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

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.

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

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...

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...

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,...

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.

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

Lies Have expiry dates but the truth never expires

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

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.

But I left because I was scared of catching AIDS.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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).

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 in God.

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 new band from England,’ Price points out.Where’s dinner?’ Van Patten asks, absently studying the question scrawled on his napkin. ‘Where...

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.

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.

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

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

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,...

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...

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...

HIV is free, why pay for it

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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 can cure AIDS, and I will.

general population” that so concerned the Secretary.

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

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.

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.

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,...

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.

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

And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably,...

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...

[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...

[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...

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.

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...