The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same …

This week openly gay Congressman Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, posted a story to Twitter—I refuse to call it X—that emphasized just how different things were for LGBTQ+ people not even three decades ago … and how much the same things are today.

Pocan has a framed pair of rubber gloves in his office due to an incident that occurred in 1995, when he and 49 other out gay elected officials were invited to the White House:

“While serving alongside now-Senator Tammy Baldwin on the Dane County Board of Supervisors in 1995, we were invited to the Clinton White House for a celebration of openly gay elected officials.

We headed to Washington and after some sightseeing, finally got to take a tour of the White House. As we came through the metal detectors, we noticed the security personnel wearing rubber gloves.

This took place shortly after the Oklahoma City Bombing, so we assumed security was taking extra precautions to protect themselves from increased radiation.

Not thinking much of it, we continued through the afternoon of meetings where we ultimately discovered the real reason for the gloves.

The security officials were wearing gloves out of fear that they would contract AIDS from one of the openly gay elected officials visiting the White House.

In 1995, there was still a lot of ignorance surrounding the AIDS epidemic and LGBTQI+ individuals on a larger scale.

Later that evening, Vice President Gore made a point to come around and shake all of our hands, demonstrating that this was not the official position of the Clinton White House.

A few weeks later, I received a signed letter from the president apologizing for what we had encountered at the entrance.

It’s been more than 25 years since that historic meeting of out elected officials at the White House. I held onto the invitation and the apology letter — neither of which said the word “gay” — and still have them framed in my office with a pair of those rubber gloves.

This year as we celebrate LGBTQI+ History Month, I look at them and remember how much progress we’ve made and the work we still have to do.

Whether it’s a pair of gloves, or a slew of educational gag orders seeking to ban conversations on sexual orientation and gender identities, our work to protect LGBTQI+ individuals will not be done until equality is finally and fully realized.”

The Washington Post reported on the incident in 1995 and noted that Secret Service Director Eljay Bowron regretted the “unfortunate actions” of the Secret Service agents, saying it was “not the policy of the Secret Service to wear gloves merely based on known sexual preference,” and promised a “special training session directed specifically at these matters.”

Refusing to touch people in normal and socially accepted ways has long been one of the many microaggressions faced by LGBTQ+ people, whose bodies have often been labeled disgusting or toxic. More than half of the LGBTQ+ respondents to a 2009 Lambda Legal survey on medical discrimination said that they had experienced microaggressions in a medical setting that included, among others, “health care professionals refusing to touch them or using excessive precautions.”

Sidenote: back in the 1990s Carlos was trying to get life insurance and took a physical as part of the process. His doctor called him and told him he needed to come in for a talk. Carlos arrived at the office, the last appointment for the day, and the nurse talked to him from behind the glass partition—he thought it was because the office was closing. He sat and waited to see the doctor and when he was finally called in he sat across the desk from his doctor scarcely looked at him and said:

“I’m sorry, Mr. Harris, you have AIDS and there’s nothing I can do for you.”

And that was it; nothing can be done for you. Carlos got up and left the office while a nurse came in with gloves to clean the chair he sat in, the part of the desk he touched. In the waiting room a nurse was cleaning the doorknobs and the counter and where he sat while waiting to see the doctor.

On the upside, Carlos instantly found a doctor who deals with HIV and was prescribed medications; after we moved to South Carolina, he found a doctor here who is managing his HIV. He is, and has been, undetectable for thirty-plus years.

And these Don’t Say Gay laws and anti-trans laws and banning drag laws are still doing that today, making us feel like we don’t belong, like we are somehow dirty and dangerous and riddled with disease and not worthy of being touched.

The march goes on …

LGBTQ Nation

Bobservations

The other night while watching The Voice, one of the contestants was called ‘charismatic’ and I said to Carlos:

“But does he have charisma, uniqueness,  nerve and talent?”

“What?”

“RuPaul says he would need charisma, uniqueness,  nerve and talent.”

“What does that mean?”

“Drag race? RuPaul? Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent? What does that stand for?”

“C … U … what were the others?

