His life was a party which tragically came to an early end.

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern – the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that...

I have serious hearing loss. I’m challenged if I don’t have my hearing aids in.

That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room...

Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving…. AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive.

Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither… Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause.

Shame is the demon that keeps many of us trapped in our pain; healing comes when we gain the courage to confront our demon(s).

Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?

Abstinence, being faithful and correct and consistent condom use are the only ways to successfully reach everyone when discussing HIV prevention. I believe that the abstinence message alone does not solve the AIDS epidemic.

Listen, I wanted to say, I don’t need your judgment, okay? I have enough to deal with without you contributing, so can we just get on with this so I can get out of here?But I couldn’t form the words. Dr. Johnson viewed me as a child, and somehow, under his contemptuous gaze, I had...

Well, you rest. I’ll check on you later.” She turned and left the room, a funny, unexplainable feeling inside her.

Questions have also arisen about AIDS being transmitted to hemophiliacs via blood transfusions.

This is in line with the work we’ve been doing on an action plan to try and improve the capacity of the Libyans to deal with AIDS/HIV.

[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer – if the information they base that decision on is wrong. People don’t want the truth [when] it is complicated. They don’t want to spend years debating...

From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8, 000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.

I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small...

Are you afraid of dying?” “I was at first, maybe I still am a little bit. But it’s not death that scares me so much as not being alive anymore. It’s missing all the things that I would have seen if I hadn’t gotten AIDS. Things like my daughter’s graduation, her wedding, my grandchildren. I’ll...

And we went through AIDS… which was as good a course in mortality as anyone is likely to get, short of war.

What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease [AIDS] had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.

[A] couple I had known – who were old friends – asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened...

Give it to me. Inject it,” I’d say. To be destroyed so efficiently. But I settled for less.

But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks,...

Kuamini (mbali na imani, ambayo ni nia ya kujua kisichoweza kujulikana) ni kwa ajili ya vitu usivyoweza kuvielezea. Unaamini kwamba siku moja dawa ya UKIMWI au saratani itapatikana mahali fulani, ilhali huwezi kufanya majaribio ya kisayansi kulithibitisha hilo. Unaweza kusubiri hata miaka mia, lakini kama bado dawa haijapatikana, unaweza kusubiri hata miaka mingine mia. Kuamini...

On the issue of the rights of AIDS victims infected by blood transfusions or blood products, the health authorities of our country have so far done nothing, which we consider criminal.

Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made and drugs are approved. What a horrible feeling that is,...

If candidates do not support testing for HIV or Aids, don’t vote for them. If candidates don’t support the use of condoms, don’t vote for them.

(Note: I realize this is horrifying. Just keep reading.) “Turn to Leviticus 20:13, because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS. If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them. And...

After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin…The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don’t know how long I held his face and his shoulders...

From then on, blood was more dangerous than shit.

Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious.

Vid ett tillfälle var det ett ungt vårdbiträde som utan att tänka sig för sträckte ut sin hand när hon inte hade skyddshandskarna på och tråkade hans tårar.

We’re all just people making decisions and accepting consequences as we march toward an impending and inevitable death.

And I was cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option.

Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, to erect bridges across the chasms that separate selves. Sexuality is, finally, about imagination. Thanks to brave people’s recognition of AIDS as a fact of life, we are beginning to realize that highly charged sex can take place...

I can cure AIDS, and I will.

I kiss [her] even though I know that if you kiss a girl before you are married to her you might get AIDS.

May we each find in ourselves the courage we forgot we have, to see the beauty we forgot is inside us, while battling the demons we forgot we can slay, on a battlefield we forgot we can win.

It must be a real betrayal, when your body turns against you. I wonder if she likes flowers. All the bits of you that can go wrong…I don’t like flowers, not really. I like growing them, but that’s only because I like seeing them blossom, and seeing them die…But oh, how I do love to...

But I left because I was scared of catching AIDS.

Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys from time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that.

Lies Have expiry dates but the truth never expires

Fighting makes us feel alive, until it kills us. If it doesn’t kill us, the pain of sitting alone with ourselves, quietly, under constant assault by our own thoughts and memories of war can easily be enough to make us wish we’d died in battle instead.

We’re all going to go crazy, living this epidemic every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it’s like, what we’re going through. We’re living through war, but where they’re living it’s peacetime,...

Tobacco use kills 1200 Americans every day and 450,000 every year. More people die from tobacco-related diseases than from AIDS, alcohol use, drugs, fires, car accidents, murders and suicides combined. It is the nation’s leading preventable cause of death.

Colonel Sanders as played by Hot Daddy Harrison Ford, cracking the whip on some island plantation, topping every native boy, stopping only long enough to enjoy a refreshing Coca Cola. Because every white guy is a blonde, Aryan top. All of us are the Christian Soldiers of Capitalism that flew TWA into your country, depositing...

Globally, millions of married men and women engage the servicesof sex workers each year. Despite growing health concerns aboutthe increased risk of STDs and HIV AIDS this trade continues toblossom, leading to the premature termination of several lives andthe dissolution of several marriages.

I could go into their reality any time I chose to, but they could never come into mine. This is what I called ‘helping’ them.

With regards to getting laid and getting AIDS: Being interesting can be an interesting guy’s downfall.

The conundrum with AIDS is (that) unlike chicken pox, AIDS is fatal.

One is that if women’s sexuality in Africa wasn’t under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren’t subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn’t have a pandemic.