A&U February 2019

FEBRUARY 2019 • ISSUE 292 • AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE

EMPOWERING OURSELVES

•BRYAN C. JONES Writes His Own Future

•BRAD GRIMES

Promotes HIV Awareness in West Virginia

plus

• Artist Siona Benjamin • Poetry by Tara-Michelle Ziniuk • Antoniojuan Randle-Garcia • HIV & Military Firings

sur

RODNEY (SUR) Art & Truth About AIDS

IMPORTANT FACTS FOR BIKTARVY®

This is only a brief summary of important information about BIKTARVY and does not replace talking to your healthcare provider about your condition and your treatment.

(bik-TAR-vee)

MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT BIKTARVY

POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS OF BIKTARVY

BIKTARVY may cause serious side effects, including:

BIKTARVY may cause serious side effects, including: } Those in the “Most Important Information About BIKTARVY” section. } 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 BIKTARVY. } Kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do blood and urine tests to check your kidneys. If you develop new or worse kidney problems, they may tell you to stop taking BIKTARVY. } Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious but rare medical emergency that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: weakness or being more tired than usual, unusual muscle pain, being short of breath or fast breathing, stomach pain with nausea and vomiting, cold or blue hands and feet, feel dizzy or lightheaded, or a fast or abnormal heartbeat. } Severe liver problems, which in rare cases can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow, dark “tea-colored” urine, light-colored stools, loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, or stomach-area pain. } The most common side effects of BIKTARVY in clinical studies were diarrhea (6%), nausea (6%), and headache (5%).

} Worsening of Hepatitis B (HBV) infection. If you

have both HIV-1 and HBV, your HBV may suddenly get worse if you stop taking BIKTARVY. Do not stop taking BIKTARVY without first talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to check your health regularly for several months.

ABOUT BIKTARVY BIKTARVY is a complete, 1-pill, once-a-day prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults. It can either be used in people who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before, or people who are replacing their current HIV-1 medicines and whose healthcare provider determines they meet certain requirements.

BIKTARVY does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS. HIV-1 is the virus that causes AIDS. Do NOT take BIKTARVY if you also take a medicine that contains: } dofetilide } rifampin } any other medicines to treat HIV-1

BEFORE TAKING BIKTARVY Tell your healthcare provider if you: } Have or have had any kidney or liver problems,

These are not all the possible side effects of BIKTARVY. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have any new symptoms while taking BIKTARVY.

including hepatitis infection. } Have any other health problems. } Are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if BIKTARVY can harm your unborn baby.

Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking BIKTARVY. } Are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed.

Do not breastfeed. HIV-1 can be passed to the baby in breast milk.

You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.FDA.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

Your healthcare provider will need to do tests to monitor your health before and during treatment with BIKTARVY.

HOW TO TAKE BIKTARVY

Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take:

Take BIKTARVY 1 time each day with or without food.

} Keep a list that includes all prescription and over-the-

counter medicines, antacids, laxatives, vitamins, and herbal supplements, and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist.

} BIKTARVY and other medicines may affect each other.

Ask your healthcare provider and pharmacist about medicines that interact with BIKTARVY, and ask if it is safe to take BIKTARVY with all your other medicines.

Get HIV support by downloading a free app at

MyDailyCharge.com

GET MORE INFORMATION } This is only a brief summary of important information

about BIKTARVY. Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist to learn more.

} Go to BIKTARVY.com or call 1-800-GILEAD-5. } If you need help paying for your medicine,

visit BIKTARVY.com for program information.

BIKTARVY, the BIKTARVY Logo, DAILY CHARGE, the DAILY CHARGE Logo, KEEP EMPOWERING, LOVE WHAT’S INSIDE, GILEAD, and the GILEAD Logo are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. Version date: December 2018 © 2019 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. BVYC0102 01/19

KEEP EMPOWERING.

Because HIV doesn’t change who you are.

BIKTARVY® is a complete, 1-pill, once-a-day prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in certain adults. BIKTARVY does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS.

Ask your healthcare provider if BIKTARVY is right for you.

To learn more, visit BIKTARVY.com.

Please see Important Facts about BIKTARVY, including important warnings, on the previous page and visit BIKTARVY.com.

c o n t e n t s February 2019

32 Cover Sur Rodney (Sur)Talks with Larry Buhl About the Political Spirit & Aesthetic Sensibilities of Artists in the First Decade of HIV/AIDS and How He Strives to Tell the Truth About the Pandemic

Departments

Features 8 Poetry “If you believe you are safe” by Tara-Michelle Ziniuk 20 Gallery Artist Siona Benjamin Brings Intersectionality to Her Representation of the Body 26 Sex Positive Advocate Bryan C. Jones Creates a Community of Care in Ohio 30 Red, White & Positive Recent Firings in the U.S. Military Raise the Prospect of HIV Discrimination 38 Moving Mountains Brad Grimes Helps Provide HIV & Sexual Health Support Among the LGBTQ Community

cover photo by Sean Black

5

Frontdesk

6

Digital Footprints

10

NewsBreak

14

Ruby’s Rap

viewfinder 16 For the Long Run 17

Our Story, Our Time

19

Just*in Time

25

Second Acts

lifeguide 42 Destination: Cure 43

Money Matters

45

The Culture of AIDS

46

Lifelines

48

Survival Guide

Did You Know?

Your organization can receive FREE copies of A&U, America’s AIDS Magazine, to distribute to your clients!

Takes Creative Risks to Empower Others

MAY 2018 • ISSUE 283 • AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE

JUNE 2018 • ISSUE 284 • AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE

SUMMER 1993 & AFTER LOUIE VIEW GENERATIONAL LOSSES THROUGH DIFFERENT LENSES

FRONT

RUNNERS

• Dawn Averitt • Dan Nicoletta • Luna Luis Ortiz • Tori Cooper • Leo Herrera & The Fathers Project • The Billys • Christopher Costas • Ron B.

*plus

• Dr. Evan Antin • Larry Buhl on Keeping Sex Workers Safe • Rose Auslander

FILM FESTIVAL

*plus

Wilson Cruz

The Dedicated HIV Advocate Champions Youth Activism

Photog Suzanne Poli • Thomas Parker Harris • Will St. Leger & Hazel Coonagh • Stephen Ira • Alfie Pettit

JANUARY 2018 • ISSUE 279 • AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE

HIV IS NOT A CRIME

Trevor Hoppe Talks About His New Book, Punishing Disease

Melissa Rivers

The Writer, Producer & Entertainment Correspondent Proves that Doing Good Is Never Out of Fashion

EVEN ME

LaWanda Gresham Inspires Others Living with HIV to Seek Support

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• Avram Finkelstein • Positive Parenting • Geoffrey Couët & François Nambot • DIVAS Simply Singing!

• Gina Brown

david

Arquette

A Sibling’s Love Re-Energizes the Fight Against Stigma

To make sure your clients don’t miss another insightful and thought-provoking issue of A&U, subscribe online at aumag.org

A&U Frontdesk

AMERICA’S AIDS MAGAZINE issue 292 vol. 28 no. 2 February 2019 editorial offices: (518) 426-9010 fax: (518) 436-5354 Editor in Chief & Publisher David Waggoner Managing Editor: Chael Needle Senior Editors: Dann Dulin, Sean Black Editors at Large: Chip Alfred, Hank Trout Special Projects Editor: Lester Strong Arts Editor: Alina Oswald Poetry Editor: Noah Stetzer Fiction Editor: Raymond Luczak Consulting Editor: Nick Steele Copy Editor: Maureen Hunter Contributing Editors: Sarah Churchill Downes, Reed Massengill, Kelly McQuain, Lesléa Newman, Robert E. Penn Contributing Writers: Noël Alumit, T.J. Banks, Larry Buhl, Ruby Comer, George M. Johnson, John Francis Leonard, Candace Y.A. Montague, Connie Rose, David Rosenberg, Corey Saucier, Stevie St. John, Justin B. Terry-Smith, Patricia Nell Warren, Jeannie Wraight, Rob Zukowski Art Director: Timothy J. Haines Contributing Photographers: Jordan Ancel, Davidd Batalon, Mark Bennington, Tom Bianchi, Sean Black, Adam Bouska, Brian Bowen Smith, Tim Courtney, Duane Cramer, Stephen Churchill Downes, Greg Gorman, Francis Hills, Renée Jacobs, Michael Kerner, Tara Lessard, Tom McGovern, Scot Maitland, Nancy Perry, Alex Ray, Annie Tritt National Advertising Director: Harold Burdick, Jr. Sales & Marketing: David L. Bonitatibus Advertising Sales Office: (518) 426-9010 National Advertising Representative: Rivendell Media (212) 242-6863 Subscription Info: (518) 426-9010 Circulation Manager: Robert Schelepanow Bookkeeper: Richard Garcia Board of Directors President: David Waggoner Vice President: Harold Burdick, Jr. Secretary: Richard Garcia Founding Board Members: Mark S. Labrecque, 1961–1992, Christopher Hewitt, 1946–2004, Mark Galbraith, 1962–2011

In Memoriam: Bill Jacobson, 1939–2005 Rhomylly B. Forbes, 1963–2011 • Chris Companik, 1957–2012 Nancy Ellegate, 1959–2015 A&U (ISSN 1074-0872) is published by Art & Understanding, Inc., 25 Monroe St., Suite 205, Albany, NY 122102743, USA. For A&U advertising information please call 518-426-9010; for subscriptions and address changes please call 518-426-9010; for letters to the editor and unsolicited manuscripts write A&U Magazine, 25 Monroe Street, Albany, New York 12210; fax 518-436-5354; or e-mail: mailbox@aumag.org. All unsolicited manuscripts that do not have a S.A.S.E. cannot be returned and will not be acknowledged. ©2019 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.

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Count Me In

F

or the past year, I have been watching artist documentaries on cable and I caught one the other day that gave me pause: Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait. The doc features lengthy interviews with the artist, his children and other family members, gallery owners, and art critics, and creates a fascinating portrait of someone who paints to the beat of his own drum.

The film presents a chronology and, by the late seventies and early eighties, the enigmatic Schnabel has moved to New York City, connecting with Mary Boone and befriending Jean-Michel Basquiat (later a subject for Schnabel’s first film as a director) and becoming part of the art scene.

Yet not once does the documentary mention AIDS. This exclusion may or may not have been conscious, but it struck me how easy it is to tell a story of the eighties in NYC without mentioning the pandemic. Granted, the doc did not mention any other political or cultural forces during that time, keeping its subject in a cocoon. But that approach is par for the course in aesthetics—art is universal and transcends the time in which it is produced, goes one theory.

But HIV/AIDS changed all that, perhaps once and for all. So we tell the story again: Keith Haring, Frank Moore, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Mark Morrisroe....

Yet, like the documentary, exclusion comes easily. The art establishment “forgets” Black artists and other artists of color, anyone who is not male and white. So we need to approach art appreciation—and AIDS activism—with questions in tow: Who is missing from the record, and why? Who occupies the center and who has been marginalized?

Sur Rodney (Sur), this month’s cover story interview, was part of the NYC art scene in the eighties. And because he feared that artists who were dying from AIDS or otherwise impacted might be forgotten, he,

his partner Geoffrey Hendricks and Frank Moore, along with help from Visual AIDS, cofounded an initiative to preserve art in the mid-nineties called the Frank Moore Archive Project. His practice of inclusion extends to telling the truth about activism and treatment history as well.

He tells contributing writer Larry Buhl: “There were a lot of women and mothers [in ACT UP] and they’d bring their kids because they couldn’t get babysitters. You never see any film about AIDS activism where kids are present, or people of color. The reality was a lot more complicated.” I am so glad we can feature Sur Rodney (Sur)’s insights as well as the heartfelt photographs of him taken by Senior Editor Sean Black.

Inclusion is also a goal for the advocates featured in this issue.

Bryan C. Jones, interviewed by Mel Baker, is a tour de force in Ohio, creating a true community of care, while Brad Grimes, interviewed by A&U’s Hank Trout, is making sure to not leave anyone out in the cold in West Virginia. And Larry Buhl interviews military service members and other advocates fighting against the government’s policies to restrict deployment of and therefore exclude individuals living with HIV/AIDS. As we know, some members of the HIV community are no longer around to tell their story and must rely on those who remain to be accurate and fair. And some are living today who cannot access their full-throated voices. Or they are being sidelined by those in power. If the proposition on the table is that, within the HIV community we have to be extra-diligent to strive for and achieve inclusion, well, then, count me in. And I hope we can count on you, too.

DAVID WAGGONER

digital

s t n i r p t o o f

mostloved on INSTAGRAM

@au_americas_aids_magazine

Senior Editor Sean Black interviewed and photographed Black AIDS Institute’s Phill Wilson and Raniyah Copeland for the January 2019 cover story. Phill Wilson is departing from the organization he helped to found and the change in leadership was lauded online with congratulations all around.

mostshared Survival Guide: A Portrait by Sean Black featured advocate Tami Haught has a lot of support.

The Sero Project expressed how proud they are of Tami. Ken Pinkela expressed his love. And they were not the only ones!

mosttweeted @au_magazine

@AmericasAIDSMagazine 6

As part of our 2018 round-up, we collected the best columns of the year and readers became engaged all over again by the insights of Hank Trout, George M. Johnson, Corey Saucier, John Francis Leonard and Justin B. Terry-Smith. We are proud to feature them in our magazine!

@au_magazine

Copeland & Wilson/Haught photos by Sean Black

@AmericasAIDSMagazine

@au_americas_aids_magazine A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

Harold Matzner

Helene Galen & Jamie Kabler Donna MacMillan

R T

POETRY

E O

P

If you believe you are safe

ring silence draped over night. bring our end.

