Most people don't think about fat insects or hibernating animals when they talk about the cause of obesity, so it's refreshing to see a book that tackles obesity as a normal process that all animals have learned.

In his new book The Fat Switch, Richard J. Johnson, a professor of...

If you ever have any doubt that the future will be in good hands with today's youth, just talk to the three young people with whom I recently spoke. Amelia Schlossberg, a 22-year-old senior at Carleton College in Minnesota; Ignacio Cruz, 19 and a junior at the University of Texas-Austin;...

The recent news about a baby in Mississippi and 14 French adults said to have been "cured" of HIV infection has fueled excitement that the end of HIV/AIDS could be within sight. Both situations raise more questions than they currently answer.

Although no one can...

Thousands will fill St. Peter's Square in Vatican City, the nation-state headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church in Rome, on March 19 when Jorge Mario Bergoglio, from Argentina, officially becomes Pope Francis.

The crowd will cheer and the cardinals will chant in Latin as the 265th man to become pope...

Although it wasn't a total surprise when the National Association of People With AIDS (NAPWA) announced on Feb. 14 that it was suspending operations and filing for bankruptcy, it felt like a shock. Exactly 30 years after its founding by the very first people to go public about having HIV,...

In early January the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the U.S. government can require that the domestic and foreign groups it helps fund to educate about HIV and care for people with the virus worldwide have a policy "opposing prostitution."

The Obama administration has urged the court to support...

Bob Hattoy, the late and hilariously funny environmental activist and friend of President Bill Clinton, used to crack us up at friends' gatherings in Washington, D.C., with his quip, "I used to be a legend. Now I'm a cautionary tale."

In 1992 Hattoy became the first openly gay man living...

For World AIDS Day, I invite you to consider a different take on the mourning we'll do for those we've lost, the acclamation of the men and women working to end the epidemic, and how we approach the challenges still ahead.

This year, I thought I would talk about dancing...

Roseanne Barr was practically drawn and quartered by the liberal gay left in 2007 when she had the nerve to call them out for something that some of us have thought but kept quiet about. "Never once in my 54 years have I ever once heard a gay or lesbian...

All I knew of the next-door neighbor was that he was gay, a gardener, and a weaver of beautiful tapestry rugs.

Kitty, my friend and hostess (or, more accurately, my landlady, as she wasn't actually at the house while I was there) told me that he had a partner...

Republicans insist on pushing the outer limits of sanity in their relentless attempts to portray President Obama as someone other than a "true" American. They conveniently ignore the fact that their own candidate is so disconnected from America as most of us know it that he actually didn't...

Judging from the bold, daily headlines during the 19th International AIDS Conference, held in Washington, D.C. July 22-27, you might have thought the world finally woke up to the reality of the deadliest plague in modern history.

But then the thousands of journalists covering the conference went home. The...

When the international AIDS conference was last held in Washington, D.C., in June 1987, "only" 36,000 Americans had been diagnosed with the fatal illness by then; 21,000 had already died since it was first recognized six years earlier. Worldwide, 51,069 AIDS cases had been officially reported to that point.

As...

Few words evoke the definition of "dreaded" as bluntly as "root canal."

But there's something even more dreadful than a root canal. It's when the first procedure doesn't fix the problem.

Even more dreadful yet: Because you depend on Medicaid for your dental care, and the dentist who...

I wasn't a boy when I experienced the seduction and betrayal of a trusted father figure, like the 10 young men who have accused former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky of sexually abusing them.

But I have deeply felt the grief and pain of those men because I,...

When I was 22 and just stepping out of the closet, I knew that choosing to embrace my sexual orientation meant not choosing other options available at the time to gay men. Marrying a man wasn't a legal option. And the integrity I asserted by accepting myself allowed no place...

Common sense suggests that in a time of wringing blood from turnips, every member of the U.S. Congress would leap at the chance to save the nation billions of dollars.

Yet Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the most commonsensical man on Capitol Hill, was the only member of the subcommittee on...

There's an old saw in my hometown, the place I fled at 18 and returned to at 48, that perfectly illustrates the way too many people I see around me here view themselves as powerless victims: As a crab tries to claw its way out of a bucket of crabs,...

Living in a 353-year-old city (with a long and storied Native American history even before its 1659 settlement by Puritans), there's no shortage of people who cling to nostalgia for the "old days," the glory days, when the city's many big textile mills were humming rather than crumbling, and the...

Getting an email from Larry Kramer saying he's disappointed in you is like having your own personal Judgment Day, and God is not amused.

What got Mount Kramer rumbling was my online comments about New York Times columnist Frank Bruni's recent article on AIDS reporter David France's forthcoming...