyone but us.

BILLY: It was a dozen years ago.

STEPHEN: Call me Cathy Curious.

BILLY: Martin is on a new regimen. Louis was telling me. He’s doing that tea thing everyone is doing. They look like pods. You boil them. Or something. I’d be afraid the pods would come and crawl on your face in the dead of night. You’d wake looking like Cathy Lee Rigby. Very Rod Serling.

What was your question again?

STEPHEN: All of ’84 and the winter, spring and the beginning of the summer of ’85 he was with me. You came along, as the world knows. You. Bathsheba. Came along. But you didn’t arrive until after the summer began. You couldn’t have.

BILLY: Professionally speaking, what would you do with Frank’s hair?

STEPHEN: Set it on fire.

BILLY: How do you define the beginning of summer?

STEPHEN: Joey and I were with Rick and Jason on the Island the weekend of the Fourth.

BILLY: Seriously? July 4th? Where was I? STEPHEN: I can’t possibly know. I’m not sure I know where you are now.

BILLY: To be perfectly honest, since you insist, I met Joe the day before Mother’s Day. STEPHEN: [shocked] You can’t have. You must be thinking the Fourth. After the Fourth.

BILLY: They’re wrapping things. I should grab something.

STEPHEN: Let me!

[STEPHEN goes off. He returns

with a tray of pastries.]

BILLY: Stephen, really! You’ve returned with a plate of sin. I couldn’t.

STEPHEN: Don’t be precious. You, Jerry Hall, you.

BILLY: They’re watery.

STEPHEN: They’re sweating. Pastries sweat. It’s how they mourn.

BILLY: Just one tiny one.

[BILLY eats a pastry.]

STEPHEN: He spent Labor Day with me.

BILLY: That’s a lie! We were on the Grove with Sally and Cherise. I was reading A Tale of Two Cities. These sweaty pastries are beyond delicious. Just one more.

STEPHEN: Explain Mother’s Day. BILLY: Explain Labor Day. STEPHEN: I asked first.

BILLY: I could eat a hundred of these.

STEPHEN: If you do not explain Mother’s Day, I will rip the perfect eyes out of your perfect head.

BILLY: Wait. Last one. If I reach for another cut my hand off.

STEPHEN: Oh, why stop at the hand?

BILLY: Wait. Where is your glass of white wine?

STEPHEN: [smile] Darling, I finished that ages ago.

BILLY: Stephen, you had a full glass when you went for the pastries.

STEPHEN: Really, Billy. It doesn’t take an Academy Award winning performance to finish a glass of wine.

[Pause. BILLY’s face turns white.]

BILLY: WHORE! [BILLY rushes off. MARTIN STUART enters.]

MARTIN: Did someone call me?

STEPHEN: Hello, Martin. How are you?

MARTIN: Alive, Stephen. How are you?

STEPHEN: Oh, I’m presently going through a Bette Davis phase. Mischief.

Mischief. Mischief.

MARTIN: How does one manage to be mischievous these days?

STEPHEN: It takes great thought and planning.

[BILLY returns, out of breath and red in the face.]

BILLY: COW! BENEATH PEASANTRY!

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MARTIN: William, really. All of the other boyfriends are looking.

BILLY: YOU KNEW I WAS SOBER! STEPHEN: I had heard tell.

[BILLY lunges at STEPHEN.] BILLY: I’ll rip every processed hair out of your skull!

STEPHEN: Get off me, animal!

MARTIN: Darlings, what the hell are you thinking? Everyone is watching! Stop it!

Now! You heard me!

[BILLY and STEPHEN pull apart.]

[BILLY takes MARTIN’s glass.]

BILLY: What is this?

MARTIN: Water.

[BILLY drinks, gargles, spits behind him.]

[They stare at him as if he were from another planet.]

Have you lost your slender mind?

BILLY: No. [to STEPHEN] I slept with him the day before Mother’s Day. So there.

STEPHEN: I slept with him Labor Day weekend. So there.

MARTIN: Girls, girls. We are not in a Bavarian Beer Hall.

STEPHEN: You were nowhere near him on Mother’s Day. BILLY: No, but I was on top of him the day before.

STEPHEN: Slattern!

BILLY: Mendicant!

STEPHEN: Slavophile!

BILLY: We met at the skinny card shop at Eighteenth and Seventh. He was late with his Mother’s Day card. He cruised me like a sailor who’s been at sea for decades.

STEPHEN: I don’t believe it. Not a word.

Your brain has obviously been damaged thanks to the decades you’ve been pickling it.