I a mess want your attention, applause.

There is a purpose for you real brutal clear.

Two hundred thousand million more million six million a hundred million spite science search good old campaign slogs hope the epidemic is winning.

This great, quiet Democrat male female gays rag you old drafted society mother one black infant sings in Philadelphia the lonely gay candle wind his family distant Danger women Child killer American cancer disease Love kill or ignore hide alien state cruel as God mad person deserving victims long pity read worthy.

we speak a ton hemophiliac, gay inject history teach this: this kill is no family race no America embrace more than a million littering bodies of the young rock support. not all of you have been blessed. dare not love dare weep Grieve a lone mess feel shame. tolerate pace fear silence reach out for quiet denial, mother victim mess. rage is the act when we Party You the millions you grieving frightened, suffered ravages millions strong sound this pledge: I will not rest, where intimacy is suffering.

I will not hurry to my children, I pray shame on the sound of my voice, appeal: less grace afraid to say the word whisper.

Good night.

My call to you, Party, public

Text excerpted from Mary Fisher’s 1992 Republican National Convention Address, Whisper of AIDS

the President and Mrs. Bush. embrace me in memorable ways.

In the lace of judgment, in cult moments, raise spirits.

In dark hours, I see grief grace the President

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Whatever, Iceberg with Mansfield Press. She’s a former harm reduction worker, currently working in arts and media. Her work has been featured in Joyland, EOAGH, Prism, Taddle Creek, and in The Best Canadian Poetry anthology. She lives in Toronto with her daughter.

the American family Believe our role as pat act eloquently

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A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

NEWSBREAK 2019 Reunion Latina Training Institute The Latin Commission on AIDS will present their annual two-day Reunion Latina Training Institute on March 14 and 15, 2019, at the Hilton Hotel in Albany, New York.

Since 1996, the Latino Commission on AIDS has hosted Reunion Latina to provide an opportunity for service providers and those who utilize those services to explore ways to improve services, to share strategies to overcome health challenges, to coordinate efforts to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and to work toward eliminating health disparities in Latino communities.

The two-day training institute will feature a combination of panel presentations, workshops and institutes that will explore the use of prevention tools against HIV, e.g., PrEP and PEP, the management of HIV as a chronic disease, and linking clients to treatment. Topics will include the impact of HIV, hep C, and STIs in Hispanic/Latino communities; stigma, homophobia and transphobia in Hispanic/Latino communities; the importance of addressing the issues faced

by Hispanic/Latino long-term survivors over the age of fifty; specific transgender health issues; and incorporating Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U) into training and support. The institute will cover other health conditions affecting Latino communities such as viral hepatitis, STIs, and opioids, among many other topics.

The Latin Commission on AIDS proffers that this training is suitable for “health care providers, nurses, outreach workers, case managers, people living with HIV, community leaders, elected officials, health department representatives” and anyone else interested in advancing the health conditions in Latino communities.

Limited scholarships to Reunion Latina were made available for people living with HIV who are residents of New York State and are actively involved in the HIV/AIDS field.

For the complete program and to learn more about the training institute, visit: www.latinoaids.org/reunion. The registration fee is $110 and includes all written conference materials, two continental breakfasts, two box lunches and one dinner/celebration.

Two powerhouse ASOs in New York City have announced a merger that, when completed, will create one of the largest comprehensive HIV/AIDS service providers in the City.

Housing Works, the nation’s leading HIV/AIDS advocacy and service organization with a chain of well-known businesses in New York City, founded in 1990 as an outgrowth of ACT UP, announced its merger with Bailey House, the nation’s first HIV/AIDS supportive housing provider which, since 1983, has also provided housing and other services for marginalized New Yorkers.

The new entity arising from the merger will retain the Bailey House name while expanding services, including primary medical care. Housing Works will also extend its Federally Qualified Health Center to incorporate Bailey House’s behavioral health program in East Harlem.

In a written statement, Daniel W. Tietz, CEO of Bailey House, said, “This partnership provides us the opportunity to jointly develop new, ground-up supportive and affordable housing under the Bailey House brand. Together, we will help more low-income New Yorkers achieve the best possible health by expanding housing, healthcare, and behavioral health services.”

Charles King, co-founder and CEO of Housing Works, said, “Gina Quattrochi was a dynamic and creative force in the response to the AIDS crisis,” speaking about the long-time leader of Bailey House who died in late 2016. “This pairing builds on her legacy of vigorous advocacy on behalf of New Yorkers living with and affected by HIV/AIDS and continues the evolution of the Bailey House mission.”

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A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

photos courtesy Latino Commission on AIDS

Housing Works Merges with Bailey House

newsbreak Chair of the Bailey House Board of Directors, Matt Farber, continued, “We are thrilled to team-up with Housing Works to expand and enhance services to some of New York City’s most marginalized communities...As Bailey House celebrates its 35th anniversary, we are proud and grateful for the partnership with Housing Works as we together continue as a leading HIV/AIDS supportive housing provider in New York City.”

For more information about Housing Works and its services, visit www.housingworks.org. For more information about Bailey House, visit www.baileyhouse.org.

LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN 2019 LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN 2019 is a project established

by Visual AIDS artist member Jessica Whitbread in 2013.

“Why not do something nice for the women most forgotten about?” in the AIDS pandemic, said Whitbread. “I started LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN in 2013 as a way to rally women living with HIV to celebrate themselves as well as to be celebrated by friends, lovers, children and loving souls.”

The LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN 2019 Valentine Pop-up Exhibition at the Abrons Art Center, Second Floor Gallery, will be a display of hundreds of handmade paper valentines made by artists and friends. These valentines will then be Visual AIDS’ paper-making workshops mailed to self-identifying women living with HIV internationally for Valentine’s Day. Artists, activists and HIV-positive at Dieu Donné for LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN 2017. women will come together at Dieu Donné’s paper making Photo by Jonathan Bouknight studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to create unique handmade valentines. On January 28 and 29, 2019, Visual AIDS, Visual AIDS Artist+ Member the Fire Island Artist Residency, Dieu Donné and Positive Women’s Network-USA hosted four paper-makJoyce McDonald making handing valentine workshops to create valentines, which were then mailed to women living with HIV who made paper Valentines for LOVE signed up for one.

POSITIVE WOMEN 2018.

The opening reception is scheduled for Friday, February 1, 2019, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. and is free to Photo by Alex Fialho the public. It will include reflections on the importance of love and community-building from Visual AIDS Artist+ Members and others from the Positive Women’s Network and She’s So VOCAL (Voices of Community Activists & Leaders). The exhibit will run through February 3, 2019, from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.

Immediately after the exhibition, these valentines will be mailed to HIV-positive women internationally and will arrive in time for Valentine’s Day. Love Positive Women-USA is a national membership body of women living with HIV and our allies that exists to strengthen the strategic power of all women living with HIV in the United States. https://visualaids.org/events/detail/lpw-opening-2019.

There’s an APP for That!

TechHealth Sdn Bhd., a startup located in Malaysia, is working globally to end HIV “one download at a time,” as their website puts it, with a mobile phone app created by a medical graduate from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Perdana University Branch. “Burnd! An App for the Sexually Active” is designed to help users take charge of their sexual health by giving them access to the largest database in the world of HIV/ STD testing sites, locations providing PEP, and rape crisis centers.

The app, which works in more than sixty-five countries, directs users to the nearest healthcare facilities based on their age, gender, and sexual orientation. The service is completely confidential—no personal information other than the user’s location is collected in order to enable servers to find the healthcare facility nearest to them. To ensure that no one is discriminated against when they go to get tested, the app has filtering systems in place to ensure that a healthcare facility is appropriate to that user. If TechHealth receives complaints from users about a particular healthcare facility, they investigate the complaint and, if necessary, remove that facility from the network.

The same applies for user looking for PEP after a high risk exposure. The app assesses the user’s eligibility for PEP before directing them to the nearest location providing the post-exposure treatment. This will help users at home or travelling abroad find PEP in a timely fashion.

Burnd also has a segment called “Rape Protocol.” That portion of the app details important steps to take following a sexual assault or rape incident and directs the user to the nearest hospital equipped to handle rape/sexual assault. The priority is getting women and men who have been sexually assaulted to the nearest hospital to get the medical aid they need including treatment of STDs, HIV PEP, and emergency contraception if needed, followed by proper psychological assessments. This function is currently available in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Finland, Ireland, Germany, New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, and the U.K. In the coming months, TechHealth plans to expand coverage to as many countries as possible.

The app also comes with a viral load and CD4 monitor to help users keep track of their levels and to motivate them to reach an undetectable viral load. Users can also set medication reminders and helps users keep track of their testing and treatment history.

The Burnd app is available at both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Part of TechHealth’s profits will be used to fund anonymous HIV testing by community based organizations globally (especially in low income countries and countries where being LGBTQ is criminalized) and also to produce creative safer sex campaigns.

For more information on TechHealth Sdn Bhd and the Burnd app, log on to: www.burnttechhealth.com.

—Reporting by Hank Trout FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

11

by Ruby Comer

Antoniojuan Randle-Garcia

14

LifeCycle (ALC).

That was his second ride, as in the eighties, he rode in the second California Ride, before it was called ALC! You might wonder how he made the trek from San Francisco to Los Angeles: he had a customized three-wheeler that was operated by a hand crank.

Well…if you haven’t guessed it by now, AJ’s other war is AIDS. He’s unyielding in battling this enemy!

Turning seventy-five on the first of January, the vivacious Vet seems to wear a permanent smile. His positive attitude and boundless energy far exceeds this gal’s! Residing on Elizabeth Lake, a natural body of water in the Angeles National Forest just north of L.A., AJ welcomes me to his comfy abode. We sit alongside the water.

Ruby Comer: What brought you to the shores of Elizabeth Lake?

Antoniojuan Randle-Garcia: Well, I’m a country boy at heart. [AJ surveys the picturesque view.] I’ve

been here five years.

It is absolutely enchanting here. Tell me, what is a typical day for AJ? Walking my dogs, putting puzzles together, and spending time with other veterans. I also enjoy my family—and I love karaoke.

Who doesn’t enjoy karaoke?! Give me that mic! Say, when did you first hear about the epidemic?

In 1981, while I was in serving in the Army. My son contracted it from a blood transfusion.

Oh…my…God. So sorry to hear AJ. Damnit. How has the epidemic affected you?

It has made me more passionate in how I feel about this war that I came home to…which doesn’t seem to have an end.

Isn’t that the kicker?! How did the disease impact you and John?

We were only with each other, but

Ruby illustration by Davidd Batalon; photos courtesy AJ Randle-Garcia

W

ar. Unfortunately, it’s part of life. For Antoniojuan (AJ) Garcia, he fought one war and continues to battle another.

The seventy-four year old Arroyo Grande, California native, served in Vietnam, where he endured a causality. During a usual military operation, his legs were injured and AJ has used a wheelchair ever since.

But he didn’t let that deter him. After thirty-eight years, Officer Randle-Garcia happily retired from the Army. The gentleman was also lucky in love. He met his future husband, John Pence Randle, when they were kids. (John also enlisted in the Army the same time AJ did but he didn’t make a career out of it.)

At thirteen, they both told their parents about being in love. AJ’s father’s remark, “Just don’t tell anyone else.” In the fifties, being gay meant you were mentally deranged. My god, how threatened and insecure people can be—even today!

(Gulp.) Frightening. Fear.

AJ and John were together forty-seven years and raised two sons. Several years ago, tragically, John was killed in a car accident. Around that time, their youngest son, Junior, was killed serving his country. Capt. Antoniojuan Eduardo Franco Ablaza Randle-Garcia Jr., died July 18, 2002, in the war against terrorism. He was forty-two.

Gerald, AJ and John’s other son, is living with HIV, which inspired AJ to ride in the 2013 AIDS/

A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

still safe. [He pauses, looking out onto the breathtaking vista of pine trees and the Sierra Pelona Mountains.] We didn’t need anyone else but each other.

until he passed in 2004.

Whaaat?! [My head spins.] Wait!

Yes. AJ Junior and Gerald are my biological sons.

Our other nine sons adopted us.

They were boys who came from unloving homes.

They saw how loved and cared for our sons were. One by one they moved in with us. John was the soft one between us. He was stern but would give in.

I was the voice that kept order.

How tender. I don’t think those kinds of relationships happen all that often, AJ. [He displays a satisfying grin.]

When did you first get tested, and was it anxiety provoking?

I was tested when I was giving blood. I knew that I would be negative, so it was not emotional.

Do you get tested regularly?

Yes, even though I’m not with anyone now.

Good for you.

What was it like riding in the ALC at sixty-nine years young?

Ruby, it was like PT in the military.

photo by Cheryl Mann Photography

[I chuckle.] What were the challenges?

My challenge was keeping my mind on the ride and not my mobility.

As you know, there’s a high rate of HIV infection in your generation. Can you address this?

Well most of the guys early on seemed to not care [about using protection]. As time went on, they opened their eyes. It was too late.

Why do you think that was?

No one believed it could happen to them.

Yes, regrettably, that always seems to be the way—“It will never happen to me.”

How can we better reach out to them?

Just by what we are doing, sharing our experiences.

FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

Who do you consider a hero in the AIDS epidemic?

Everyone who speaks out and supports us in this war. I am in the fight until the end.

Fantastic to have you aboard. Do you have any other comments?

Get tested and always be safe—even with your partner.

Fantastic advice, AJ. I’m excited to know more about you and John’s relationship.