“Oh for goddess’s sake. Cunt. It’s CUNT!!!!!!!”

“I sure hope the neighbors can’t hear you.”

Me, too.

Tuxedo wants y’all to remember that, not only is he saving lives with the vaccine roll-out, but he’s not running off in the middle of a pandemic to have a play date at our expense.

Joseph Chaplik, a first-term RepubliQAnon legislator from Scottsdale, Arizona, has persuaded the Arizona House to let businesses ignore mask mandates to stem COVID spread. His reasoning? Masks weren’t needed decades ago to stop the spread of AIDS—even though AIDS was not spread like COVID.

Seriously. This ignorant tool actually said HIV “was going to wipe our global destruction of human bodies with AIDS. We heard about that in the ’80s, yet no masks were required.”

Well, a mask of sorts was required, but they were called condoms and you wore them on your dick to protect you and your partner. And they helped slow the spread of HIV, just like a facemask helps slow the spread of COVID. But nothing, no mask, no face covering, no condom, will ever stop the spread of ignorance by the GQP, especially in Arizona where the legislation passed on a 31-28 party-line vote.

Police reforms have been slow, even after last years’ BLM protests against systemic racism and police  abuses of power following the murder of George Floyd, but the good news is that this week the House’s George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed. The legislation overhauls qualified immunity for police officers, bans chokeholds at the federal level, prohibits no-knock warrants in federal drug cases and outlaws racial profiling.

Noting the thirty years since Rodney King was brutally beaten by the LAPD, House Judicial Chair Jerrold Nadler said:

“Since George Floyd was murdered a year ago, there have been over 100 officer-involved shootings, there have been numerous examples of officers not being charged.”

And yet police unions are fighting to keep the qualified immunity protections that make it almost impossible to prosecute these crimes.

It’s a step, and the first of many.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, after a week of saying that President Biden is allowing COVID-infected immigrants to enter this country, has actually refused help from the federal government to give coronavirus testing to migrants before they are released from federal custody.

So, who is really at fault here? Greg Abbot. Q.

There is mothing prettier than a fine ass, and this here is one of the finest I’ve seen in a long time. It belongs to model Michael Yerger.

That’s the post …well, unless you need more and then here it is:

Years back Carlos and I bought two corner chairs; that’s one up there. And over the last decade or more, one of the cats, who shall remain nameless …Miss Consuelo Roca Jones … has clawed the back corner of each one. And she is so sly, waiting until we are asleep, at which point she slithers into the living room and attacks the furnishings.

Last fall we decided to reupholster the chairs and searched for fabrics. As they are corner chairs and “float” in the living room, I wanted a different fabric on the back and we found a cool kind of mid—century textile. Then came the second guessing and the idea that the chairs will look a little Marriott Hotel Lobby.

Cut to February and I bit the bullet and bought the fabric and the chairs came back yesterday looking just so cool. Plus, they’re covered in velvet so the Cat Scratcher™ isn’t tempted by a nubby fabric.

Georgia? While the country thanks you for voting into office both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, we’re still kinda miffed that you voted for QAnon nutbag, and apparent full-blown idiot, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

You see, this week, Greene [Q-GA] raised a fuss about foreign nations that receive American tax dollars and in that group, she included the US territory of Guam:

“We believe our hard-earned tax dollars should just go for America. Not for, what? China, Russia, the Middle East, Guam, whatever, wherever.”

Greene apparently doesn’t know that people born in Guam are US citizens cuz she’s that stupid.

Matt Benedetto is a product designer from Burlington, Vermont and he has decided that the world needs Croc Underwear.

Well, to be fair, and to avoid a lawsuit, he has dubbed these hideous rubber-looking, diaper-things, Gator Briefs.

Anyway you say it, it’s an assault and I will be seeking to file charges as I cannot ever unsee this.

Merrick Garland has been confirmed as United States Attorney General nearly five years after his nomination to SCOTUS was blocked by Moscow Mitch. Garland will be fully investigating the insurrection at the capitol, including any and all members of Congress who may have helped the rioters.

Josh? Ted? Lauren? Marge? That includes you.