MARTIN: Oh, no.

STEPHEN & BILLY: What?

MARTIN: She’s crying.

STEPHEN & BILLY: Who? MARTIN: The mother.

STEPHEN: Oh, God, no.

BILLY: I hate that.

MARTIN: The father is going to say a few words.

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STEPHEN: I really hate that.

[Pause.]

MARTIN: Very few words.

BILLY: They’re both crying now.

STEPHEN: Not fair.

MARTIN: The entire room is crying.

STEPHEN: I hate it when they thank us for being family too.

MARTIN: That always kills me.

BILLY: Stephen, your mascara is running.

MARTIN: My God, it is.

STEPHEN: That’s impossible. This is tearproof.

MARTIN: You, butch-fem, you.

[Pause.]

BILLY: Heard you were doing the tea thing, Martin.

MARTIN: Yes. It’s fabulous.

STEPHEN: Your color is thrilling.

MARTIN: Thank heaven; it’s been a grand month. Excepting Joseph.

BILLY: Yes. STEPHEN: Excepting.

BILLY: Joe. [Pause.]

MARTIN: Did he tell you his Elton John story?

STEPHEN: No. BILLY: Yes. STEPHEN: I heard it.

MARTIN: Yes. One does.

[Pause.]

STEPHEN: Anyone going uptown?

MARTIN & BILLY: No. STEPHEN: Well. Then.

MARTIN: How about a movie? An old movie. One of the bad Julie Andrews musicals. Something overblown and witless.

STEPHEN: Like us.

[They stare off.]

One often feels like a dinosaur.

MARTIN: Surviving the crunch.

BILLY: Leave it to Sondheim to have the last word.

STEPHEN: Let’s not do this again soon.

MARTIN & BILLY: Agreed.

[Pause. They stare off.]

Tom O’Leary is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and humor writer. O’Leary wrote the screenplay for the short film Where We Began, which won a 2007 PlanetOut Short Movie Award and tied for the PlanetOut Audience Choice Award.

Nourishment, another short film written by O’Leary, has played around the world at over thirty film festivals. With writer Cathy Crimmins, O’Leary co-authored the best-selling humor book The Gay Man’s Guide to Heterosexuality. His play David won the Provincetown Theater Company Best New Play of 1998. David received its world premiere at the Theater on the Square in Indianapolis where it played to sold-out houses. Breath, an evening of one-acts by O’Leary, was performed in both New York City and Los Angeles. His play The Negative Room won the Best New Play Award at the Towngate Theater in 1994 and played to sold out audiences in Provincetown, MA.

[2001–2005]

Mary Kathryn Vernon Visit IV

On the skirted porch that flanks two sides of the house, on a wicker table, kept in place by rocks, two stacks of mail wait, one for me, and one for you.

There’s nothing important for me— a few flyers are all.

For you there are cards wishing you well, arriving the day after your passing.

One small card, handmade, with a heart carefully drawn, says, “Get well soon!”

Across the street, Mr. Davis pushes his mower, which makes a pleasant whirring sound.

Standing, leaning with my hands on the table, I listen.

Mary Kathryn Vernon began writing when she was thirty-five. Since then, she has taken writing courses at local colleges and universities and has published poetry, memoir, and non-fiction. She has lived in Wichita, Kansas, since 2009.

CURTAIN A&U • AUGUST 2015

[2006–2011]

Jim Nawrocki Shades

Inspired by the filming of Gus Van Sant’s film Milk, in San Francisco’s Castro district, January, 2008

They brought back facades from thirty years ago: the camera shop and Toad Hall. They parked old Chevys, old VWs and old Fords, up and down the hill.

Each morning, each evening, I walked through the 1970s.

The past can be as present as a light you switch on, or walk into. One night I watched Sean Penn climb atop a wall to rally a crowd the way Harvey did. I stood in the chill beside the machinery of illusion—a line of police dividing us.

This was a season of the walking dead, and I wondered if any of those, gone now twenty years, might be there too, staring out through bar glass and walking within that remade river of candlelight. Or maybe only waiting, like those men I passed every morning each one with a black jacket marked, SECURITY, each one bored, lounging, and dozing beside the big white trucks, guarding the apertures of memory.

Jim Nawrocki’s poetry recently appeared in the anthology, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press).

It has also appeared in Kyoto Journal, Poetry, Chroma Journal, modern words, and the website Poetry Daily (poems.com). He writes regularly for the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.