We were in love with each other, Ruby, plain and simple. It’s like any other relationship, there were ups and there were downs. Communication was our glue. Even when I was deployed, we kept the channel open to talk about everything. We raised ten boys together

Bless you guys.

Holy Merciful Mary! AJ, you need to write a memoir! I’m fascinated and want to know more. Please write a book. [A gentle breeze whisks by and we both gaze at the ripples in the lake from a passing boat.] Looking back on your military career, are there any regrets?

I have no regrets. If I could, I would still be enlisted. Even though it was not always easy being gay, I never had any problems.

Nice to hear. Any words for the younger gay generation?

Be who you are at all times. Be informed and conduct yourselves accordingly. Remember, we are all in this fight for our community.

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.

15

Doctor, Doctor

by

Hank Trout finding a replaceent for a trusted hiv

physician is no easy task

on me like that!

When you’re a long-term HIV/AIDS survivor, and have been relying on the same healthcare provider for quite some time, changing doctors can be problematic, both physically and emotionally. It’s like losing a boxing coach.

I have been with the same large HMO here in San Francisco since 1992. Doctor “C” has been my primary caregiver for most of that time. I first saw him in 1998. The doctor I had been seeing from 1992 through 1998 left the HMO and went to Sacramento to work for the VA. I was sad to see him go—in addition to being a wise, compassionate general practitioner, he was also one of the HMO’s leading HIV/AIDS doctors, the one who talked me into taking the cocktail of medications starting in 1996. His departure was quite a loss for the HMO—and for me. Before his departure, he recommended Dr. C to me, assuring me that “Dr. C knows as much about treating HIV/AIDS as I know,” and that was indeed reassuring.

In the years since, Dr. C and I have been through a lot together in addition to my HIV-related care, although everything is HIV-related for me these days. We’ve fought long and hard together—pneumonia, shingles, ringworm, influenza, pink eye, arthritis, osteoporosis, COPD, emphysema, asthma, herniated discs and compression fractures in my spine, cancer of the appendix, my loss of muscle mass, and a sprained pelvis, just for starters! Dr. C has been there in my corner throughout all of those fights.

Of course, I haven’t always been happy with some of Dr. C’s diagnoses and treatments. For instance, a few years ago, he maintained that the excruciating pain in my back that went on for months and got worse month after month was just a muscle spasm. The MRI that I insisted on revealed that “muscle spasm” to be three compression fractures in the middle of my spine. He also missed the cancer of the appendix that was revealed, again, only because I insisted on more extensive testing when my belly ballooned up

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to three times its normal size. So Dr. C hasn’t been perfect, by a long shot, but I’ve stuck with him for two decades now.

The last time I saw him, Dr. C advised me that he was retiring at the end of 2018. And I know I’m going to miss him.

Who’s going to take care of me now? Who else knows everything we’ve been through? Will I have to start all over training a new doctor?

Dr. C assured me that he would recommend for me another physician at the HMO who is as knowledgeable about HIV treatment as he is. I haven’t met the guy yet, though. I know only that it will indeed be a male doctor—looking through the roster of physicians on the HMO’s website reveals that all of the HMO’s specialists in HIV/AIDS are male doctors. And they all look younger than the virus in my blood.

So what do I want from this new doctor?

I want a doctor who knows at least as much as I know about current treatment options and the prospects for a cure.

I want a doctor who understands that since I have had the virus coursing through my blood for thirty years now, everything wrong with me is HIV-related and must be seen through that lens.

I want a doctor who understands the problems inherent in aging, and especially the problems of aging with HIV. I want a doctor who understands that

“U=U” is not just an aspirational slogan.

I want a doctor who already comprehends the word “constant,” as in, “I am in constant pain” (a word I had to teach Dr. C).

I want a doctor who isn’t dismissive of alternative treatments such as acupuncture and therapeutic massage.

Mostly, I want a doctor who will listen to me; a doctor who will acknowledge that maybe I’ve learned something about this virus in the thirty years I’ve carried it; a doctor who will actually take the time to talk with me.

A doctor like Dr. C. When Dr. C first told me that he is retiring at the end of the year, I had no idea that it would affect me emotionally. But I have to admit, it saddens me to change doctors. It feels like getting divorced—at the other person’s instigation; it feels almost like being abandoned or, at the very least, like losing a good friend, something I will never get used to. But we’ve all had to change doctors from time to time and I know I’ll get over this.

I just wonder, who is this young whippersnapper whom I have to train in the proper care of a sixty-six-year-old curmudgeon?

Hank Trout, Editor at Large, edited Drummer, Malebox, and Folsom magazines in the early 1980s.

A long-term survivor of HIV/AIDS (diagnosed in 1989), he is a thirty-eight-year resident of San Francisco, where he lives with his fiancé Rick. Follow him on Twitter @HankTroutWriter.

A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

illustration by Timothy J. Haines

W

hat do you mean, you’re retiring at the end of the year?!

You can’t do that! We’ve been together for twenty years! You can’t just walk out

The Valentine Void

love starts with the self

illustration by Timothy J. Haines

I

’m at a very interesting stage in my life.

At the young age of thirty-three I am watching things starting to take shape for me, professionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. 2018 brought a lot of these things into a full perspective for me, and really challenged me to figure out just how I was going to navigate these aspects of my life over the next few years. Especially in the romance department, which I can’t say I’ve ever been able to fully figure out.

I’m a publicly HIV-positive Black Queer man. I have nearly 30,000 followers on Twitter and have written thousands of articles for over forty magazines in my career. I now have two book deals and am preparing for the release of my debut novel. Suffice it to say, being this person has not made it easy in the dating department. A lot of people aspire to be like me or are inspired by me but never ready to walk side by side with me. There is a lot of attention that can be drawn onto a relationship, especially when dating a person who is known as HIV-positive.

I’ve had my fair share of rejection because of my status. If one of my articles, tweets or memes goes viral, one of the first things that people will attack me for is my serostatus. I’ve been called every kind of “AIDS-infested faggot” one could imagine.

In the past it used to break my spirit some, but now I am able to brush it off. As for dating, I’ve had people tell me that they can’t sleep with someone who is HIV-positive. Or that they like me but can’t see themselves ever dating someone who is HIV-positive, especially one who is public about their status.

It was much harder to shake the rejection from dating, though. It really stings anytime a person says that to me— “I can’t date someone HIV-positive.” It makes me feel so devalued, like I’m damaged goods.

It is hard when you see so many in love and dating and getting engaged and married— all things that I want for myself someday that I’m not sure if I will ever have. But I’m also aware that part of this has been my own doing. Not having the capacity to let anyone in or be close to me because I’ve been rejected before. It was something that FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

I had been holding on to for a very long time, until 2018 when some major changes in my life put everything in perspective.

My grandmother was diagnosed with brain cancer back in July. That news really shook me up, a reminder that you have to do things while you are here because you never know when your time may be up.

The following month, my younger brother and his girlfriend had their first child.

Holding my new nephew, on the day he was born, was life-changing. For the first time I had to really start thinking about setting myself up for the possibility of having kids and, even more so, a relationship.

I’ve learned over time that there is nothing wrong with being single. The world isn’t too kind on single people, as it is often looked at as a negative thing, rather than an option that could work for many. There were definitely times when I truly wanted to be single and I thrived in it. Especially with the types of sexual encounters and experiences that I was able to fully enjoy. But now, at the age of thirty-three, my spirit has shifted some and I’m recognizing the importance of taking this journey into the next stage of public life with someone by my side.

The Valentine void for me isn’t just about not having a partner. It was more about the fact that anytime I was serious about dating, I was using men to fix voids

I was unwilling to take care of myself. The work I should have been doing on myself I was pushing to the side. I wasn’t working through my own traumas. I didn’t love myself. I wouldn’t want to date me. I was more willing to use other people to fill those voids—thinking that outside validation was more important than self-validation. I no longer think that.

I have done the work on myself over the past couple of years to now open myself up to proactively dating. As someone who is Black and queer, there was no roadmap. I didn’t date in my teens and young adulthood as I was still struggling with coming out. So, because of that, I got a late start in the dating department.

I used that as an excuse though. As a crutch because regardless of when I started dating or being ready to date, I didn’t want to do the work.

So, for this Valentine’s Day, I will no longer feel any void. Even if I am not dating someone, I always have me. Sometimes, it is necessary to invest in self-love.

It might be time for me to be my own Valentine for a change.

George M. Johnson is a journalist and activist.

He has written for Entertainment Tonight, Ebony, TheGrio, TeenVogue, NBC News, and several other major publications. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram @iamgmjohnson.

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Justin B. Terry-Smith, MPH, DrPH, 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. Visit his main Web site at www.justinbsmith.com. He welcomes your questions at justinterrysmith@gmail.com.

photo by Don Harris © Don Harris Photographics, LLC. all rights reserved

S

o, here we are again. It’s time for that commercialized holiday we call Valentine’s Day, or Lover’s Day for those of us who don’t like St. Valentine.

Being infected with HIV can be rough if you are looking for a little romance, but what can be rougher is being rejected because of it.

Personally, I can say I was lucky to find my soulmate and husband but not many of us are that lucky. Many of us have now decided that we will only date other people living with HIV. I asked a couple of people why would they only date HIV-positive people and I heard people say that they like the fact that the person they are dating knows what they are going through, that they like not using a condom and that they feel more supported; all these factors were quite interesting to me. When I was dating, it was hard to disclose, but I did eventually. As I became more comfortable with my HIV status, it became easier and easier to disclose to my partners. Also, now that PrEP and U=U have come into play should we as HIV-positive people only date other HIV-positive people?

I did a little bit more research and looked into HIV dating sites. Of course, a lot of them catered to both HIV-positive and negative singles.

There were many choices and most had the typical dating questions for singles like, Do you plan on getting

FEBRUARY 2019 •• A&U A&U DECEMBER 2018

married? Do you want kids? What are you looking for in your partner? But also they had questions on whether or not those looking for love were undetectable or on PrEP. I’ve dated HIV-negative and positive men before and to me there was no difference. When I’ve been rejected because of my HIV status I’ve learned to say in my own head, “FUCK YOU….

NEXT!!” Honestly, if you can’t say that, chances are you are going to beat yourself up or at least, to a small degree, feel badly because of the rejection. Just say, “FUCK YOU” and keep it moving.

Why waste your time feeling bad about something you have no control over? Ignorance is bliss and now you should let them go in peace.

I started thinking about HIV-positive singles sites again and I asked myself, “Are they really necessary? And, if so, can someone tell me why?”

In my opinion my answer is, Yes, they are necessary. One of the main reasons why I would think that positive dating sites are necessary is that people are tired of rejection. I know plenty of people that go through anxiety just by going on a date and having to think about how they are going to disclose their HIV status to someone who is negative. Then you have to think about how stigma affects a person. People do not want to be looked down upon because of their HIV status. So they feel that they

have no pressure about disclosing if they go on a positive dating website.

There is no added pressure of lying or disclosing one’s status just to find love.

Another question arose from my research: Why should HIV-positive people have to feel as though they have to go to these dating websites to feel a certain level or acceptance?

My answer is we should not have to. There is too much education on HIV out there for ignorant people to reject you because of your HIV status. It is wrong. But we all have our “preferences,” don’t we? Again, let us not agonize over ignorant people who obviously only see the virus rather than seeing you for the beautiful person you are. You can only be who you are.

Trust me, someone is going to love you regardless of your HIV status. I didn’t think I would find love, but I will have been married for ten years in August and we have been together for about thirteen years. In those thirteen years we have adopted two beautiful sons (now twenty-two and twenty-0ne years old), my husband supported me while getting my doctorate and we continue on this journey together. It has been and will continue to be an adventure.

And status had nothing to do with it! ◊

19

BLike

A&U Gallery

lue

Her L

ike the six-armed Shiva frequently depicted in her art, one might say that Siona Benjamin paints with a multitude of hands, each expressing in her work the rich blend of cultural, ethnic, religious, and gender identities by which she defines herself.

Born and raised in India as a member of a small, generations-old Jewish Bene Israel group within a predominantly Hindi and Muslim society, Siona was educated in Catholic and Zoroastrian schools before coming to the American Midwest as a graduate student. She has lived and worked in the United States ever since, embracing her additional identity as a transplanted member of Western society while continuing to nurture and explore her firm roots in Eastern culture. Her art, reflective of her rich and varied life experience, is itself expressed in a variety of ways, from painting to collage, relief, video, installation, dance, and apparel.

Her work seeks to debunk ideals of societal conformity by instead examining the true, uniting commonality of the human experience: that in some way, each and every one of us, like the artist herself, uniquely stands apart in a self-defined sense of “otherness.” She leaves that term open to response and interpretation by each individual viewer’s sense of their own “otherness” and its potential conflict with what are perceived as societal “norms.”

This holds true whether one’s sense of apartness is self-defined through one’s gender identity, physicality, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, age, or a health challenge. In this way, Siona’s work includes and embraces the HIV/AIDS experience as another identity to be considered, to be brought into the whole of the human experience as part of the diversity that truly unites us.

A&U contributor Michael Schreiber recently spoke with Siona Benjamin.

Michael Schreiber: An overarching invitation in your work is for viewers to consider themselves, in your words, “blue like me.” Why

20

Artist Siona Benjamin invites viewers to examine their own “otherness” as she explores her own

by Michael Schreiber

do you depict your figures as having blue skin?

Siona Benjamin: The constant fluidity of the transcultural immigrant identity has been important in my research and work.

Identity is defined through race, ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality. The body presented in my paintings transgresses all these boundaries, as it belongs everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It dissects and analyzes itself and perhaps lets the viewer do the same. Here it is, inside and out, adorned and naked, together and apart. In sickness and in health.

