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The PEPFAR Crisis
Nine days after the new President of the United States took office and unleashed an unelected billionaire to wreak havoc in American institutions and programs with little or no thought to the real-life consequences for millions of people both in this country and worldwide, I wrote about the impact this clown car of an administration…
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If you don’t have your health, what do you have?
Say what you will about George W. Bush, and I have said plenty, but in 2003 he started the United States President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, better known as PEPFAR. It was the largest global health program focused on a single disease in the history of the world until the COVID-19 pandemic, and as…
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Visibility
I was born at the height of the civil rights movement, and in many ways, I am its beneficiary. The freedoms I enjoy as a gay man today are the result of years of social liberalization during my lifetime, a trend that has benefitted women, people of color, the disabled, and a host of other…
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The Myth of Patient 0
On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report in their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) entitled “Pneumocystis Pneumonia—Los Angeles,” describing five cases of a rare lung infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), in five young, previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles. Two of the men had died. Click…
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Boys Town
It rained all day. Rain in Los Angeles makes the city feel clean. The smog disappears; the dust is washed off windowsills and handrails. There’s a distinctive smell in the air after a Los Angeles rain: it’s called petrichor, from the Greek words petra (meaning stone), and ichor (from Greek mythology, referring to the fluid that flows like blood in…
Your mileage may vary.