[2006–2011]

Emanuel Xavier

Walking With Angels for Lindsay AIDS knows the condom wrapped penetration of strangers and lovers, deep inside only a tear away from risk knows bare minimum t-cell level counts, replacing intoxicating cocktails with jagged little pills knows how to avoid a cure thanks to war how to keep pharmaceutical corporations and doctors in business AUGUST 2015 • A&U

AIDS knows the weight loss desired by supermodels, knows the fearless meaning of a friends genuine kiss or hug converts non-believers to religion and spirituality comprehends loneliness values the support of luminaries smiles at the solidarity of single red ribbons knows to dim the lights to elude detection how to shame someone into hiding from the rest of the world to be grateful for the gift of clothing and shelter, to remain silent, holding back the anger and frustration AIDS knows that time on earth is limited for all of us that using lemons to make lemonade is better than drinking the Kool-Aid but no matter how much you drink you are always left dehydrated knows working extensive hours to pay hospital bills, the choice of survival or taking pleasure in what is left of life knows the solid white walls you want to crash through and tear down the thoughts of suicide in the back of your head AIDS knows the prosperous could be doing more with their wealth and that everyone still thinks it is a deserving fate— for gays, drug addicts, prostitutes, and the unfortunate children of such born into a merciless world of posh handbags and designer jewelry knows how to be used as another percentage to profit politicians knows it doesn’t only affect humans but animals too, without bias —providing fodder for art and something to be left behind if there is a God he has disregarded our prayers left his angels behind to journey along with us —none of us knowing exactly where we are headed A formerly homeless teen and the first openly gay Nuyorican poet, Emanuel Xavier is the author of the novel Christ Like, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and the poetry collections Nefarious, If Jesus Were Gay & other poems, Americano, and Pier Queen. He was proclaimed an LGBT Icon by the Equality Forum in 2010 and is recipient of the Marsha A. Gomez Cultural Heritage Award, a New York City Council Citation, and a World Pride Award. He works for Penguin Random House and is the editor of Me No Habla With Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry published by El Museo del Barrio in collaboration with Rebel Satori Press. He was recently a TEDx featured speaker and filmed for a documentary about poets from around the world. He continues to share his work at universities and venues throughout the country.

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lifeguide

Eye on the Future towards an hiv cure 2015 provides strategies to watch for to achieve remission after experiencing advanced HIV disease. At last report from the XX International AIDS Conference in 2015, she had been in remission for eighteen years. This woman no longer produced antibodies to HIV nor had HIV provirus in PBMC cells.

These cases, though seemingly rare, are important in understanding HIV remission and researchers say they may help to better determine who may experience post-treatment remission and what markers may eventually show who could come off of ARVs without viral rebound.

Early ARVs The most widely publicized news from the symposium regarded an eighteenyear-old perinatally infected French-Canadian woman. The unnamed young woman was given ARVs at three months of age and discontinued therapy at 5.8 years old.

She has currently been in remission for twelve years.

So far researchers found two important factors with her immune response to HIV. Her haplotype, which measures how susceptible her cells are to HIV infection, is normal, and not one that makes HIV slow to progress. Second, like other post-treatment controllers, her CD8 cells are significantly unresponsive to HIV, giving off a low level of chemical messengers like Il-2.

This differs from elite controllers (those able to control HIV infection without treatment) who have high levels of these messengers and a haplotype that generates low viral loads and slow HIV progression.

Unlike the Mississippi Baby, she does test positive for HIV DNA, although her plasma HIV levels are below the level of detection even with extremely sensitive assays.

The relevance of the differences between the two post-treatment controllers as well as with elite controllers is yet unknown.

Other patients known to be experiencing post-treatment remission include twelve of the fourteen individuals from the Visconti Cohort. The average remission in this group is ten years. There is also a documented case of a woman in Argentina who began ARVs after she was diagnosed with AIDS. She is the only person known

Broadly Neutralizing Antibodies John Mascola, MD, Director of the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH, spoke of the role that broadly neutralizing antibodies may play in HIV. Dr. Mascola stated that the research over the past five to ten years has shown that some people living with HIV produce very potent antibodies that help them to effectively control HIV. These antibodies have been collected and stored and are being used for research to discover ways they can help to prevent and treat HIV. There are three ways that these antibodies could play a role in HIV treatment.

1. Given early with ARVs, they may be able to get the virus under control quickly and/or have an effect on the size of viral reservoirs.