Lastly, Francisco Henriques, a tall dreamy curly headed hottie from Lisbon, Portugal.

He seems to be able to do angelic to nekkid hottie to underwear hottie to rock star oozing sex appeal hotties. And I’m fine with that!

Stories of Pride: Jade Elektra is Unforgettable

Last week at the 2019 Toronto AIDS Vigil, local drag queen Jade Elektra, AKA HIV+ activist Alphonso King, Jr.,  took the stage to deliver a message. And it wasn’t that Jade would become the first drag performer to ever sing live at the event, it was the song she sang and the message she delivered.

She sang the Nat King Cole classic, “Unforgettable,” but made the tiniest of changes to the lyrics:

“Undetectable.”

Jade says the song, and the idea to sing it that night, started as a joke with her husband:

“I started singing it and decided to say ‘undetectable’ instead. It wasn’t until he insisted that I sing it for an upcoming show that I realized that the original lyrics worked on a different level with the word change.”

And after performing the song publicly once or twice, Jade was invited to sing at the annual AIDS Vigil, and even she was stunned by the reaction:

“Looking out over all those faces was amazing. And hearing their reaction to the first word was magical! My fear melted away and it was on to channeling Marilyn Monroe as much as possible. Because after all, I may be HIV positive, but Jade is a sexual being and unapologetic about it. I hadn’t decided what I was going to say in the instrumental break, so I just let what came to mind come out.”

And this is what she said during that break:

“You know, for people who are living with HIV, we finally have the science to back up what I kind of knew about a decade ago. That ‘undetectable’ means you are ‘untransmittable.’ And hopefully, this will help us fight the stigma associated with being positive.”

It’s no longer an instant death sentence; it’s no longer something to feel ashamed of; it’s a condition, a manageable condition; it’s not something to fear or hide. You can live openly and honestly, and love openly and honestly, and be a sexual being, openly and honestly.

And Jade is absolutely ‘unforgettable’ for delivering that message.

LGBTQ Nation

I Didn't Watch But ...

….I read about it, and read his lies, and, well, this one disgusts me most of all.

During his propaganda speech, _____ said he would end AIDS in 10 years:

“In recent years we have made remarkable progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach. My budget will ask Democrats and Republicans to make the needed commitment to eliminate the HIV epidemic in the United States within 10 years. Together, we will defeat AIDS in America.”

Clearly, like everything he does, he will do this alone because over a year ago, in December 2017, _____ fired his entire Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS with no warning … he defunded National Institute of Health [NIH] vaccine research … and his budgets have all included cuts in the funding to fight HIV/AIDS.

And yet he says he’ll end AIDS.

Oh, and let’s not forget that closeted gay man Michael Elisabeth Pence once said that he was in favor of taking money allocated  to care for people with HIV/AIDS and giving it to organizations that provide gay conversion therapy … and for the second year in a row he failed to even mention the LGBTQ community in his World AIDS Day speech for the second year in a row.

And yet these two bigots and homophobes expect us to believe they’re going to ‘end’ AIDS.

Fuck off.

Americans Suffer So _____ Can Keep Kids In Cages

Of all the cluster-f**ks associated with _____ and his so-called presidency, the one that kind of galls me the most is Kids in Cages.

I mean, I get wanting to secure the borders, but taking children from their parents and then basically putting those kids in prison is so un-American, at least in terms of what most people think about America. And yet here we are …with Kids in Cages; and it just got worse.

The Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] has diverted millions of dollars in funding from a number of programs, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, to pay for housing cages prison for the growing population of detained immigrant children.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar has a plan to reallocate up to $266 million in funding for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, to the Unaccompanied Alien Children [UAC] program in the Office of Refugee Resettlement [ORR].

To be fair, some $80 million of that money will come from other refugee support programs within ORR, which have seen their needs diminish as the _____ administration cuts the numbers, ever so slightly, of Kids in Cages.

But the rest of that money, money used to take children away from their families and put them in internment camps will come from other programs, including $16.7 million from Head Start, a program provides  early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families; $5.7 million from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, which provides primary medical care and essential support services for people living with HIV who are uninsured or underinsured; and $13.3 million from the National Cancer Institute, which conducts and supports research, training, health information dissemination, and other activities related to the causes, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. Money is also being diverted from programs dedicated to mental and maternal health, women’s shelters and substance abuse. 