Very often when I have looked down at my skin, it has turned blue. It tends to do that when I face certain situations of people stereotyping and categorizing other people who are unlike themselves. As an artist, I draw from my sources—my Jewishness, my Indianness, my Americanness—but I am not just one of these things, but all of them, and much more. I have therefore over the years developed many blue-skinned characters in my paintings that transcend categorization, and invite viewers to look both into and beyond their own identities and their perception of other categories. This blue self-portrait of sorts takes on many roles and forms, through which I theatrically explore ancient and contemporary dilemmas. In this process of recycling and rejuvenating, they merely remind me in making the work, and hopefully my audience in viewing the work, that mythmaking is cyclical and timeless.

In your art, you’ve awakened and pulled a small army of Jewish heroines from musty biblical morality stories, and thrust them into combat with today’s societal challenges. Can you speak to why Finding Home #63 you made this creative decision?

(Fereshteh) “Ruth,” 2004, While growing up in India Gouache and 22K gold leaf I recall being surrounded by on wood panel, 9 by 12 inchidols and iconography that were es. Image courtesy the artist taboo in my Jewish world. I eyed and ACA Galleries, New York A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

JANUARY 2019 • A&U

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A&U Gallery these figures from a distance, captivated with their radiance and richness. Since Judaism stressed monotheism and iconoclasm, I somehow resisted the lure of figurative drawing for years. Initially making abstract work and then later, if I did venture to depict the forbidden fruit, my figures were shrouded with darkened faces. Now my work is filled with graven images, as sudFinding Home #76 denly it became (Fereshteh) “Tzipoclear during my rah,” 2006, gouache years studying and designing sets and 22K gold leaf on paper, 15 by 12 inches. for theater that I liked the narrative, Image courtesy the artist and ACA Gallerthe theatrical, the ies, New York decorative lyrical line, this ornateness I carried with me all along. These figures have thus become characters in my paintings that act out their parts, recording, balancing, rectifying, restoring and absorbing. It is through all this I understand how I can dip into my own personal specifics and universalize, thus playing the role of an artist/activist.

My work is celebratory of my womanhood, my abilities, my strengths and my ambitions. After having struggled long with my own hybrid background and experience, I am beginning to see more clearly now that this blend can be humorous, enlightening and revealing. The ornate culture from which I came once seemed difficult and unnecessary to apply in my work. Now I have found a way to use it, to be able to weave current issues and parts of my life in its intricacies, thus making this ornateness strong and meaningful. In this way, I attempt to create a dialogue between the ancient and the modern, forcing a confrontation of unresolved issues. The forms, though, may appear unconventional and exotic to some. I would like viewers to transcend this apparent exoticness and absorb the core message: tolerance of diversity.

You’ve written about two especially powerful works, in which your heroines seek to “repair the ills of the world.” In one, Ruth (Finding Home #63) is seen “ingesting the weapon that threatens to destroy.” In the other, Miriam’s cup is depicted “brimming with sustenance, health and wisdom” (Finding Home #73). These paintings seem especially relatable to those impacted by HIV/AIDS. Can you comment?

Yes, I believe that these two, amongst other works, can be very relatable to those impacted with HIV/AIDS. I believe that these works can impact all of “the other”: those left out of the mainstream, those misjudged and those misinterpreted. In Miriam (Finding Home #73), for example, she seems to brim with health, but looking closer, she has a hospital drip connected to her, and so perhaps she is sick? Controlled? A victim of war? A victim of any form of disease? AIDS? Miriam in the Torah was inflicted with a skin disease when she did not comply with the rules, and so just like her, will those who do not comply be misjudged and therefore discarded?

22

The character Ruth strikes me as faithful, benevolent and altruistic. By learning about these various characters in the Torah, I found the study to be rather like analyzing characters from a Shakespeare play. After learning as much as I could about the roles they played, I wish to make my interpretation, or midrash.

Instead of painting them in their time and setting, I wish to bring them forward to our times and have them combat today’s evils: wars, nuclear weapons and intolerance. How would Ruth react, how would she contain, destroy or stop the ills and injustices of today? I imagine that, given her benevolence, she would ingest the weapon, she would swallow the dagger that threatens to destroy, and with this effort she would hope to arrest the mushroom cloud even before it envelopes the world in darkness.

What else in your wide body of work might viewers impacted by HIV/AIDS find of particular resonance to their experience?

In Finding Home #60 ‘My Magic Carpet,’ I wonder, does the magic carpet transport to the promised land, or does it dislocate?

Her one hand transforms into a paintbrush. Is it a paintbrush or blood that flows wasted into the drain, caused by wars or sickness? Two of her many hands are shackled, but does she know that she holds the key? She balances a bowl that collects golden drops, or is it acid rain? While one claw-like hand destroys her own painting, the two hands above rekindle a flame of hope.

Another relatable work is Finding Home #76 (Fereshteh) ‘ZipA&U • FEBRUARY 2019

porah.’ Zipporah translates into English as “bird,” and here it can represent anything, including the HIV/AIDS experience. The Zipporah in my painting presents a dichotomy of ideas and interpretations. Is the figure Finding Home #73 in the painting voluntarily flying to a new (Fereshteh) “Miriam,” land or home? Or is she being carried away 2006, gouache and 22K by this fire bird? The umbilical cord of her gold leaf on wood panel, sari becomes a tallit, a prayer shawl, the 10 by 7 inches. Image fringes of which are entangled in the claws courtesy the artist and of the bird. Will the binding of her tefillin, ACA Galleries, New York the small boxes containing verses from the Torah that are worn during prayers, save the creatures from being killed by the hunters? Perhaps we are mistaken, and those who we think are hunters are guardians, “fereshteh,” angels, in disguise, souls of the soldiers from the wars of our ancestors. Futile blood that was once shed and wants a chance again to save and rejuvenate the “tikkun”—the fixing—of this world.

Blood is a frequent theme in your work. Can you speak to its symbolic meaning in your art?

Lifeblood runs in our veins. Artmaking is the lifeblood for me as an artist, Blood is also shed in vain very often, in wars, to disease, in many misgivings that humanity has done through the ages. Red blood runs in my transcultural blue body. Blood is life-giving and also life-taking.

The concept of “finding home” is also a pervasive theme throughout your work, most especially expressed in a series bearing that title. Do you think a sense of otherness and one of exile—whether it’s literal exile or a feeling of not belonging—go hand in hand?

Sometimes it feels safe to fit into a compartment and fall either way from the fence, but then I am reminded that although precarious, this position gives me a wider perspective of being able to see both sides. This is exactly what interests me in de-categorizing in my work. There are persistent issues that disturb me, so I choose to present them. I do not wish to be a token artist for any one category as tribal impulses and nationalism are deeply ingrained in us. Therefore because of the lack of tribal security and comfort, I am an outsider and I am on a quest for special insights into the situation. I have always been on a quest for making hybrid images or characters in my work, a sort of universal being that comes from one point of view, but leads the viewer to unexpected destinations.

The characters in my world have to shed their skin of religion while in turn celebrating it, shed the skin of nationalism while at the same time being proud of it, shed Finding Home #71 the skin of affliction while also embrac(Fereshteh) “Eda,” 2006, ing it, and completely shed the skin of Gouache and 22K gold tribalism and wrong use of power. Once leaf on paper, 17 by 13 these skins are shed, one then can coninches. Image courtesy struct a new language of understanding, the artist and ACA Galbecause what was once “the other” is leries, New York none other than oneself!

For more information about the artist, log on to: www.artsiona.com.

Michael Schreiber is a writer, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His first book, One-Man Show: The Life and Art of Bernard Perlin, is being adapted into a feature-length documentary film. His next book, a collaboration with his husband about their Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in Iowa, is due out in early 2020.

FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

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Reality Check

by

Tim Hinkhouse one individuals’s fight for hiv justice

B

ack in the late eighties, I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area and, at the time, I was deep off into a serious drug and alcohol addiction. I was an invincible nineteen-year-old man without regard for my own safety, or anyone else’s for that matter. My addiction to illegal substances led to meth and IV drug use and sharing needles that resulted in a positive diagnosis for HIV in the early 1990s.

I believe that this was the main mode of infection but I won’t rule out all of the unprotected sex I engaged in with women that traded their bodies for drugs. This was a time in my life that I am not proud of but it is still a part of who I was early on. My HIV diagnosis wouldn’t be known to me until I returned home to Portland, Oregon, and donated plasma as a way to make some money.

This was how I was alerted to having HIV. You would have thought that such a life-changing diagnosis would have made me change my behaviors and it would have forced me to be a responsible adult. Yeah, not so much. I chose not to make any changes to my life regarding my drug and alcohol use and especially my appetite for unprotected sex. Sometime in September of 1991 I made the choice to stop the IV drug use. I kept on drinking and engaging in reckless unprotected sex along with not disclosing my HIV status, which may make me sound like a real monster to those reading this.

My last girlfriend who I was with when I was free—I cheated on her with two other women. None of the relationships that I had ever started were rooted in any truth; it was all lies because I couldn’t even be honest with myself. Internally, I was trapped in my own hell. I really wanted to end the self-inflicted pain that tortured my soul and stop myself from harming the lives of those I came in contact with. I didn’t care about myself, which was outwardly reflected through all of my reckless behaviors.

After my cheating betrayal of my girlfriend she called law enforcement and let them know that I was HIV-positive and sleeping around. I was arrested on multiple counts of attempted murder, attempted assault in the first degree, and reckless endangerment charges. This was at a time when an HIV diagnosis was commonly referred to FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

as an “an automatic Death Sentence”—the early nineties, when there weren’t lifesaving medications available. This resulted in me getting sentenced to more than sixty-five years in prison. I put people’s lives at risk, which I had no right to do. I made this selfish decision anyway. My words are that I never had the intention to harm anyone, but my actions spoke much louder than my words did. I needed to be held accountable.

Looking back at that time in my life, I needed to be given some type of reality check. Going to prison literally saved my life when I refused to take care of myself or look out for the safety of others. This experience has opened my heart and mind to someone other than myself. Now I am all grown up and no longer do I make impulsive decisions, so you can say that I have changed over the past two and a half decades I have been incarcerated.

Since around 2012–13, I have been engaged in HIV advocacy for myself and others, trying to become involved in the movement in society to end HIV criminalization. With outside support from family and friends, I have been able to contact the organizations directly involved politically to make this change.

Because of these contacts, I have been afforded the opportunity to receive via snail mail, valuable information about how I am able to plead my case to the only political person that has the power to do anything for me—the newly re-elected Oregon Governor Kate Brown, to whom I have submitted a

clemency application in late 2015. Governor Brown has received several letters on my behalf from people all over the globe asking her to let me out of prison.

Thanks to my petition on Change. org asking for signatures in support of my clemency application and who knows how many handwritten letters were sent directly to the governor, I hope to make progress. My biggest cheerleader/HIV advocate has made this all possible for me! Recently I received a copy of a letter sent on my behalf to the governor from Oregon’s largest and oldest HIV advocacy organization asking for my release.

I am truly blessed. I have a very humble heart because of all the help I have received in my quest for eventual freedom. My promise that I have made to everyone upon my release is to become a very outspoken HIV advocate to anyone that needs my help. I will be their voice and their advocate.

I want to encourage anyone reading this to use your time and resources to be supportive of those affected by HIV criminalization. HIV is a treatable chronic infection now and should be viewed as such and not treated like the plague it once was.

Tim Hinkhouse has been living with HIV for at least twenty-nine years this March 2019 and is relatively healthy for his age. Being a long time survivor with HIV has taught him a lot of important life lessons that he probably wouldn’t have learned otherwise. He is a freelance writer with a blog that can be seen at TheBody.com. Contact him by email at hi.timothy7019@gmail.com.

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Not Telling A Story Advocate Bryan C. Jones Wants to Change the Narrative About HIV

by Mel Baker Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Sean Black

W

hen I interview Bryan by phone from his home in Cleveland, he is full of insight, strong opinions and energy. I spend a lot of time trying to lock down the timeline of his story, but he’s not so keen on the idea of another profile of him as the “ghetto activist.”

“I hate it when people say, ‘Brian can you tell your story?’ I don’t have a damn story. I have chapters of my life I haven’t lived yet, so

why do you want me to tell ‘a’ story?”

I soon realize I can’t profile Bryan and his current activism by simplifying his life into the narrative of “one man’s triumph over hardship.” Instead his journey moves back and forth, front ways and sideways, down and up.

Many Chapters On World AIDS Day 2018, Bryan is in Ottawa with Canada’s Minister of Health as the nation becomes the first to endorse the Unde-

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tectable = Untransmittable (U=U) campaign.

The culmination of a long campaign promoting the fact that people under treatment with undetectable HIV can’t transmit it to others.

In 1984, Bryan is a senior at Florida A&M University, but fears he may have the disease killing gay men. To avoid anyone finding out at college, he travels all the way to Atlanta to be given a series of tests. A few weeks later he gets a call telling him he has “gay-related immune deficiency” (GRID) and only six months to live, before the doctor quickly hangs up.

In 2017, Bryan and more than 180 protestors are arrested inside the U.S. Capitol to protest the Republican efforts to

In the late eighties Bryan is living his dream as a performer. He converts to Islam, as his sister had done decades earlier, but like so many at the time he finds little solace in his faith community. “Because, if you had AIDS, it was obvious that you did something that wasn’t Islamic.”

In 2015, he is invited to join the People Living with AIDS advisory board of RAHMA (Reaching All HIV Positive Muslims) an organization dedicated to helping Muslim’s infected with HIV. * It’s as if HIV, stigma, racism and homophobia have been like a brick shattering the mirror of Bryan’s early self-image. Like any committed artist, he has collected those mirror pieces and turned them into the art of his activism, using each piece to reflect something he has learned, illuminating the way for other’s facing HIV.