2. They may help with viral suppression along with ARVs, possibly allowing for the ARVs to be limited or withdrawn.

3. They have some effects that ARVs don’t have, such as the ability to mediate killing off HIV-infected cells. If given with drugs that induce expression of virus from cells, they may be able to reduce the size of viral reservoirs.

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Gene Editing Christopher Peterson, PhD, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, discussed stem cell editing and transplantation that his lab is performing on primates. By removing the CCR5 co-receptor gene, it makes it difficult for HIV to enter cells that utilize this co-receptor. They then transplant the cells back into the primates with the hopes that enough protected cells

will prevent the virus from spreading and will enable the immune system to mount a better immune response. It’s very early on in this research and early stage human trials are expected in the near future.

Partnerships Partnerships between pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, universities, foundations, the government, and the HIV community are beginning to surface.

These partnerships are becoming an important source of funding and collaborative research and will hopefully expedite and streamline research. One such recent collaboration involved GlaxoSmithKline and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where a cure center is being built, and a new pharmaceutical company called Qura Therapeutics formed to expedite drug development that may arise from the collaborative research. Another initiative is the amfAR Institute for HIV Cure Research that will be located at and will work with a yet to be named institution. A separate Cure Center is expected to be announced later in the year.

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.

A&U • AUGUST 2015

illustration by Timothy J. Haines

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owards an HIV Cure is an initiative of the International AIDS Society (IAS) formed to help direct and facilitate discussion, research and policy to advance and accelerate a cure for HIV. The project hosts the annual “Towards an HIV Cure Symposium,” where HIV cure research is presented and discussed. This year’s conference took place on July 18 and 19 in Vancouver, Canada, preceding the 8th IAS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention. Over 300 participants, including clinicians, activists, policymakers, and cure researchers, attended the symposium.

Process of Elimination gilead donates hcv treatments to the country of georgia

illustration by Timothy J. Haines

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s part of a comprehensive project to eliminate hepatitis C (HCV) from the country, Gilead began providing free hep C regimens containing the company’s breakthrough HCV drug Sovaldi (sofosbuvir) in April.

For Gilead, it’s a chance demonstrate that its products can drastically reduce HCV prevalence and encourage more widespread use of Sovaldi and its eventual successor, Harvoni, which is currently undergoing review in the country of Georgia.

For Georgia, which is estimated to have the third highest prevalence of HCV in the world, according to the World Health Organization, it’s a lifeline to cure estimated hundreds of thousands of affected Georgians who would not have been able to afford the latest HCV treatment.

For hepatitis treatment advocates throughout the world, it’s an opportunity to learn much about how to treat and prevent the virus in especially hard-hit middle-income countries like Georgia.

It’s called the Elimination Project, a collaboration of Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Affairs of Georgia, Gilead, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Beyond the immediate public health impact in Georgia, the plan is to implement a program for HCV elimination and generate valuable data to support similar programs throughout the world.

Right now the Elimination Project is in the first of two phases. Phase one is treating, at no cost to the patient, approximately 5,000 Georgians with advanced liver disease and at the greatest risk of death. Patients are responsible for the cost of screening, which is around $212 USD. The government of Georgia will cover up to seventy percent of that amount for low-income patients. Treatment advocates in Georgia told A&U that in mid-June almost 1,000 patients had started treatment.

Also in phase one, the government of Georgia and the CDC will develop an implementation plan for monitoring and prevention, patient care, and treatment.

Phase two will include the development of a comprehensive elimination plan to guide the implementation of prevention and education programs to stop transmisAUGUST 2015 • A&U

sion, broad-based screening to identify persons unaware of their infection, and expansion of medical facilities to increase the number of HCV-infected persons receiving lifesaving care and treatment.

This second phase of the program will scale up over time, with a goal of treating up to 20,000 HCV-infected individuals per year.

The CDC will provide technical assistance and consultation for the elimination project, including the implementation of a population-based survey to identify the current prevalence of HCV. These data will be used to measure the success of the project over time. The CDC will also provide assistance and consultation on diagnostics and laboratory quality assurance, treatment guidelines, and program monitoring and evaluation.

A statement released to A&U from Gilead says: “Georgia’s small population size, high HCV prevalence, and the availability of the necessary diagnostic tests to monitor patients, create an environment that we hope will allow us demonstrate the impact of HCV treatment as part of a larger, national disease elimination plan.”

July 2014’s issue of A&U reported on the surging rate of HIV and hepatitis C (HCV) in Georgia and other former Soviet republics. Paata Sabelshvili, a treatment access activist based in Tbilisi, said the rates of infection were exacerbated by government policies on illegal narcotics. Now he tells A&U that he’s grateful for Gilead’s elimination program, and he hopes the program could indirectly lead to changes in Georgia’s harsh drug laws.