Let me get this queer …we’re taking money away from poor American families to pay for internment camps for children taken from their parents because those parents have sought refuge in this country; we’re screwing people with HIV/AIDS to pay for camps. Cancer? Mental health? Women’s shelters?

No money for you because we have to keep children in prison because their parents wanted a better life.

As of today, there are 13,312 immigrant children in federal custody in internment camps that are at 92% capacity. And low-income families, people with AIDS, cancer parents, pregnant women, women in general, and people in need of mental health care are paying for that.

Ain’t that America … under _____ and the GOP?

Yahoo News

Ruth Burks Is A Name You Should Know

In 1984, twenty-five-year old Ruth Burks went to University Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas to visit a friend who had cancer. Her friend went through five separate surgeries so Ruth spent a lot of time in hospital hallways and waiting rooms. And that’s when she saw it; a door with “a big, red bag” over it. It was a patient’s room.

“I would watch the nurses draw straws to see who would go in and check on him. It’d be: ‘Best two out of three,’ and then they’d say, ‘Can we draw again?’ ” 

And Ruth knew who was in that room, even though it was 1984, the early days of the epidemic. But still, she watched every day as the nurses drew straws to see who would lose and have to go through that door.

Back then it was called GRID — gay-related immune deficiency — instead of AIDS. Ruth knew, because she had a gay cousin and had asked him about the so-called “gay plague” affecting homosexual men. He’d told her, “That’s just the leather guys in San Francisco. It’s not us. Don’t worry.” But she was worried; and so she read everything she could find about the disease, hoping he was right.

And it was because of what she’d read, and what she felt in her heart, that one day Ruth ignored the warning on the red door and went into that room. She found a skeletal-looking young man in the bed who weighed just a hundred pounds; he told her he wanted to see his mother before he died

“I walked out and [the nurses] said, ‘You didn’t go in that room, did you?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah. He wants his mother.’ They laughed. They said, ‘Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming.’”

Nobody is coming. That wasn’t good enough for Ruth Burks; she demanded the boy’s mother’s phone number and called the woman; she spoke for just a minute before the woman hung up on her.

“I called her back. I said, ‘If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death.’ Then I had her attention.”

The woman told Ruth Burks her son was a sinner; she said she didn’t know what was wrong with him and she didn’t care. Her son was already dead to her and so she would not come to the hospital; she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.

That was all Ruth needed to hear; between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before HIV drugs improved and  effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men abandoned by their families. And she buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those young men, Ruth Burks is the only person who knows the location of their graves.

After Ruth Burks hung up the phone on that first mother she had called, she tried to figure out what to do, what to tell that young man who only wanted a visit from his mother before he died.

“I went back in his room, and when I walked in, he said, ‘Oh, momma. I knew you’d come,’ and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, ‘I’m here, honey. I’m here.’”

She sat beside his bed; she talked to him; she held his hand. She bathed his face with a cloth and told him she was there. She stayed in that room for most of the day until he finally died. But what could she do now that the boy was gone; where could she bury him.

Well, since the late 1880s, Burks’s family have been buried in Files Cemetery in Hot Springs. When Ruth was a girl she’d heard the story about the time her mother had gotten into a fight with Ruth’s uncle. And, to make sure the uncle, and his branch of the family, would never be buried alongside her side of the family, Ruth’s mother quietly bought every single grave in the cemetery — all 262 of them. Ruth and her mother visited the cemetery most Sundays after church and Ruth remembered her mother looking out over the land and saying:

“Someday, all of this is going to be yours.”

And little Ruth wondered what she would ever do with a cemetery.

After trying one more time to call that young man’s mother — and being told once again she wanted nothing to do with her son — Ruth Burks buried the man’s ashes in Files Cemetery. But that was the easy part; she had to search for a funeral home to cremate the body—most funeral homes refused to touch AIDS victims even in death. Finally, a funeral home in Pine Bluff, some 70 miles away, cremated that young man’s body for Ruth Burks. She paid for it out of her savings.

