The turning point could be traced to August of 1998. It was the month that, for the first time in well over a decade, the Bay Area Reporter did not have a single AIDS obituary submitted for publication. The promise of protease inhibitor medications had been realized, and...

It was all well and good to be front and center as an HIV-positive man during the first years of the AIDS crisis. It's easier being a role model when your face looks good on the poster. But then, slowly but surely, a common side effect of HIV medications, facial...

WARNING: This post contains a NSFW graphic. Please read on at your own discretion.

My fear of all things anal began when I was an early teen. My older brother David took great delight in bursting into our bathroom to startle me, especially if I was on the john, and...

"My most courageous self, the best man that I'll ever be, lived more than two decades ago during the first years of a horrific plague. ... I miss the man I was forced to become" (Me, in "Once, When We Were Heroes," 2007).

AIDS did not kill Spencer...

There was so much distance in my mother's eyes that I feared she may never come close to me again. Circling her stare were wrinkles of pain, betrayal, even, and in her hand she held the watch.

It was December of my senior year of high school, and things had...

Our first meeting on-camera was six years ago. The memory of it pains me still, despite my enthusiasm for appearing on national television for any reason whatsoever.

"And how long have you been off drugs?" he asked. The look in his eyes carried a journalist's skepticism. The intense lights of...

The story behind the title of Michael Kearns' memoir, The Truth Is Bad Enough, is as delicious as the title itself. As Kearns' parents, themselves worthy of a Tennessee Williams subplot, battled each other at their divorce proceedings when Michael was...

In my new video blog episode (below), someone asks me, incredulously, if I would actually march down the street telling people I'm HIV-positive. Well, actually, I would, and I have. Many Pride parades ago, in 1994, I marched while wearing a T-shirt that said, "NO ONE KNOWS I'M HIV-POSITIVE." This...

It's difficult, sometimes, writing about an event that so easily lends itself to images and sound. Such is the case with the AIDS2012 March to End AIDS, the subject of today's video blog from the conference.

The people included in the video can speak for themselves, and quite eloquently. Maybe...

Here is my first report from the International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C.!

Since less than 5 percent of the programming for AIDS 2012 is targeting to MSMs (Men who have Sex with Men), a special one-day pre-conference is held the day AIDS 2012 convenes to address the...

Lynne Rhys and I were never supposed to become friends. It was just too unlikely.

She is a divorced woman raising a teenaged daughter, and was barely aware of a "gay community" until she stepped tentatively out of the closet in...

WARNING: This piece contains graphic sexual language. Reader discretion is advised.

The annual Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco is noted for its unbridled embrace of every star in our sexual constellation. Even the fearless leather community, which founded the event, can sometimes appear tame amidst the outlandish kinks and...

I took a shower this morning. I am clean. I might work out at the gym later, or maybe the trash bag will break on the way outside and I will scoop up coffee grounds and put them back into the bag. I will then be dirty. I will shower...