“Right now the [Georgia government’s] opiates substitution program is not sufficient to meet the needs of all who are addicted and I hope the government will

scale it up as a result of this elimination program, and change the harsh, restrictive policies that have helped to create this crisis.”

Right now it’s unclear as to what kinds of outreach and prevention policies Georgia’s Ministry of Health will implement, and whether the government will shift from a punishment-based policy for drug addicts to one of harm reduction. Since 2006 Georgia has had “zero tolerance” policy on drug use that shifted prosecution from drug traffickers to users, with no distinction made between possession of drugs for personal use and for trafficking. These policies, Sabelshvili and other activists say, drive drug-dependent people underground, which increase their risk of contracting HIV, HCV, and tuberculosis.

Sabelshvili says he is encouraged by what he’s seen as the government’s new efforts in identifying new places where HCV screening can be made routine, including dentists’ offices and even beauty shops. And he points out Georgia’s new Prime Minister, Irakli Garibashvili, a former business executive, has declared the eradication of hep C as a top priority.

But he adds, “unless the government is able to reach out to all the drug users in the country and develop a total plan for harm reduction, the Elimination Project won’t eliminate [HCV].”

Larry Buhl is a radio news reporter, screenwriter, and novelist living in Los Angeles. His podcast on employment issues, “Labor Pains,” can be found at www.laborpainspodcast.com.

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lifeguide

Survivor’s Fatigue how do we negotiate the space between memory & hope

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for dying lovers and friends, or struggling for ways to work around immigration restrictions.

I hadn’t been at the week of actions, but I had come into ACT UP/Los Angeles soon after, and recognized the community struggles that were talked about. The hopes of solidarity, the elation and love when connections were made, and the disappointments and heartbreak when people failed each other. “What’s your damage?” we asked each other. Over drinks, after the panel, we told the less public, more intimate stories of hope, connection, and grief. I recognized all of them, the emotional ephemera, from my own ACT UP years.

The weekend ended with a public memorial on Sunday called “When Comrades Fell.” The names that had been gathered for weeks were read into a filled room. People stood and told stories about friends and lovers who had died. A photo slideshow brought most of us to tears.

Survivor’s fatigue, I thought, looking around the room at us: the condition of not being able to save those we love. And once gone, haunted by our failure to bring them back.

The following week the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

The story has always been that we have to choose—the home life of paired domesticity, or the life of the community. Working with poly and nonmonogamous clients as a psychotherapist has reminded me over and over that the dominant paradigm of pairs as the only option for family is a myth, just as marriage’s mutually exclusive relationship to community fidelity is also a myth.

Many of us at the ACT UP Reunion brought our queer spouses, most of whom had not been a part of our ACT UP lives.

They witnessed our stories and the community expanded to include them.

Certain kinds of queerness will always exist in a condition of mourning, which is an uneasy bedfellow with hope. In the dominant narrative of life trajectory, marriage and hope are portrayed as twin forces of futurity.

Queer life has always held the complexity of multiple pulls at our attention, multiple alliances and struggles, the simultaneity of grief and celebration. This new legality and social construction (and victory) will be no different. During the ACT UP reunion we were reminded of all

the ways we showed up for each other, and all the ways we still need to. I will celebrate my marriage. And I will mourn the deaths of young queers lost to bullying, suicide, poverty, and HIV, and the assassinations and criminalization of trans people of color. And I will celebrate my community, my comrades, with whom there is still so much work to be done. “‘Til death do us part” used to come quickly. It used to mean an urgent and horrible death from AIDS. It used to be a specifically queer promise made among friends and chosen family as well as between lovers. What will it come to mean as the narrative of queer relationships changes, and as the narrative of AIDS changes? The changes aren’t all bad. In fact they are mostly lovely, and hard won, and hopeful. But hope, by definition, is forward looking, and memory is fixed and nostalgic.

“What’s your damage?” we asked each other during the ACT UP reunion. Memory is our damage. And it just may also be our hope.

Keiko Lane, MFT, is a Japanese American writer and psychotherapist. She writes about the intersections of queer culture, oppression resistance, racial justice, and liberation psychology. She has a psychotherapy practice in Berkeley, California, specializing in work with queers of all genders, artists, activists, academics, people affected by HIV/AIDS, asylum seekers and other clients self-identified as post-colonial. Keiko also teaches graduate and post-graduate psychotherapy courses on queer and multicultural psychotherapies, the psychodynamics of social justice, and the embodied literature of exile. She is a long-term survivor of ACT UP/Los Angeles. Visit: www.keikolanemft.com.

