HIV/AIDS

The Same Problem on Repeat

Monkeypox is now, with Covid-19 and HIV, one of the viruses at the center of American life. Yet even now that preventive treatments for all three exist, the US has failed to help people access them. 

September 4, 2022

An AIDS Activist’s Archive

The obituaries saved by one social worker are, essentially, a list of names and the barest outlines of biography. But in their silences, they contain multitudes.

October 29, 2021

‘Comic Terrorism Works’: An Interview with John Waters

The avant-garde filmmaker who wanted to be the filthiest person alive has ended up becoming a national treasure. How did that happen?

April 29, 2021

The Powerful Reticence of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Rather than presenting himself overtly as a gay artist in the age of AIDS, he preferred to work as a secret agent in the house of culture.

November 22, 2020

Hervé Guibert: Living Without a Vaccine

Disease is conspiratorial, never egalitarian, always crawling along social fissures.

June 12, 2020

South Africa's AIDS Orphans

When I first visited South Africa in 2000 to report on the AIDS epidemic there, one adult in five was HIV positive, and a million children had lost one or both parents to the disease. But what really amazed me was that no one was talking about this. Silence gripped the nation like a spell. People with obvious AIDS symptoms told me they were suffering from “ulcers” or “tuberculosis” or “pneumonia.” Orphans said their parents had “gone away” or had been “bewitched” by a jealous neighbor. Now, five courageous teenagers from a Cape Town slum have made a fifteen-minute film called *Young Carers: Through Our Eyes* about what it’s like to lose a parent to AIDS. It’s one of the most powerful films about the epidemic I’ve ever seen.

July 18, 2012

Keller to Nuns: Get Out!

Former *New York Times* editor Bill Keller thinks it sounds shocking that he agrees with the Catholic conservative Bill Donohue, but he need not be disturbed. Some of us have long thought he was closer to Donahue than he pretended. What he particularly liked is the way Donohue argues that half of Catholics should just leave the church they pretend to believe in. Keller puts the matter even more punchily. He tells the useless half, “Summon your fortitude and just go.”

June 23, 2012

Abuse in Uganda

During the Cold War, Western nations supported numerous African tyrants who brutalized their own people and held economic and social development back for decades. This did our international reputation no good, and helped create some of the most serious foreign policy problems we face today. Now it seems, we are doing it again in Uganda.

July 19, 2011

AIDS at 30: A Time Capsule

It is difficult now to call up the particular mood that prevailed in the AIDS epidemic’s early years. I am not talking about the first rumblings, when no one knew enough to be afraid, but further in. The idea of life without AIDS, much less of being alive in thirty years, was almost unimaginable. Which is why in the late eighties, coworkers and I at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation came up with an idea to get people—gay men, in particular—thinking about the future. We decided to create a time capsule.

June 6, 2011

The Smithsonian’s New Culture War

About twenty years ago, a gaunt, respectful, but angry David Wojnarowicz walked into my office at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York to ask what could be done about a flier that Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association had just sent out to every member of Congress, all major newspapers and TV networks, and thousands of religious ministers throughout the country.

December 16, 2010