The ashes were returned in a cardboard box, and that wasn’t good enough; Ruth called a friend at Dryden Pottery in Hot Springs, who gave her a chipped cookie jar for an urn. She took the urn to Files Cemetery and dug a hole with posthole diggers in the middle of her father’s grave.

“I knew that Daddy would love that about me and I knew that I would be able to find him if I ever needed to find him.”

She put the urn in the hole, covered it over and said a prayer for that young man. It was done; only it wasn’t.

Over the next few years Ruth Burks became one of the go-to people in Arkansas when it came to caring for those dying with AIDS; and Ruth Burks buried more than 40 people — most of them gay men whose families would not claim their ashes — in chipped cookie jars in Files Cemetery.

“My daughter would go with me. She had a little spade, and I had posthole diggers. I’d dig the hole, and she would help me. I’d bury them, and we’d have a do-it-yourself funeral. I couldn’t get a priest or a preacher. No one would even say anything over their graves.”

Ruth Burks always made an effort to reach out to families before she put those urns in the ground, but nearly every time she tried the families would hang up on her; they cussed at her; they called her a demon … because she was caring for their gay sons. And more and more people started calling Ruth Burks, asking for help.

“They just started coming. Word got out that there was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid. They would tell them, ‘Just go to her. Don’t come to me. Here’s the name and number. Go.’...I was their hospice. Their gay friends were their hospice. Their companions were their hospice.”

And before long, Ruth was getting referrals from rural hospitals all over the state. She started asking for donations, and often used her own money, to take AIDS patients to their appointments, help them get assistance when they could no longer work, help them get their medicines; she said many pharmacies wouldn’t handle prescriptions for AIDS drugs like AZT, and there was fear among even those who would, and so she stockpiled an “underground pharmacy” in her house.

“I didn’t have any narcotics, but I had AZT, I had antibiotics. People would die and leave me all of their medicines. I kept it because somebody else might not have any.”

Ruth says the financial help given to patients — from burial expenses to medications to rent for those who could no longer work — couldn’t have happened without the support of the gay clubs and drag queens around the state, particularly Little Rock’s Discovery.

“They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done.”

Ruth sometimes held as many as three funerals a day in the early years, and most of her memories have blurred together while some remain crystal clear ….

There was the man whose family insisted he be baptized in a creek before he died, to wash away the sin of being gay. Ruth remembers his mother pressing a spoonful of oatmeal to his lips, pleading, “Roger, eat. Please eat, Roger. Please, please, please,” until Burks gently took the spoon and bowl from her. He was 6 foot 6 and weighed 75 pounds. That young man’s aunts went to his parents’ house after the funeral in plastic suits and yellow gloves to double-bag his clothes and scrub everything, even the ceiling fan, with bleach.

She remembers sitting with dying people while they filled out their own death certificates, because Burks wouldn’t be able to call on their families for the required information.

“Can you imagine filling out your death certificate before you die? But I didn’t have that information. I wouldn’t have their mother’s maiden name or this, that, or the other. So I’d get a pizza and we’d have pizza and fill out the death certificate.”

A young man called Billy is the one whose death hit her the hardest. Billy was young, in his early twenties, and was a female impersonator in his early 20s. She says he was beautiful; she still has one of Billy’s dresses in her closet.

As Billy’s health declined, Burks drove him to the mall in Little Rock so he could quit his job; Afterward, he wept and she held him while shoppers streamed around them and pointed at Billy.

Once, a few weeks before Billy died, Ruth Burks had taken Billy to an appointment and afterward they were driving around aimlessly, trying to get his spirits up.

“He was so depressed. It was horrible. We were driving by the zoo, and somebody was riding an elephant. He goes, ‘You know, I’ve never ridden an elephant.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ll fix that.’”

Ruth turned the car around. She has a picture now, in her home, of she and Billy on the back of the elephant.

But it wasn’t all so terrible. While she admits to seeing the worst in people, Ruth says she also saw people at their best, caring for their partners and friends with selflessness, dignity, and grace. That’s why she was so happy to see same-sex marriage legalized all over the country.