A&U • AUGUST 2015

photo by Keiko Lane

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hat’s Your Damage?” was the name of the arts panel that kicked off the opening night of ACT UP/San Francisco’s reunion gathering commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the International AIDS Conference and corresponding week of demonstrations.

As I prepared to participate in the panel, I walked nervously around the gay men’s health center in the Castro district that had been turned into a gallery space and was housing the event. When one of the ACT UP/ SF organizers started talking about the ACT UP diaspora, I felt a little more at ease. San Francisco had not been my home during the action that the weekend was remembering. But the commonalities of the fight, as well as the coalitions built through statewide and national actions, give us a shared vocabulary and a familiar emotional history. We connected with each other by frame of reference, and we connected the dots of a collective history that led us into the room and the weekend.

Saturday brought together a living history panel of activists who were part of the central organizing committee for the actions at the International AIDS Conference.

The week of demonstrations had served to re-center people living with HIV/AIDS in the agenda setting for treatment and research, demanded the inclusion of and attention to the specific ways in which HIV manifests and progresses in women, and highlight outrage about what was known as the “HIV travel ban” which had grave implications for HIV-positive immigrants by creating life-threatening disincentives for seeking testing and treatment.

Within ACT UP the questions of whether the demonstrations would be successful at the level of changes in treatment, research, and public policy, were flanked by the questions of alliances and coalition building. Would the white people show up for the immigration actions? Would the men show up for the women’s actions? The success of ACT UP as a political force and as a community was that every targeted group did show up for the others.

Marriage equality was not a political priority back then. The main times we longed for it were during fights over hospital visitations and power of attorney

AUGUST 2015 • A&U

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E R U CULT S

AID OF

FILM

Larry Kramer In Love & Anger Directed by Jean Carlomusto HBO Documentary Films, Cresting Moon

I

s there love in anger? Or anger in love? The answer might just be a resounding “yes,” in both cases, especially when individuals find themselves in crises, left with no other choice but to act up in love, and also anger, in order to save lives—their own, as well as the lives of others.

During the early years of the AIDS pandemic, silence did equal death. In order to survive this crisis or, as Larry Kramer calls it, this “plague,” people needed a leader, a powerful voice to rise above the noise and despair, in love and anger.

And that voice was, and to some extent continues to be, Larry Kramer’s.

The co-founder of GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis) and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Larry Kramer needs no introduction. And yet, we get to see him—the activist, artist, and also the person—in a fresh and intimate way, in Larry Kramer In Love & Anger, a new HBO documentary directed by Jean Carlomusto.

In Love & Anger weaves together Kramer’s life story inside, and also outside the AIDS activism movement—from his childhood

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and teenage years current state of HIV/ marked by his AIDS, and offers a relationship with wake-up call that is as his family, and also timely today as it was a with his brother in decade ago. particular, to a presIn Love & Anger also ent-day, frail yet still includes scenes from fighting activist, and The Normal Heart, the his remarkable work in play and movie penned between, a work that

by Kramer, as well as still goes on. much more recent Snippets of film personal moments footage, and photofrom the activist’s life. graphs from a “then” One of those moments and “now” fight stands out by showagainst HIV/AIDS, ing an ailing and frail and also of Kramer’s Larry Kramer on his own fight are juxtahospital bed, marrying posed in In Love & Anhis longtime partner, ger to bring into focus a much sharper, and David Webster, taking also a more candid portrait of a person many viewers back to a similar scene from many consider a living legend. InterThe Normal Heart. (Kramer, who is living views with NIH’s Anthony Fauci, and with HIV, has had ongoing complications co-founder of the SILENCE = DEATH due to liver damage, even after a successcollective, Avram Finkelstein, among ful transplant.) others, add different perspectives to the But Kramer is not quite done fighting. already complex portrait of Kramer, and He continues to write. “Not enough of also to a portrait of the eighties’ epidemic. “People were slipping through our fingers like grains of sand. There wasn’t a day that went by when somebody didn’t die,” Finkelstein says in a footage included in the documentary, describing the state of urgency of those days, an urgency few seemed to acknowledge.

