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STREET SHRINK
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NYPRESS.COM
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COMMUNITY NEWS BELOW 14TH STREET • AUGSUT 29, 2013
After DOMA The LGBT movement shifts its focus beyond marriage By Joanna Fantozzi
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inny Allegrini shuffles slowly into the diner down the block from his West Village apartment, his gaunt legs shaking as he sits down cautiously. Vinny is followed closely by his husband of almost 20 years, Mark De Salla Price, who keeps a close eye on his partner. The wait staff smile. They know Mark and Vinny well. “Back again?” says their waitress. “Vinny was just here early this morning.” Both Mark and Vinny have been living with HIV and AIDS for the past two decades. They share an omelet for breakfast, and order identical iced coffees. When Vinny’s unsteady hand causes some egg to spill onto his t-shirt, Mark immediately wipes it off. After their first date at Rafaela’s Café in 1993, they knew they had to get serious fast, because of their medical conditions. A year later, Mark had proposed marriage at Rafaela’s, and over the years the two have gotten married three times: once to a rabbi who lost his congregation for marrying a gay couple, once to a Catholic priest, who was kicked out of the church for performing the ceremony, and once in 2000 when Vinny got sick. Shortly after he was diagnosed with AIDS, Vinny had to quit his job as a
hair stylist. He was told that his death was imminent, and Mark placed his partner in home hospice that same year. “We had a visitor one day and she came in with a bad haircut,” said Mark. “You see, I worked under Vidal Sassoon for two years,” interjected Vinny. “So Vinny tried to stand up, and a hospice nurse had to help him, and he did this spectacular haircut for her. The rest of the day he was glowing. Before that, he was this pale guy about to die and then he did his art.” “I never thought I was dying,” said Vinny with a boyish grin. “I knew I was going to beat it.” For four and a half years, Vinny was told he was going to die any day. To this day, both Mark and Vinny’s list of daily and weekly medications fills an entire sheet of printed paper. But they are still alive and fighting, and they join a steadily growing number of aging gay men with AIDS known as HIV veterans. These are the issues, says Janet Weinberg, chief operating officer of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, that have been swept under the rug in recent years, as the fight for marriage equality has absorbed much of the media’s and public’s attention. But since the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, was overturned in June, New York LGBT activist organizations like Queerocracy and Gay Men’s Health Crisis feel that it is time to focus on some of the unanswered questions and issues of the LGBT community: Continued on page 13
How Safe is Our Pre-Cut Produce? A renewed focus on bodegas following a Hep A scare By Alissa Fleck
T
he recent Hepatitis A exposure at the Westside Market at 97th and Broadway had consumers all over the city reeling — and wondering if they can trust their local grocer. The incident came as a result of the disease potentially being spread from an infected food preparer to consumers of pre-sliced produce. The Department of Health sent out a release
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ALSO INSIDE DO ENDORSEMENTS MATTER? P.4
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warning consumers who had made possible contact with these products to get vaccinated as soon as possible. This outbreak also comes on the heels of a similar scare earlier this spring at Alta, a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. We took to the Upper West Side neighborhood to see how local bodegas keep their pre-packaged food safe and what the inspection process looks like. Pre-packaged food, with a substantially higher markup than the unprepared product — a container of sliced fruit goes
Tickets to Cinderlla given away weekly
CRACKDOWN ON PLASTIC BAGS P.8