“I watched these men take care of their companions and watch them die. I’ve seen them go in and hold them up in the shower. They would hold them while I washed them. They would carry them back to the bed. We would dry them off and put lotion on them. They did that until the very end, knowing that they were going to be that person before long. Now, you tell me that’s not love and devotion? I don’t know a lot of straight people who would do that.”

After better drugs, education, understanding, and treatment made her work obsolete, Ruth Burks moved to Florida where she worked as a funeral director and a fishing guide. When Bill Clinton was elected president, she served as a White House consultant on AIDS education.

In 2013, she went to bat for three foster children who were removed from the elementary school after administrators heard that one of them might be HIV-positive. Burks said she couldn’t believe she was still dealing with the same knee-jerk fears in the 21st century.

The work Ruth Burks, and others, did back in those early, dark days has mostly been forgotten, partly because so many of those she knew back then have died. Ruth wants you to know that she wasn’t the only one to do that kind of work, but she’s one of the few who survived and so she is the keeper of memory.

But, before she’s gone, and perhaps the memories, too, Ruth Burks would like to see a memorial erected in Files Cemetery; something to tell people the story; a plaque or a stone; listing the names of the unremembered dead who lie there.

“Someday. I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.” 

I have so few heroes in life, outside family members. Rosa Parks; Harvey Milk. And now Ruth Burks, who did what so many could not, and would not, do; who stood up for those who couldn’t stand; who bathed them and cared for them and laughed with them, rode elephants with them.

Buried them.

Ruth Burks is a hero and her story should never be forgotten.

OUT

My Two Cents: Hillary Clinton's AIDS Gaffe

Nancy Reagan died last week, and in talking about her with MSNBC, Hillary Clinton said Nancy Reagan helped start a “national conversation” about AIDS in the 1980s  when AIDS activists and protesters were fighting for more federal help in fighting the disease.

Trouble is, Nancy Reagan was far from an LGBT advocate, and even farther away from helping anyone with HIV/AIDS. And the moment the interview was over Twitter, and other parts of social media, exploded, with folks accusing Clinton of misrepresenting history and insulting the 1980s activists who pressured elected officials to step up the response to AIDS.

So, Hillary Clinton apologized for what she said:

“While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on HIV and AIDS. For that, I am sorry.”Can we move on, now?

Or must we hang Hillary Clinton for saying the wrong thing? Something I am sure we have all done, and will all do again. Must we scream and shout because her team, made of many in the LGBT community, missed that comment before it was made?

Build a bridge. Get over it.

Look, I am no fan of either Reagan, Ronald or Nancy, and their complete aversion to even saying the word AIDS — even as one of their closest friends, Rock Hudson, was dying of AIDS-related complications they refused to help — and I am no fan of the jokes White House staff, under President Reagan, made regarding AIDS.

But let’s move on … does castigating Clinton for saying the wrong thing change anything? No, it just gets us all off topic: we need a democrat — either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton — in the White House if the LGBT community is going to have any chance of continuing the strides we’ve made towards equality.

Getting sidetracked by a mistake is the wrong thing to do.

Today Is World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day is held every year on December 1^st as an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, to show their support for people living with HIV and to commemorate those we have lost. The first World AIDS Day was in 1988.

Today there are an estimated 34 million people who have the virus; since it was first identified in 1984, more than 35 million people have died of HIV or AIDS, making it one of the most destructive pandemics in history.

But times have changed. Today, scientific advances have been made in HIV treatment, there are laws to protect people living with HIV and we understand so much more about the condition.  And yet despite the advances in treatment and in stopping the stigma of what it means to be HIV+, there are more and more cases of people being diagnosed with HIV.

Many do not know the facts about how to protect themselves and others, and the stigma and the discrimination remain a reality for many people living with the condition.

World AIDS Day is important because it reminds the public and the government that HIV has not gone away, and that there is still a vital need to raise money, increase awareness, fight prejudice and improve education.