Silence Equals Death Bryan’s activism has always been about solving the problems he sees right in front of him. “When I moved to Cleveland’s Garden Valley neighborhood, where Jones has taken the Direct Inspiring Reachable Teachable (DIRT) advo- Atlanta [in the 1980s], I was doing activism becacy into the place where it’s most needed fore people knew what it was. Taking care of gut the Affordable Care Act. people and rallying around friends.”

In 2008, Bryan has survived cancer in ACT UP’s motto “Silence Equals prison. He’s being treated for HIV, but as he Death” was a demand for government leaves his prison cell, he’s given HIV meds action and a cry for compassion. For Bryan that he knows won’t work on his virus. At and many of his friends, silence equaled the bus station, he drops the useless pills into the twin deaths of stigma and isolation. the garbage, knowing that he will have to take “Even though we worked to take care of care of his own health. each other we never talked about the ‘conIn 2019, Bryan is making plans to return dition.’ Little code words; you know, they’re to South Africa, to help people living with sick, he went to the hospital. I was diagnosed, AIDS and share his experiences as a longbut I would never tell anyone about it beterm survivor. cause I knew my number was up soon.”

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“When my number didn’t come up—I’m still thinking I’m going to die fairly soon here—so I decided I would go to prison, so I ended up in prison.”

Bryan says the pain of being in and out of prison slowly forced him to change his relationship with life and with HIV. “I had cancer three times and the worst was a Stage IV cancer in prison, with one leg chained to a hospital bed. So I thought I’m still not dead and I told God, this is not funny. So then I decided I would not filter my words.”

Refusing to hide the fact that he was a person living with AIDS (PLWA) became a way for him to mend his broken self-image.

“It was around ’98 that I started to be open about my status.

I was [still] in and out of prison. I started Jones and Michelle Jackson-Rollins, a social worker and a DIRT to do glimpses of advocacy prevention specialist in Garden Valley advocacy. I still didn’t have the self-esteem, Despite his early death sentence by my self-acceptance yet.” doctors, life went on. ”I did a lot of theater. I Part of his advocacy was for himself. toured the country and did chorography for Discovering that he knew more about HIV recording artists, toured in Japan, did concert than the doctors treating him required him dance and a couple of shows in New York. I to advocate for and educate himself to stay had a fairly extensive career.” alive.

Even as his professional life flourished, those silent years were filled with the pain of One Door Closes stigma and isolation. “I was hiding waiting Bryan walked out of a cell for the last for somebody to discover me. I just didn’t time in 2008. Over the next few years he want anyone to know. I just wanted to die.” would become involved in a whirlwind of Bryan understands why tongues were activism. tied. “Just because somebody tells you, Back home in Cleveland, Ohio he realyou have an HIV diagnosis, doesn’t mean izes that other PLWAs weren’t being helped they’ve accepted it. That’s hard for people to by the AIDS service organizations. In 2011, understand. I [they] don’t know how to do he organizes Gentleman’s Quarterly, Positive this. Consequently it affects how we move Men Doing Positive Things. through life. We isolate then we mask it and “I spoke with the hospital about doing self-medicate.” a support group that met quarterly. A lot of By the early 1990s, Bryan became people had begun to isolate; they didn’t want self-destructive. “For that moment with the to go to dinners or support groups because substance I felt like somebody loved me. If they felt like they didn’t know anybody. What I had drugs somebody would treat me with made my group unique from other groups respect and dignity, so I thought.” was that I would call people personally so

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they knew they had one person to look for when they got there.”

The year after leaving prison he takes part in the U.S. Conference on AIDS in San Francisco, where one of the topics was the criminalization of people infected with HIV. “I realized there were a whole lot of people doing this work. The way I looked at it, people were talking about my life and it changed my whole life.”

Many states still criminalize people who are infected with HIV and fail to tell a sex partner. Bryan says Ohio’s law is still on the books. “We see at least four prosecutions a year. It’s hard to tell how many go to trial, versus how many are plea bargained out.”

Ohio’s laws are often used against transgender people and sex workers. “The laws are not about transmission, the laws are about not disclosing before anything is inserted into any orifice. You can even be prosecuted in Ohio for loitering after receiving a positive diagnosis.”

Bryan became active in the HIV decriminalization movement after the 2009 conference. “I went back to my city and started calling [the Center for] HIV Law and Policy, asking them to come to Cleveland.

There was no conversation in Ohio, to my knowledge, around modernizing our laws.

I bugged them for two years and finally we were able to mobilize Ohio. Now we have the Ohio Health Modernization Movement, we’re finally starting to see some headway.”

Art = Life Bryan’s activism helped him reclaim his life, but he also reclaimed his art with his one man show AIDS, I Die Slowly, which he performed at the International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C., in 2012.

He describes the work as; “an intimate show weaving together several characters, songs

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Jones prepares grocery bags given to people in the Garden Valley neighborhood as part of his DIRT advocacy. and narratives of the positive journey of Bryan C. Jones. He explores the issues of addiction, childhood, honesty and moving on with life, no matter what it throws at you.”

His work with Gentleman’s Quarterly, HIV decriminalization, and his own journey spurred him to reach out to people with even less connection to HIV service organizations. “DIRT stands for ‘Direct Inspiring Reachable Teachable’ which started in 2013, when I organized a national advocacy and leadership summit here in Cleveland thru the Campaign to End AIDS. I wanted these people who were coming in from around the country to be able to understand what was going on in a neighborhood.”

That neighborhood was Garden Valley, burdened with entrenched poverty and crime. “I said if this is our mission we’ve got to be able to go into these communities and teach people how to advocate, how to do outreach and prevention. Black folks have to have real conversations that are stripped of all pretenses, all the flowers and all the greenery, all that’s gone. It’s down to the bare essentials. They’ve got to have a real conversation that looks like them, talks like them and lives like them.”

Bryan and his fellow organizers came up with a way to help people as they were reaching out. “In Garden Valley, Jan Ridgeway started putting condoms in the food bags, which was controversial. We would start passing out food at 11 a.m., but people would gather at 7 a.m. where we brought them in for coffee and donuts and had open discussion about HIV and AIDS. I remember one woman who said she would just get tested to get me to shut up.”

Reaching Out to the World The work at DIRT led Bryan to do outreach in Africa. “I had applied to go to the international conference in Durban, South Africa with my DIRT advocacy. We bought Jones speaks to healthcare professionals about the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS.

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the tickets, but days before we leave I got a scholarship. We spent two weeks volunteering in St. Lucia, South Africa, where we were in the bush talking with people, washing people’s clothes, changing their bandages.

I met a woman living with HIV and leprosy and I thought it was something that was this old biblical condition, all the stigma was just [foisted on] this one person. So the experience was life changing. It’s amazing in order to appreciate what we have here in the United States, a clean bandage an antibiotic cream can make a person’s whole week. Going to other places and saying I’ve been thriving with AIDS for thirty-five years, telling people that alone is a powerful form of advocacy in itself.”

Writing Chapters, New Mirrors In the end, Bryan doesn’t want us to focus on the hardships of his journey. “I’m not here for your amusement so you can see my horror story. I don’t need you to feel sorry for me, I don’t need no one to save me, I can save my damn self. I don’t need a hand out, I need a hand up.”

Bryan’s fierceness is a reminder that we all lose when we try to get people to just “tell us a story,” failing to see the many mirrors they offer us to reflect on the work we all have yet to do.

Mel Baker is a broadcast journalist and former LGBT and anti-nuclear weapons activist. He is married to artist Leslie Aguilar and lives in San Francisco, California.

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Amid the Trump Administration’s Firing of Service Members with HIV, Three Lawsuits Challenge the Pentagon’s Longstanding Policies

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by Larry Buhl

wo active-duty airmen who were given discharge orders just days before Thanksgiving are suing the Pentagon over its HIV policy and deployment policies. Pentagon policy states that service members living with HIV are not deployable if they first test positive while on active duty, unless they get a waiver. The policy also prohibits anyone with HIV from enlisting or being commissioned.

LGBT civil rights group Lambda Legal, with the assistance of LGBT military association OutServe-SLDN and pro-bono counsel at Winston & Strawn LLP, filed the lawsuit against the Pentagon in the U.S. District Court on behalf of the airmen, who used the aliases Richard Roe and Victor Voe to prevent publicizing their HIV status.

Their counsel is challenging the policy that prevents the airmen from deploying

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to the Middle East, and also challenging a new policy that forces them out of military service for not being able to deploy.

“At the center of our arguments are the regulations against people with HIV deploying should be tossed out, whether it’s a constitutional violation or a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act,” Peter Perkowski, legal director of OutServe-SLDN told A&U. Both active-duty airmen in the Roe and Voe v. Mattis suit tested positive for HIV last year during Air Force screenings. After starting them on antiretroviral treatments, their doctors determined that they were asymptomatic and physically fit to deploy, and their commanders backed their continued service. But in November the airmen received word that they were “unfit for military service” and discharge procedures

were initiated. The stated reason, according to the Air Force, is that the U.S. military bans personnel with HIV from deploying to the Middle East, where the majority of Air Force members are expected to go. The airmen claim the Air Force did not offer them alternative jobs, which both said they would have accepted.

The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Air Force have declined to comment on Roe and Voe v. Mattis, or two other legal cases moving forward regarding the removal of service members with HIV. Last summer Lambda Legal, OutServe-SLDN, and Winston & Strawn LLP filed a motion for preliminary injunction in Harrison v. Mattis, which involves Sgt. Nick Harrison, who was set to be discharged from the military due to his HIV status.

In a companion lawsuit entitled Doe v.

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photo by Salma Mohammed/Lambda Legal

Mattis, Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN are representing an anonymous service member living with HIV who the Air Force refused to commission as an officer after he graduated from the Air Force Academy, despite recommendations from medical personnel.

Since they filed this case, Perkowski has heard from numerous service members with HIV who have been threatened with discharge or have had their service restricted as a result of the new policy.

Perkowski said that those who serve stateside after an HIV diagnosis are being denied promotions, such as the opportunity to commission as an officer, like Sergeant Nick Harrison.

Harrison, one of the plaintiffs in the combined Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN lawsuit, was on track to be a JAG attorney in D.C. when he learned that he had HIV. As with others who have HIV, Harrison could not be commissioned as an officer without a special medical waiver, which he was denied. Two levels of exceptions to the policy were denied as well.

Harrison had been deployed to Kuwait with the U.S. Army previously, before his HIV diagnosis.

Harrison told A&U he was bewildered by the military’s decision to keep him out of the JAG Corps given all of the education they had already invested in him.

“When I moved to D.C. and talked to the D.C. National Guard they said I was a great candidate and that they wanted to commission me as a captain based on my experience. They even tagged me as their first choice. I asked for an exception because I was already in the National Guard. I’m of limited use to them now as an enlisted member and not being able to deploy overseas.”

Harrison takes issue with the entire DoD policy of prohibiting HIV-positive service members from deploying, with or without a waiver.

“It surprises me that the military hasn’t updated their policies or looked at any kind of resolution with me or any parties involved.”

An Antiquated Policy Scott Schoettes, HIV project director at Lambda Legal, said that the focus of all three lawsuits is on overturning the broader policy undergirding all branches, a policy FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

he believes is antiquated.

“The military is slow,” Schoettes said.

It has been over twenty years since meds started changing the landscape of people living with HIV. “On the advocate

Last February Mattis told the Military Times the rule was about fairness.

“You’re either deployable, or you need to find something else to do. I’m not going to have some people deploying constantly

Sergeant Nick Harrison

side we gave [the military] time to work it out from a policy angle. When there was an administration that was friendly, the Obama administration, we thought the best route was to apply pressure on them.”

But the Obama administration had other issues to tackle first, such as ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and allowing the retention of transgender service members. The HIV policy was pushed to the back burner. Then, when Trump took office, everything went sideways.

“With the Trump administration it was immediately clear that they were hostile; the only way to make them change is to force them to accept people with HIV,” Schoettes said.

Deploy or Get Out In February 2018 the Trump administration announced a new military policy, known colloquially as “Deploy or Get Out,” which orders any service member who cannot be deployed for twelve consecutive months to be discharged. One exception is pregnant and postpartum service members.

and then other people, who seem to not pay that price, in the U.S. military. If you can’t go overseas [and] carry a combat load, then obviously someone else has got to go.

I want this spread fairly and expertly across the force.”

Trump fired Mattis in December and replaced him with Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan. The President said he is in no hurry to find a permanent replacement for Mattis, and he has not indicated any changes in Department of Defense policies.

Service member advocates don’t believe Deploy or Get Out was implemented specifically to discriminate against military rank and file with HIV, but it does have that effect. If they can’t deploy due to their HIV status, Deploy or Get Out means they have no place in the military.

“Our position is people with HIV should be able to deploy. They wouldn’t be caught up in this policy if DoD regulations restricting deployment were modernized to reflect the current medical science around HIV,” Perkowski said.

“There is no regulation saying you must be discharged if you have HIV. When you are diagnosed with any medical condition, you will be evaluated on your medical condition and your physical ability to do the job. Normally people with HIV continued on page 46

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l a c i d a R sence e r p art h g u o s thr e i l S AID g n i s dres e r t u s abo k l a t Sur) ( y e odn Black R r Sean u y b S A&U hl ry Bu ively for

by Lagrraphed Exclus Photo

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like to have a good idea of who my subjects are before interviewing them. This is to avoid saying, “How do you, um, define yourself?” before moving on to something more incisive.