“The world of science didn’t get it. They got it, because it was affecting them,” Fauci is ACT UP protest shown commenting on the AIDS activists who took the fight into their own hands, when very us are proud enough of being gay,” Larry few others would stand and fight for, and Kramer says, commenting on his writing with, them. a new book on American history, and perLoud, unafraid to call the early AIDS haps hinting at new reasons to continue epidemic “an intentional genocide,” the fight. His book The American People pushy, and enraged, Larry Kramer saw print earlier this year. was the person to unite people in In Love & Anger doesn’t only tell Larry anger, when they needed it most.

Kramer’s story or that of AIDS, through Considered by many to be the the eyes of the activist and of those who father of ACT UP, Larry Kramer is have joined his fight over the years. In Love also known for his AIDS activism & Anger tells a story of determination and throughout the epidemic. His passion for survival, and for life.

2004 book The Tragedy of Today’s Larry Kramer In Love & Anger debuted Gays this June, on HBO. [A&U, Larry Kramer June 2005] —Alina Oswald addresses the (then) Alina Oswald is Arts Editor of A&U. A&U • AUGUST 2015

photo by Ellen Shub/courtesy HBO; photo by Lee Snider/Photo Images/courtesy HBO

THE

T

A Calendar of Events

ake a break from looking for “Champ,” the Loch Ness monster-type creature thought to swim the depths of Lake Champlain, and train your binoculars instead “on the road to zero.” Hosted by Vermont CARES, the 2015 AIDS Walk for HIV Prevention through downtown Burlington is an event that has been bringing individuals together for fifteen years to help support the well-being of the community.

Starting and ending in City Hall Park at midday, the Walk aims to draw participants lending their support to raise AIDS awareness and the importance of testing and education in HIV prevention, as well as much-needed funds for HIV/AIDS-related services around the state. It’s also a chance to learn about the progress Vermont CARES has made in the fight to empower

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the community.

Vermont CARES offers free HIV testing, syringe exchange services, stigma-reduction education, and case management services, among others. The organization also advocates for HIV-supportive policies.

Date: September 27; time: 10 a.m. (start); location: City Hall Park, 149 Church Street, Burlington, Vermont.

For more information and to register, log on to: www.vtcares. org. You can also register the day of the Walk; look for the designated table at Main Street Park, starting at 10:30 a.m.

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Sheryl Lee Ralph continued from page 43

“There’s an old African proverb [that goes] ‘If someone says your name after you’ve passed on, you will live forever,’ and I wanted them to live. I didn’t want their dying to be in vain.”

But why do people resist or are prevented from tapping into this love?

The reasons for not calling their names are various and complicated, she discovered. “For a lot of people there have been the burdens of poverty. There have been the burdens of lack. There have been the burdens of feeling shut out of society. There have ever been the burdens of trying to be perfect, trying to fit in, trying to be all the things to want to be that get you respect from people in the community. And a lot of people just have not wanted to say, ‘This is what’s in my family.’ They’d rather act like it’s not there, like it didn’t happen. A lot of

“

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listened to Ralph talk about AIDS and then posted a video of a less-fun HIV lesson in school—a film had been turned on, students tuned out, chatted, passed notes, fell asleep. Ralph was not impressed. “We’ve got to reach young people because they’re next to spend.

Man, it’s been women, it’s been Black, it’s been white, it’s been gay, it’s been poor—who’s next? Children....

“We can do better than that. We can do better for our children in America.

To me it’s like we just want to set them up for failure. We’re not there to love them, give them guidance and show them a way, but we want to build prisons and lock them up. We don’t want to build schools for them to educate them, give them the programs to occupy their minds whether it’s art and singing and dancing, but we want to build prisons to lock them up in. We don’t want to talk to them about sex but we want to show it everywhere, talk about it explicitly in the music that they listen to, and when they start dropping it like it’s hot in sleeping with everybody and coming up with all these diseases. We’re trying to say we don’t know how it’s happening. Yes, we do; we know how its happening. We are just not loving our children enough.”

She is hopeful about the next generation. Every year at DIVAS Simply Singing!, Ralph introduces a Diva-in-training, a youngster whose voice needs nurturing. It’s a reminder that all of our voices need nurturing so that, if we have not already, we can join others against the silence that will kill us if it can.

I was shocked to find out very, very few people of color are included in the AIDS Quilt, how [the community] just wanted to wipe the memory of some of their family away. And it hurts. That’s why I really got involved in Call My Name. people are ashamed of HIV, and AIDS stigma is real. Stigma is alive. And some people would just rather not have to deal with the stigma and the shame, and so they prefer to be silent, as if that person did not exist in their life, like it didn’t really happen, that they didn’t die of AIDS—they died of pneumonia, they died of respiratory complications, they just got sick and died, they died of cancer. So much easier. People love you more, embrace you, when it’s cancer, not AIDS.” At one point, a twenty-fifth installment of DIVAS Simply Singing! seemed inconceivable. “I’ve had many incredible moments the past twenty-five years, but just the other day I said to myself I had no idea that I’d be doing this for most of my life—fight.”