Take just a minute to talk about AIDS and HIV; fear and ignorance are at the root of HIV … the fear that you may get ‘it,’ may have ‘it,’ may spread ‘it’ … and the ignorance about the treatment and prevention. The times have changed, we’ve come a long way, but there is still work to be done. People are still contracting the virus

Here are some facts about AIDS in 2015:

1. Globally about 36.9 million people are living with HIV including 2.6 million children

2. An estimated 2 million were infected in 2014

3. An estimated 34 million people have died from HIV or AIDS, including 1.2 million in 2014

4. The number of adolescent deaths from AIDS has tripled over the last 15 years

5. AIDS is the number one cause of death among adolescents in Africa and the second among adolescents globally

6. In sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest prevalence, girls account for 7 in 10 new infections among those aged 15-19

7. At start of 2015, 15 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy compared to 1 million in 2001

8. Despite widespread availability of HIV testing, only an estimated 51 percent of people with HIV know their status

9. The global response to HIV has averted 30 million new HIV infections and nearly 8 million deaths since 2000

10. In 2015, Cuba was the first country declared to have eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV  

The march goes on …

World AIDS Day site

Greedy Motherf**ker Martin Shkreli Gets Served ... Again

Remember when greedy mother**ker Martin Shkreli, of Turing Pharmaceuticals, bought the rights to Daraprim, an AIDS drug and instantly jacked up the price from $13 a pill to $750 a pill because he can and because he’s a greedy mother**ker?

And remember the shiz storm that followed and how Shkreli said he would lower the price?

And remember that he never lowered it?

Now, he has some competition, because Mark Baum, the CEO of San Diego-based Imprimis Pharmaceuticals Inc., which mixes approved drug ingredients to fill individual patient prescriptions, announced that his company will supply capsules containing Daraprim's active ingredients, pyrimethamine and leucovorin, for $99 for a 100-capsule bottle.

A buck a pill.

Imprimis also said it has plans to start making inexpensive versions of other generic drugs whose prices have skyrocketed.

Paybacks are a bitch, eh Martin?

Huffington Post

Today In Christian Love: 'To End AIDS, Kill The Homos'

A man called Steven Anderson founded the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona as its "Pastor"; he holds no college degree — according to his own website — but he has actually memorized over 140 chapters of the Bible memorized “word-for-word, including approximately half of the New Testament" so you just know he’s a man of God … because he can read and retain Bible passages.

Hell, if that’s all it takes, I might just start me a church … but I digress.

Naturally, as a man who memorizes the Bible, he is quite familiar with Leviticus and because of that, in a recent sermon to his, I don’t want to call it a congregation, I think of it more as a cult, that he has discovered a cure for AIDS and it goes like this:

“Look, we can have an AIDS-free world by Christmas. Here's what the bible says, Leviticus 20:13. 'If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman,' it says, even both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.

“And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS. It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.”

And as he said this, his cult laughed; at killing people, they laughed.

Of course, Steven Anderson failed to mention that AIDS doesn’t just affect the gay community, it also affects the straight community, black people, white people, rich, poor, but in his narrow mindset it’s a gay thing so, you know, Kill The Gays; Problem Solved.

But it creates a whole new problem: how is that Christian love? How will Steven Anderson kill The Gays without, you know, breaking that nagging commandment about Thou Shall Not Kill? How do you get around that?

Let me make this perfectly queer: this is not Christian teaching, this is Hate Speech. This is suggesting to any number of loons who might be following Steven Anderson in his descent into madness, that they have a right, ordained by God, to go out and kill a gay person because it will stop the spread of AIDS. And so, when that happens, I want Steven Anderson arrested as a co-conspirator.

I said in a post yesterday — see it HERE — that all of these so-called men, and women, of God, who use religion, faith, Jesus Christ, and God, to suggest that The Gays are less than, that we are second class citizens, an abomination, unworthy of life, should be found guilty in every single case of gay bashing in this country because of their Hate Speech masked as Faith.

Add Steven Anderson to that list, and give him a special place of honor, because he isn’t hiding very well; he simply, and plainly, says, Kill The Gays.

How f**king Christ-like.

via NCRM