My first stop was Sur Rodney (Sur)’s website, where I found pages that would have been amateurish even in 1995— text-based, with every section (curating, writing, archiving, and performance) grudgingly providing a 250-word synopsis of his involvement in those areas and starting with the same line: The enigmatic Sur Rodney Sur… “The site is a joke,” Sur tells me, explaining that was his nod to the common notion that nobody will take you seriously without a website. So he took conventional wisdom and used a technique he preferred in his early art; he parodied it, here, with generic text frozen in time.

“People want to say I’m a curator, filmmaker, a performer,” he says. “Some of the worlds don’t collide. The black art world doesn’t know about the gay literary world. AIDS and art doesn’t tie into my literary work. On film projects, I’m a producer working behind the scenes so that people don’t recognize that I’m involved until they see the credits roll.”

Sur says his late partner, Geoffrey Hendricks, who collaborated on a series of cultural projects relating to art and AIDS, wanted to be recognized for who he was, while Sur prefers to be recognized for what he’s done.

“But,” Sur adds, “I don’t wear my biography on my sleeve.

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I’m a modest person, and I don’t announce who and what I am because I’ve never cared about that. Eventually the things I’ve done, people will catch up or not.” Though he breezily mentions that People magazine celebrated him as one of the most intriguing people in 1985. Many might still consider him a most intriguing person. Definitely enigmatic.

When anything was possible, where everything was likely Sur moved to the East Village in New York City in the summer of 1976 with a degree from Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design, flat broke, just like the city. This was not long after President Gerald Ford denied federal assistance to save New York from bankruptcy. But from urban adversity arose artistic opportunity. Because it was cheap to live there, a community of artists, writers, poets, visual artists and photographers, outsiders to the rest of the world, thrived, without worrying too much about making it big in order to cover the rent. Sur, checking off several of those boxes, quickly became part of the East Village art scene before it was officially a scene.

Sur says one word best describes the art world of New York in the seventies and early eighties: kaboom. “We thought anything was possible. We did our work and we didn’t expect the New York Times to cover it. They were square anyway. We didn’t need to be endorsed. We didn’t have the same financial pressure as today, because you could rent a store front for $600.”

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“In the eighties we were figuring out what worked and didn’t. A lot was a comment on what was bad and we parodied it. Like parodying a woman having an

goes around the globe immediately. We were experimenting and there wasn’t a fear of being politically correct. We were so incorrect.”

In the eighties, the dust from the seventies art big bang began coalescing into art stars, with press orbiting up-and-coming artists, and big money started flowing in. Star-chasing soon followed, and that subdued innovation, Sur laments. But in the queer art world, and to a certain extent among queer artists with AIDS, the creativity never stopped.

Instead of chasing the star-maker machine, Sur went in a slightly different direction. He became an art curator. With his business partner, Gracie Mansion,

roadside table with a handmade sign, expertise on a variety of topics.

But the fact that much of his work is gone and maybe forgotten is fine with Sur, because his career emphasis changed, from making art to archiving and preserving others’ art. It was a career course correction spurred by devastation.

By the mid-eighties, AIDS was like a neutron bomb in urban communities.

There were no approved medications.

Hospitals treated AIDS patients like pariahs. Nurses refused to treat them. People just disappeared. It became clear to Sur by 1988, once his friends began getting sick and dying, that the energy he’d spent on the gallery for five years needed to take another direction. So he walked away from Gracie and became a full-time caregiver.

“I was not involved in any of the political activism,” Sur says. “A lot of my friends were in ACT UP, but I was at doctor’s offices, lawyer’s offices, homes or at a me-

“Many artists asked me to care for their work, because they thought their family would just throw it away.”

Sur co-directed the Gracie Mansion Gallery from 1983 to 1988. The gallery was key to establishing Lower Manhattan’s East Village as an internationally recognized art district, and there Sur cultivated young and edgy artists, including David Wojnarowicz.

abortion. Try doing that today. You can’t.

But then, if we bombed, who would know about it? Twenty, fifty people. Now fifty people are taking cell phone video and it FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

Preserving art Much of Sur’s writing, video and performance work was done before Internet search engines—I’ve looked for them—and live on only in lore. You won’t find the Sur Rodney Sur Show, which he hosted on Manhattan Cable TV. His work as a multimedia performance artist in the Blackheart Collective evaporated into the ether. His writings in publications such as The Road Before Us: One Hundred Black Gay Poets (1991) and Words of Fire (1995)…good luck finding them. YouTube does have links to his series of “free advice” videos from 2008, where Sur provides, from a

morial.” And most of his friends, both well and sick, were artists. And he wondered, when they died where would their artwork, papers and files go?

“Many artists asked me to care for their work, because they thought their family would just throw it away.” Sur became a repository for a lot of these artists’ histories, until that effort became overwhelming.

So he asked for help from Visual AIDS, and in 1996 Sur co-founded the Frank Moore Archive Project along with his partner, Geoffrey Hendricks, and Frank Moore. The project supports artists with HIV/AIDS in the management of their estates, with the understanding that, if they couldn’t collect all of their work, and they couldn’t, at least they could document it through photography. Later, in 2012, Visual AIDS established the online Artist+ Registry, the largest database and registry of works by visual artists with HIV/AIDS. Not long after Archive Project was inaugurated, the fever of the initial AIDS crisis broke. The cocktail was out, people were living longer, and articles came out saying, incorrectly, that AIDS was over.

Activism waned. But Sur understood that saving the work of artists with AIDS was even more urgent.

“Visual AIDS became a necessary institution for keeping art and AIDS alive,”

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Sur says. “If not for Visual AIDS we would know much less than we do now.”

AIDS redress and truth telling Sur still sees his primary role as truth teller about the AIDS crisis and the artists who were lost to it. AIDS in the eighties, Sur maintains, didn’t stop the art-making.

Instead, it turned off people from wanting to deal with artists with HIV/AIDS. “People just wanted to push it away because it was too sad and ugly but also dangerous.”

And that shunning continued for decades. Sur recalls an art exhibit in the nineties that featured a work by artist David Wojnarowicz, where Sur was asked to write wall text explaining the imagery of a photo where the artist’s head was buried in the earth. “I wrote about the body and mortality and an artist living with AIDS. They came back and said, ‘I’m sorry we can’t say this; it’s too upsetting. Can you take out any reference to AIDS?’” “You couldn’t talk about anyone’s work. Like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS, and his lover died of AIDS. The foundation that represents him will not include him in any exhibitions that deal with the HIV/AIDS pandemic because they do not want him categorized as an AIDS artist, because they think his work is more universal. They think as soon as you mention his relationship to AIDS, that’s what he becomes.”

It takes years of redress before it sinks into people’s minds, Sur says. What needs to be redressed? For one, the revisionist history, he says, that AIDS activism is at the behest of white gay men. “The women were the organizers of the biggest ACT UP demonstrations, the church, the Wall Street fake money event and throwing the ashes on the White House lawn. The guys in ACT UP had all this energy wanted to do this but they had no organizing skills.”

“Then all the women fighting for the recognition of people with AIDS to get certain services. Huge contingents of women but you never know about that there were women a part of that. There were a lot of women and mothers [in ACT UP] and they’d bring their kids because they couldn’t get babysitters. You never see any film about AIDS activism where kids are present, or people of color. The reality was a lot more complicated.”

“For a long time if you were a person of color you couldn’t get into a drug trial, because there was this thinking that you’re not reliable enough to take your meds. That kind of racism, a lot of people don’t know about.

We need a fuller picture of HIV/AIDS past, present and future.”

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The eighties are dead; long live the eighties Sur admits that he’s “stuck in the eighties,” and says that it’s a good thing.

He insists he has a mission to keep the queerness and fierceness of that time alive and enlighten a new generation of artists and art fans.

“When I was organizing a show for Visual AIDS’ twenty-fifth anniversary, I asked these young people, kids in their early twenties, what do you remember about artists and AIDS in the eighties.

They mentioned the same few names, Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring.

And then I tell them the queer thing in the eighties was driving the art world. I mentioned these huge cultural icons in the eighties that are dead, and I showed them their work. [The kids] got angry and said, ‘Why didn’t we know about this?’”

He points to a “fracture” of a quarter century that keeps younger generations from grasping what happened in the 80s.

“They are not going to understand it in one show,” he says.

“With AIDS and queer culture, if the mainstream doesn’t have a use for it within the capitalist machine, then they don’t talk about it. Because you haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”

Sur explains that AIDS, and society’s response to it, cut the cultural transmission of one generation to another.

“When people began dying, people started de-queering. Being gay was then seen as bad, unhealthy, irresponsible. The generation coming up then, their parents didn’t want to talk about it. They were protecting them from family infected with AIDS because they thought it was too sad, and they pushed it back and forgot about it.”

Sur tells me that there’s a big difference in art made by people with HIV/ AIDS in the eighties and nineties and art made about HIV/AIDS today.

“Most artists making art in the eighties were not making it about their condition.

Kids today are. There wasn’t a network or a community of people with AIDS making art. And they’re angry. The way people expressed their art in the eighties was very subtle and coded, with the exception of Wojnarowicz. Now it’s not subtle or coded.”

Sur says that part of that artistic freedom—or is it a mandate?—to create explicit works about HIV/AIDS, or queer art, or both, comes from the rise of queer and cultural theory. And he suggests that cultural theory can cut both ways. It can

lead to greater truth-telling, but it can also direct artists in ways they don’t want to go.

Sur explains that, artists with HIV/ AIDS or self-identified queer artists in the eighties were on a creative [roll] and wanted to keep doing what they were doing, no matter whether their art was explicitly about themselves, or HIV/AIDS, or not. “Now, a queer artist will think they have to figure out how it’s relevant to society. Because the whole teaching about AIDS with queer and cultural theory has changed how people consider art. In the eighties it was a free-forall. We were trying an experiment. Now there isn’t that will to experiment. You have to be focused.”

Not to mention the cost of renting a storefront has increased more than tenfold nearly anywhere in New York.

But, Sur says, he doesn’t want to preach to the younger generation. Rather, he says he wants to educate them about how things were and what was important, but to also understand what they’re dealing with and experiencing now.

“Back then you would see someone with KS walking around looking like a skeleton and a week later they’d be dead.

These kids today don’t understand anything like that. You can’t make them understand. The older generation shouldn’t be talking at them, when their experience is very different. We need to hear what they have to say. That’s important to our survival moving forward.”

I couldn’t help noticing that Sur does preach to the younger generation—a bit— when it comes to safer sex, and he has choice words for people who think PrEP gives them a get-out-of-AIDS-free card.

“People from my generation are saying ‘why would you infuse chemicals in your body to have a joy ride just because you can’t think of a more creative way to have sex without exchanging body fluids?’”

Rather than an older guy’s rant about promiscuity, it may be a fatherly need to take care of others. “AIDS is not over,” he says. “It’s still as urgent and difficult to manage as it ever was. People are getting infected. There is HIV criminalization, and there is a lot of people who don’t want to get tested. What about all the people walking around thinking they’re negative? We need to remember that AIDS is still with us and still a stigma.”

Larry Buhl is a multimedia journalist, screenwriter, and novelist living in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter @LarryBuhl.

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Moving Mountains Brad Grimes Helps to Combat HIV and Stigma in West Virginia, the Reddest of the States

by Hank Trout Photographed Exclusively for A&U by Ella Jennings

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nless you would like exploring the West Virginia Penitentiary (“19th-century Gothic prison offering guided tours, overnight paranormal visits, events and a gift shop”) or the Archive of the Afterlife, A Paranormal Museum (I’m not kidding), growing up in Moundsville, West Virginia, must be pretty stifling. For a gay mixedrace teenager growing up in Moundsville in the 1970s and ’80s, it was probably hellish if not downright dangerous. Having finally fled Moundsville, Brad Grimes— lawyer, educator, advocate—can attest to what it was like growing up there.

At age thirteen or so, Brad began to suspect that he just might be gay—”My major crush on one of my male friends was an indicator,” he joked.

“I desperately did not want to be gay,” he continued. “Being bi-racial in a rural community in 1970s and 1980s West Virginia was more than enough of a challenge. I was raised by my mother and her family (who are white) and have never met my biological father (who is black). My mother was unwed, and my birth was a local scandal. I’ll always be grateful that she chose to keep me, despite everyone around her telling her to do otherwise.”

The story is familiar: young LGBTQ+ individuals living in small towns and rural areas, never feeling “at home” in their hometowns, and longing to flee smalltown life and small-town minds. Brad was no exception. But Brad’s urge to leave was complicated by the horrifying news of “a rare gay cancer” showing up in men in Los Angeles and New York City. To Brad’s fifteen-year-old mind, the news “felt like an omen, warning me of my fate: I was sure if I ‘let’ myself be gay, then I would certainly die of AIDS. That’s how strong the associa-

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tion in my mind was: Gay = AIDS.” When it came time to select a college, his primary criterion was putting distance between himself and Moundsville. After considering Yale, Tufts, and Georgetown as “my best options for getting the hell out of Moundsville,” Brad decided on Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a B.S. in International Affairs/Foreign Service in 1989. After college, fleeing even farther from West Virginia, Brad moved to Beijing, China where he taught English as a Second Language. It was in China that Brad began the process of coming out, “with the safety net of [putting] 12,000 miles between me and those who might reject me.” He returned to the States after a year, to Moundsville, and in 1992 came out to his family and friends.

He has remained in West Virginia since then, citing “my personal struggles with depression and anxiety; family members’ health problems; [and] feeling that I no longer needed to run from my identity as a gay man.” Moving from Moundsville to Morgantown, Brad earned his J.D. at the West Virginia University College of Law in 2007, was admitted to the WV State Bar in 2008, and then practiced corporate law at a large firm in Wheeling, West Virginia.

