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).

[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...

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

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...

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.

[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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The stigmatization and the excruciating pains of social alienationhave compelled most victims to conceal their status while themalevolent ones continue to distribute the virus free of charge tounsuspecting men and women

What you need is a chick from Camden,’ Van Patten says, after recovering from McDermott’s statement.Oh great,’ I say. ‘Some chick who thinks it’s okay to fuck her brother.’Yeah, but they think AIDS is a...

What society judged was not the severity of the disease but the social acceptability of the individuals affected with it…

To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us...

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...

HIV is free, why pay for it

For goodness’ sake, why elevate AIDS over cancer? She shouldn’t have filled out that questionnaire at all. President Bush is asking us to have faith in things unseen. We only have that kind of faith...