But Sheryl Lee Ralph realized that there is more work to be done. We cannot back down now. “We need to care for the next generation, our children,” Ralph reiterates. She mentions a Tweet from a girl who had excitedly

“

forget one of my early meetings around HIV and AIDS. I was in a group of gay men and a few straight female allies and we were all sitting and talking and I got up from the table to speak with someone and I heard someone say, ‘Well, why are we talking to the n*****?’ And I remember being speechless. In my brain, I was. I was absolutely on pause because I thought we were all here all on the same page to talk about what was going on with this disease, but this person just said, ‘But why are we talking to the n*****?’”

She continues on about the attempt at silencing: “I guess in his mind because I was black I wasn’t worth talking to and I certainly didn’t need to be talking with them about this subject as if it wasn’t a human disease that affected us all, no matter who we were, gay, straight, black, white, rich, or poor. I always knew that HIV and AIDS did not discriminate, but somehow some people still do.”

The exclusion of Black lives in HIV/AIDS advocacy, treatment access, and research has even permeated our acts of remembrance, such as The NAMES Project/AIDS Memorial Quilt. Ralph spoke at the Call My Name Quilt event at the International AIDS Conference 2012 to draw attention to and rectify the fact that panels created by people of African descent to honor their family, friends, and community members were severely underrepresented. Their names were not being called as frequently at Quilt readings, and The NAMES Project started an initiative to make sure African Americans were included in the fabric of history. In her speech, Ralph encouraged everyone, particularly Black Americans, to tap into that “deep, endless, uncompromising, unconditional love to remember,” to find the love to call all of their families’ names.

“I was shocked to find out very, very few people of color are included in the AIDS Quilt, how [the community] just wanted to wipe the memory of some of their family away. And it hurts. That’s why I really got involved in Call My Name; I wanted people to start talking about the fact that, yes, this happened, that these were somebody’s father, brother, sister, mother, friend. That these people had existed.

For more information about Sheryl Lee Ralph, log on to: www.sheryleeralph.com. For information about DIVAS Simply Singing!, log on to: www.thedivafoundation.org. For tickets, log on to: www.divatickets.com. Follow Sheryl on Twitter: @THESHERYLRALPH; and on Instagram: @DIVA3482.

Make-up: Ann Mosley–Basic and Beyond Faces; e-mail: IamAnnMosley@yahoo.com.

Styling: Ed Roebuck. Post -production (Digital Styling): Eve Harlowe Art & Photography; www.EveHarlowe.com.

Chael Needle is Managing Editor of A&U. A&U • AUGUST 2015

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Survival Guide

[a portrait by sean black]

Spencer M. Collins IV Los Angeles, California Spencer M. Collins IV has been asking himself who he is for the past three years after losing his fiancé, his job, and his reputation unfairly within the Black theater circle. Recently diagnosed with congenital heart disease, Spencer is rediscovering who he is with the help of his family and friends and rebuilding himself and his reputation with perseverance. A self-described “family man,” he is a father, actor, director/producer, fighter and definitely a role model. The oldest of five children, he is a graduate of SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design) and the top of his class of Landmark Education where he is now an Introduction Leader. He is a SGL (same-gender loving) African-American male and CEO of B.L.A.C. Mail Productions Inc., a production company dedicated but not limited to telling SGL/LGBT stories through the performing arts. He has been an HIV/AIDS activist for more than ten years, inspiring others and educating his community about prevention, testing and early diagnosis. He also celebrates the lives of people infected and affected by HIV at work and with special events and fundraisers.

“Life is too short to waste on regrets and grudges; I practice the triple LOL way of living: Love Out Loud, Laugh Out Loud, Live Out Loud.”

Sean Black is a Senior Editor of A&U. 64

A&U • AUGUST 2015

HIV TREATMENT CAN GET YOUR VIRAL LOAD SO LOW, IT’S UNDETECTABLE. GO FOR UNDETECTABLE.

There is no cure for HIV, but being undetectable helps protect your health. See how. Watch “The Goal of Undetectable” at HelpStopTheVirus.com © 2015 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. UNBC1853 03/15