A chance date introduced Brad to Caritas House. Established in 1994, Caritas House is a supportive service agency for people living with HIV/AIDS in North-Central West Virginia. Caritas (Latin for “charity”) became a provider of Housing Opportunity for People with AIDS (HOPWA) assistance, distributing more than $3 million in housing and utility support over a ten-year period. In 1996, Caritas House also acquired an emergency shelter for people living with HIV/AIDS who are homeless or in transition. In

2007, Caritas House launched a permanent supportive housing project. The organization’s education program reaches out to the community to increase awareness about HIV/AIDS. Brad learned about Caritas House on a Grindr date with the Vice President of the Board at Caritas, who told Brad all about the program and suggested that he might be a good fit on the Board.

He initially declined the invitation. But, he said, he realized that the position would be a good way to help and support folks living with HIV/AIDS. “I was invited to a board meeting, and I was really impressed with the level of commitment and dedication I witnessed from both the board members and the Caritas staff, and I knew that I wanted to be part of that team.” After a few A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

months of attending Board meetings, Brad was nominated to serve as Vice President of the Board; currently he serves as the Board President.

Early last year, Brad was job hunting, focusing on working at WVU, perhaps in a legal capacity or university administration, when he saw the job posting for an administrative assistant in WVU’s new LGBTQ+ Center. “I instantly thought, ‘Now, that is work I could really care about, and that would feel personally meaningful.’”

Having worked as an attorney at a large corporate defense firm, where the clients were large powerful faceless corporate entities, getting to work with young vulnerable people was an important distinction to Brad. “I felt that the LGBTQ+ Center FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

would afford me a chance to work with and support young LGBTQ+ students— something I wish had been available back in my day. It was an environment in which I could be comfortable and, hopefully, make a positive contribution.”

That contribution is sorely needed in West Virginia. One of the most conservative states in the country, West Virginia’s response to HIV has been wholly inadequate. As of 2017, there were approximately 1,800 people living with HIV in West Virginia (population only 1.8 million). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report on forty new HIV cases diagnosed in 2017 in fifteen mostly rural counties in the southern part of the state, most notably in and around the cap-

ital city Charleston (population 50,000).

Health officials from the CDC and in West Virginia say the stigma associated with HIV adds to infection risk, hindering monitoring, testing, and treatment, and adding to the risk of widespread outbreaks. Tania Basta, chair of the Department of Social and Public Health at Ohio University, has said, “I’m not saying that stigma is any higher in rural areas. It’s just that, because of the nature of living in small towns, where everybody kind of knows everybody, word travels quickly.”

Further, the ultra-conservative political atmosphere in West Virginia makes treatment and prevention especially difficult.

According to a New York Times article from April 27, 2018, Charleston, under political

39

pressure, closed its syringe exchange program—a “mini-mall for junkies and drug dealers” in the words of Danny Jones, the city’s mayor (himself a recovering alcoholic)—in early 2018, despite the program’s success. Daniel Raymond, the deputy director of planning and policy for the Harm Reduction Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group, said he had considered the Charleston program to be “a huge success story [and] a potential model for other communities.”

Unfortunately, the relationship between the health department and the city has become so toxic that the mayor and city officials have spoken openly of dismantling the department altogether. “It’s our health department,” said Paul Ellis,

40

the city attorney. “We created it. We can make it disappear.” This despite the fact that Charleston is at “grave risk for an HIV outbreak just like the one in Scott County,” Dr. Michael Brumage, director of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, said. “We’re sitting on a powder keg.”

It is in this abundance of stigma that the WVU LGBTQ Center bravely operates. While planning a World AIDS Day fundraiser for Caritas House at a local restaurant, Brad told A&U, “We met with some very unexpected and unfortunate news. While the restaurant’s Events Coordinator and Manager were excited about our fundraiser being held there, plans fell through at the last minute

when the owners shut us down, telling the Event Coordinator to find a children’s hospital or some other group, because ‘those people’ [i.e., people involved with serving the HIV/AIDS community] aren’t the right fit for our brand.’”

In the face of this kind of prejudice, since joining the Center in August 2018, Brad has worked closely with the Center’s Director, Dr. Cris Mayo, and the Assistant Director, Dr. Ellen Rodrigues, on the Center’s programming and events, creating a safe, comfortable environment for LGBTQ+ students and allies, and providing Safe Zone and Transgender Safe Zone Training to faculty, staff and students alike, among other special educational and recreational programs for students.

A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

how living with HIV/AIDS is now a manageable chronic condition instead of the death sentence it once was. The Center also partnered with Milan Puskar Health Right to provide free and confidential testing the day of the presentation.

In addition to programs about HIV/ AIDS, Brad is working with Dr. Mayo on the creation of a Gay Men’s Health Group, to launch in the Spring 2019 term. Among other services and educational efforts, the GMHG will create a brochure exploring gay/bi/MSM health-related issues, STD testing locations in Morgantown, and other resources to help improve the physical health of gay men. “I’m excited to be playing a large role in this programming,” Brad said.

“I am impressed every day by the resilience, self-acceptance, and commu-

For one of their most successful ventures, Brad and the Center partnered with Caritas House and the WVU Positive Health Clinic for World AIDS Day 2018 events. In addition to their drive to collect personal hygiene and home cleaning supplies for the Caritas House pantry (to be distributed to Morgantown’s homeless and others in need), the three organizations presented a talk at the Center for students, faculty, and staff entitled “HIV/AIDS in 2018: Where We Are Today.” The talk highlighted advances in HIV/AIDS prevention (e.g. PrEP) and treatment, and FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

LGBTQ+ folk back when I was young! But most of all, I’m really happy to be part of that progress and helping to make (and keep) things better for our LGBTQ+ youth.”

Dr. Cris Mayo (whom I have met and greatly admire; see A&U, July 2017) lauded Brad’s contribution to the Center. “The LGBTQ+ Center has been amazingly fortunate to have the ever-energetic Brad working with us. His advocacy for LGBTQ-related health in general and health among gay men in particular has helped us raise awareness of the continuing challenges of HIV in our communities, the difficulties people have in accessing PrEP, and even more basic challenges in having conversations in our communities about health.”

She continued, “Brad and I are establishing a gay men’s health discussion group in the spring that will be an important resource in our community.

“It’s also great for members of the university community to see that working closely with local organizations can improve our communities—having Brad, the president of the board of Caritas House, has really enhanced that connection.”

As a native West Virginian myself—who fled the state for many of the same reasons that Brad fled—it makes me very happy to know that there are talented hard-working LGBTQ advocates like Brad and Dr. Mayo working for the health and well-being of the community in that blood-reddest of states. I hope to visit the Center again some time to see all the progress they’ve made since I was there in April 2017.

To learn more and keep up with the goings-on at the WVU LGBTQ+ Center, join their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/WVULGBTQCenter. For more information on Caritas House, check out www.caritashouse.com. To learn more about the WVU Positive Health Clinic, visit https://medicine.hsc.wvu.edu/ wvu-positive-health-clinic/. For more information about Milan Puskar Health Right, please go to https://mphealthright.org.

nity-building I witness among the young LGBTQ+ students at our Center. I’m so glad to see things improving for the younger generations of LGBTQ people. And honestly, I can’t help but feel a little envious— what a difference a Center like this would have made in the lives and self-esteem of

Photographer Ella Jennings is a graduate student pursuing a Master of Science in Journalism at West Virginia University. She can be contacted by email at ellakjennings18@gmail. com or by following her on Twitter @DubVella.

Editor at Large Hank Trout writes the For the Long Run column for A&U.

41

Contender in the Ring

a novel hiv therapy targets & eradicates one cell type in the viral reservoir

42

A statistically significant benefit was seen in those on BIT225 and Atripla versus those on Atripla and placebo in CD8+ and activated CD4 T cell populations.

This difference in these levels is evidence of the immune system recognizing and responding to the replication-incompetent virus as a foreign invader thus producing an immune response to eliminate the perceived threat.

According to the poster authors: ”The commencement of a decline of activated CD4+ cell levels at week 6 suggests that virus from these reservoir cells is being eradicated, and cleared by week 12 when levels return to those seen in the ART + placebo group.”

Researchers looked at changes in the levels of Soluble CD163 (sCD163), a macrophage immune marker. High levels of sCD163 are seen prior to initiating ARVs, but decrease once viral suppression had occurred. However, this is not the case with all HIV-positive individuals. High levels of this immune marker in people living with HIV with well controlled viremia are linked to an increased risk of morbidity and mortality. Study participants taking BIT225 with Atripla experienced a greater decrease in sCD163 than those on Atripla and placebo. According to the poster authors, the ability of BIT225 to show a greater decrease of this immune marker in people living with HIV may show cause for use of BIT225 in high-risk patients.

The importance of this immune marker was further evidenced in a separate study (not involving BIT225) in people co-infected with HIV and HCV. In this study, sCD163

levels decreased when participants began ARVs, but did not normalize. In those co-infected with HIV and HCV, sCD163 was linked to the progression of fibrosis.

BIT225 was found to be safe with no serious adverse events (AEs). The most common minor AEs were dizziness at thirteen percent for those on BIT225 and Atripla versus eight percent for Atripla and placebo; headache at nine percent for BIT225 and Atripla versus two percent for Atripla and placebo; and nausea at six percent for BIT225 and Atripla versus six percent for Atripla and placebo.

The results of this study indicate that BIT225 may play a role as part of a potential cure regimen if its demonstrated ability to eradicate HIV from macrophages is further shown in additional studies. It also shows promise as an HIV therapeutic, particularly in high-risk individuals.

It’s important to realize that this therapy is not produced by Big Pharma.

It is currently owned by a small Australasian Biotech company (Biotron) that, as with most biotechs, has limited funds for further studies. Advocacy is needed to ensure continued research of this drug with support by the NIH, AIDS Clinical Trials Group, and other funding mechanisms.

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 • FEBRUARY 2019

illustration by Timothy J. Haines

B

IT225, an HIV VPU inhibitor, has demonstrated strong immunological effects and the ability to effectively render activated macrophages (from viral reservoirs) unable to replicate.

Results from a Phase II study from Thailand established BIT225 to be (thus far) a contender as part of an HIV cure strategy.

As described previously in Destination: Cure, HIV hides in clusters of cells called viral reservoirs where they remain inactive indefinitely. As these cells are not producing HIV, they are not recognized as a threat by the immune system. HIV antiretrovirals (ARVs) are unable to penetrate these latently infected cells. Latent HIV has the potential to awaken and begin reproducing. If a person who is on ARVs and virally suppressed stops taking their ARVs or becomes drug-resistant, latently infected cells can awaken, resulting in viral rebound. It takes only one latently infected cell for this to occur.

Researchers have found latent HIV in several types of cells, including resting T cells, follicular dendritic cells, and macrophages. Macrophages are long-lived cells derived from monocytes that can reside in tissue in several places throughout the body, including the liver, lungs, brain and bone marrow. Macrophages engulf viruses, bacteria, fungi and dead cells in a process called phagocytosis.

BIT225 works by targeting the protein in HIV that is responsible for viral assembly, interfering with its ability to properly replicate. With HIV replication incompetent, the virus is unable to infect additional cells.

Researchers conducted a Phase II study at two sites in Thailand to discover if adding BIT225 to an ARV regimen produced additional virological and immunological benefit beyond that of ARVs alone.

BIT225-009 enrolled twenty-seven patients and analyzed whether BIT225, in addition to Atripla, showed a benefit over Atripla and placebo. All study participants were treatment naive. The study ran for twelve weeks and all participants remained on ARVs after the study concluded.

Researchers focused on safety pharmacokinetics and the impact on virological and immunological markers.

The Debt Snowball

how to break up with your credit card bills

illustration by Timothy J. Haines

F

our years ago, I graduated with my master’s degree. My gift to myself? Two maxed-out credit cards, and a whole pile of student loans staring me in the eyes. The student loans seemed inevitable, but the credit card debt? It kind of snuck up on me, although to some degree I knew it was happening because I was leaning on Mr. Visa to pad my budget. The anxiety that came over me as I opened those credit card statements was completely overwhelming. Every time I made that minimum payment, the interest would post, bringing that balance right back up to where it was before. The cycle felt endless, and so did my anxiety. I was looking forward to the future while being haunted by the purchases of the past. I knew that if I wanted the anxiety to go away, I needed to rid myself of my credit card debt.

I had just over $8,000 in credit debt, which is just under the national average, and I felt as though it was smothering me. I had entered into a field that historically didn’t pay very high and there were many things I wanted to do for my financial future. Continuing a spiraling cycle of credit card debt just wasn’t one of them. People living with HIV/AIDS often have finite or restricted incomes, and are looking for ways to either make more money or do more with what is already there. One solution is to eliminate credit card debt, freeing up those funds to serve other purposes.The relationship between consumer and credit card is most certainly a dysfunctional one, and it’s time to break up.

Your first step: Take all of the credit cards out of your wallet. It’s time for a cash diet. You are only to use cash or a debit card to pay for purchases. You’ll need to be tough with yourself. If the money isn’t there, don’t make the purchase. It might hurt for the first month or so while you get used to it, but you’ll thank yourself later.

The next step is to work out a plan to pay off your credit card debt. Eventually, you’ll work on paying off everything else, but credit card debt comes first.

FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

There are two very popular strategies for paying off debt. This month I would like to introduce you to one of them: The Debt Snowball.

The Debt Snowball is a popular strategy for paying off debt, and is a favorite among those who consider themselves to be largely driven by logic. The debt snowball will yield the highest savings while in repayment because it focuses on repaying the debt with the highest interest rate first. The debt with the highest interest rate is costing you the most money because it is growing more rapidly. In order to get started, gather your most recent credit card statements.

Look at each statement and jot down the balance, interest rate, and minimum payment. Now, arrange them into a list starting with the highest interest rate at the top, followed by the next highest interest rate, and so forth until you’ve listed them all. The lowest interest rate should be at the bottom. The balance and minimum payment amounts should also be represented on this list.

Now that you’ve completed the organizational part, it’s time to develop your action plan. Continue to pay the minimum payments on all cards every single month. Pay extra on the card with

the highest interest rate. Anything remaining in your budget should serve to pay down the balance of the highest rate card. If your highest rate credit card has a minimum payment of $100 and you generally have a $200 cushion in your budget, you should be paying $300 on that card each and every month. During this time, any bonuses, tax returns, or refunds of any kind should be applied to this balance in order to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

Once the first card has been paid off, the amount that was being applied to it monthly is automatically “snowballed” onto the card with the next highest interest rate. Keep repeating this process until all credit card debt has been eliminated.

Remember to be patient with yourself. It took a while to accumulate the debt. It will take some time to get out of it, but you can do this.

Next time, we will discuss The Debt Avalanche, as an alternate method of repaying credit card debt.

Alacias Enger is a performing artist, writer, and educator. She lives with her partner in New York City, and is the founder of blogs “Sense with Cents” and “Travel Cents.” Follow her on Twitter @sense_w_cents.

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A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

E R U CULT THE

S D AI OF

FILM

Mapplethorpe

Directed by Ondi Timoner Samuel Goldwyn Films

P

atti Smith: “What will become of the world when no trace of you remains?”

Robert Mapplethorpe: “I think there’ll be some traces.”

Traces, indeed, in the form of some of the most exquisite, mesmerizing photographs ever taken. Whether portraits of celebrities (Warhol, Schwarzenegger, Hockney, as well as men who became celebrities because Mapplethorpe photographed them), or still life photos of flowers, or photos of hardcore bondage and S&M scenes, Mapplethorpe’s photographs are at once intensely beautiful and (in some instances) deeply disturbing.

Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS-related causes on March 9, 1989, at the age of forty-two, was one of the most polarizing artists of the twentieth century, producing a range of work from fine art still life photographs that have hung in major galleries (the Whitney in New York, for instance) to extreme fetish photos for the gay leather/S&M magazine Drummer (his first magazine cover photo assignment was for the legendary editor Jack Fritscher at this publication in 1975).

In director Ondi Timoner’s film, Mapplethorpe, the photographer (played by Matt Smith) comes across as a supremely confident (to some, arrogant) and selfaware artist. Dancing barefoot with Patti Smith (Marianne Rendon) in their room at the Chelsea Hotel or cruising the piers and leather bars at night in New York, Mapplethorpe grows from a shy vulnerability into swaggering self-confidence.

FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

When Mapplethorpe’s patron, art collector Sam Wagstaff (John Benjamin Hickey), asks him, “Are you afraid of dying?” he responds, “Only before I’m famous.”

Mapplethorpe began his photography career when a friend gave him a Polaroid camera. With it, he spent hours photographing Smith, other friends and tricks, and inanimate objects. “In church, I found God; when Sandy gave me the camera, it led me straight to the Devil,” he remarks in the film. Once he and Wagstaff became lovers, Sam birthday-gifted him with a very expensive camera, which he put to use creating startling images (e.g., a bullwhip handle inserted into his anus).

With the new, better camera, his photographs became more sophisticated and artfully composed, particularly his photos celebrating (some have said “fetishizing”) the African-American model Milton Moore (played by McKinley Belcher III). Even as he weakened from the ravages of AIDS-related OIs, Mapplethorpe continued making photographs. His final words (in the screenplay at least) come as he lies in a

hospital bed: “Take the picture.”

Timoner’s screenplay is neatly divided into sections labeled by the year, from 1972 until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989.

With archival movie and television footage spliced in, it captures the grittiness of 1970s and ’80s New York City and the giddy excitement of the city’s thriving art scene. The acting is more than competent, particularly Matt Smith—it’s difficult to take your eyes off him, as he seems to become more beautiful and more interesting as the film goes on.

Finally, the film contains a couple dozen shots of Mapplethorpe’s work in all its stark, gasp-inducing beauty spliced into the narrative. Even if the film consisted of nothing but shots of Mapplethorpe’s photos, especially the ones used in the end credits, I could still recommend this film very highly. Better than any book or screenplay, Mapplethorpe’s photos form the true portrait of the artist.

—Hank Trout Hank Trout interviewed Brad Grimes for this issue.

45

A Calendar of Events

ACR

Red White and Positive

continued from page 31

Health’s Ninth Annual Sled for RED Cardboard Sledding Derby will be held on Saturday, February 2, 2019, at the Four Seasons Golf & Ski Center in Fayetteville, New York, at 4:00 p.m.

All proceeds from Sled for RED support ACR Health’s mission to create healthy communities by stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS, leading the charge for LGBTQ equality and the fight to end addiction and poverty.

The Sled for RED fundraiser features a variety of competitions for each team of five brave cardboard-sled snow bunnies—the fastest sled, the slowest sled, the loudest cheer team, the highest fundraiser, the best decorated sled, most social team, and the best team costume.

A “Snow Tubing Party” follows the Derby at $15 per person, or revelers may stay inside the heated tent and enjoy warm beverages. There will be a food and beer sampling for $10 per person, $5 for ages 10 and younger (no beer for the youngsters).

For the first time this year, partiers can enjoy roasting marshmallows and making S’mores at a fire pit area sponsored by Wegmans grocery stores.

Adults can also savor the “Best Wintry Drink” competition. This contest challenges bartenders from local bars and restaurants to design a new winter libation.

Bells Brewery will be sampling some of their seasonal favorites from behind a custom-made drink-chilling ICE BAR. Established in 1983, ACR Health is a not-for-profit, community-based organization that provides support services to individuals affected by a wide range of chronic diseases, including HIV/AIDS. For more information or to register, call (315) 475-2430 or visit www.

ACRHealth.org.

go through this process and are retained.

Because universally, treatments will keep the HIV in check and you’re as healthy as anyone else and there is no reason to separate you.”

In January the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said definitely that science shows with HIV, undetectable is untransmittable. The DoD, however, is committed to policies based on 1980s science, service member advocates say.

Each branch of the military implements the Pentagon’s HIV policy with slight variations. In 2012, the Navy said that people with HIV could be deployed on large vessels with a waiver. The Air Force and Army technically allow deployment with waiver, at least in writing. “But Army to our knowledge has never granted a waiver, and for the Air Force it’s rare to get a waiver,” Perkowski said.

Schoettes and Perkowski believe that the Pentagon has not provided a rationale for why HIV-positive service members are prohibited from deploying to the Middle East or other places where the U.S. military sees active combat.

An August, 2018 report to Congress lays out the military rationale, such as it is, for excluding HIV-positive service members from deployment. Schoettes,

46

who says the report lacks specifics and a more modern understanding of HIV, summarizes the military thinking: “Their main reason, and you have to read between the lines on this, is that they can’t guarantee care to someone with HIV in a combat situation. Our belief is it is easy to give care to someone with HIV and they provide care to people with other conditions requiring similar levels of care.

“The second argument about transmission to other service members in the course of battle. But it is highly speculative that there could be any risk of transmission. Even if someone didn’t have an undetectable viral load, someone is surely not going to transmit to another person in battle.

“The third rationale,” Schoettes concluded, “is what they call the walking blood bank, of battlefield transfusions. But people with HIV will not donate blood in that situation just like they don’t donate here at home. I don’t understand that one at all but they talk about it.”

Schoettes points out that other conditions requiring daily medications, such as hyperthyroidism, are not leading to discharges from the military. He said that he’s heard accounts of people with

insulin dependent diabetes into the force.

“Such a person requires much more ready access to the medication than a person living with HIV.” Fewer Opportunities for Service Members with HIV Perkowski said that about 1,200 people with HIV are serving in the military at any given time. “I believe that number is understated, though,” Perkowski added.

“Over the past seven years it has been consistently 350 new diagnoses among active, reserve and national reserve every year. About twenty-five percent leave within sixteen months, and half leave within three years.”

Why do they leave? “They’re limited in opportunities, promotions are slowed down,” Perkowski said. “Most are stuck in jobs that they had when diagnosed.

The more you do, the more awards you get, that is factored into promotions and opportunities you get. HIV does limit all of those things.”

Larry Buhl is a multimedia journalist, screenwriter, and novelist living in Los Angeles.

Follow him on Twitter @LarryBuhl.

A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

FEBRUARY 2019 • A&U

47

Survival Guide

[a portrait by sean black]

“Since my diagnosis in 1996 I knew that God would use me to be a living example.

I began disclosing immediately! This helped with my healing and advocating for myself and others. I believe my purpose continues to be an educator and supporter to those infected and affected locally, nationally and internationally. I am KHOLEGA = I Believe.”

-Lynn T. Kidd Columbus, Ohio

As an HIV advocate, consumer and educator Lynn provides endless service to the residents of Columbus and beyond. Lynn is currently COHPA (Central Ohio HIV Planning Alliance Planning Council) Co-Chair. Lynn also provides STI prevention education to adults at various Central Ohio alcohol and drug treatment programs. Over the last twenty-two years Lynn’s experiences include numerous speaking engagements and media appearances, providing HIV awareness, education and support to those infected and affected with HIV. Her mission is to help reduce the rate of HIV infection among all people by being visible and living to break the silence.

Sean Black is a Senior Editor of A&U. 48

A&U • FEBRUARY 2019

HOW DO WE HELP STOP HIV? A. PREVENT IT. B. TEST FOR IT. C. TREAT IT. D. ALL OF THE ABOVE. Learn how it all works together at HelpStopTheVirus.com © 2015 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. UNBC1856 03/15

In adults with HIV on ART who have diarrhea not caused by an infection

IMPORTANT PATIENT INFORMATION This is only a summary. See complete Prescribing Information at Mytesi.com or by calling 1-844-722-8256. This does not take the place of talking with your doctor about your medical condition or treatment.

What Is Mytesi?

Mytesi is a prescription medicine used to improve symptoms of noninfectious diarrhea (diarrhea not caused by a bacterial, viral, or parasitic infection) in adults living with HIV/AIDS on ART. Do Not Take Mytesi if you have diarrhea caused by an infection. Before you start Mytesi, your doctor and you should make sure your diarrhea is not caused by an infection (such as bacteria, virus, or parasite).

Possible Side Effects of Mytesi Include:

Tired of planning your life around diarrhea?

Enough is Enough Get relief. Pure and simple. Ask your doctor about Mytesi.

Mytesi (crofelemer): • Is the only medicine FDA-approved to relieve diarrhea in people with HIV • Treats diarrhea differently by normalizing the flow of water in the GI tract • Has the same or fewer side effects as placebo in clinical studies • Comes from a tree sustainably harvested in the Amazon Rainforest What is Mytesi?

Mytesi is a prescription medicine that helps relieve symptoms of diarrhea not caused by an infection (noninfectious) in adults living with HIV/AIDS on antiretroviral therapy (ART).

Important Safety Information Mytesi is not approved to treat infectious diarrhea (diarrhea caused by bacteria, a virus, or a parasite). Before starting you on Mytesi, your healthcare provider will first be sure that you do not have infectious diarrhea. Otherwise, there is a risk you would not receive the right medicine and your infection could get worse. In clinical studies, the most common side effects that occurred more often than with placebo were upper respiratory tract (sinus, nose, and throat) infection (5.7%), bronchitis (3.9%), cough (3.5%), flatulence (3.1%), and increased bilirubin (3.1%).

For Copay Savings Card and Patient Assistance, see Mytesi.com

Please see complete Prescribing Information at Mytesi.com.

NP-390-9

RELIEF, PURE AND SIMPLE

• Upper respiratory tract infection (sinus, nose, and throat infection) • Bronchitis (swelling in the tubes that carry air to and from your lungs) • Cough • Flatulence (gas) • Increased bilirubin (a waste product when red blood cells break down) For a full list of side effects, please talk to your doctor.

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

You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

Should I Take Mytesi If I Am:

Pregnant or Planning to Become Pregnant?

• Studies in animals show that Mytesi could harm an unborn baby or affect the ability to become pregnant • There are no studies in pregnant women taking Mytesi • This drug should only be used during pregnancy if clearly needed A Nursing Mother?

• It is not known whether Mytesi is passed through human breast milk • If you are nursing, you should tell your doctor before starting Mytesi • Your doctor will help you to decide whether to stop nursing or to stop taking Mytesi Under 18 or Over 65 Years of Age? • Mytesi has not been studied in children under 18 years of age • Mytesi studies did not include many people over the age of 65. So it is not clear if this age group will respond differently. Talk to your doctor to find out if Mytesi is right for you

What Should I Know About Taking Mytesi With Other Medicines?

If you are taking any prescription or over-the-counter medicine, herbal supplements, or vitamins, tell your doctor before starting Mytesi.

What If I Have More Questions About Mytesi?

For more information, please see the full Prescribing Information at Mytesi.com or speak to your doctor or pharmacist.

To report side effects or make a product complaint or for additional information, call 1-844-722-8256.

Rx Only Manufactured by Patheon, Inc. for Napo Pharmaceuticals, Inc. San Francisco, CA 94105 Copyright © Napo Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Mytesi comes from the Croton lechleri tree harvested in South America.