The Fight of Our Lives: List 4

In essence, it pointed to great dysfunction and argued that this dysfunction was going to lead to lots more deaths in my community.

In essence, it pointed to great dysfunction and argued that this dysfunction was going to lead to lots more deaths in my community.

Make sure that you’re succinct.

There was this rush—an impetus for people who were dying, or people who were witnessing the death, people who were older, to hurry up and come together.

It was a chilling prospect—a literal manifestation of the conservative US Senator Jesse Helms’s exhortation that “we’re going to have to quarantine if we are really going to contain this disease”—no matter the civil rights implications.

We can only hope that this egregious experience changes us for the better, but sometimes you may find yourself feeling incapable of living a full life.

According to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, which tracks the criminalization of HIV/AIDS, thousands of people have been prosecuted for “HIV crimes” in the United States—and “the vast majority of arrests, prosecutions, and convictions are pursuant to state laws that do not require actual transmission of HIV, the intent to transmit, or even conduct that can transmit HIV.”

In the meantime, people with HIV live in legal limbo.

Still, the myth of HIV as a deadly weapon persists, in no small part to demonize and disenfranchise queer and BIPOC people.

With a full retinue of reporters and photographers in tow, Diana meets with the doctors, nurses, and other health care workers who keep the ward running.

Hernandez speaks of the stigma he felt, and of being emboldened by AIDA to fight against it: I wish you knew how I feel when I go on the subway and see people move away from me.

But at least now there is federal recourse, and an acknowledgment that people struggling with HIV and AIDS deserve the same level of accommodation as others who find they are living in a world that has not been designed for their health and needs.

It is here that I must digress for a moment and confess to you my irrational, remarkable love for the musical Chess.

“So much has been made of the Baron’s derring-do, of his death-defying leap into space. But climbing the set’s monkey bars is nothing like having to hit a high A at the end of a song every night.”

It is not an entirely representative sample—in order to have your obituary in the paper, you had to have someone who loved you enough to encapsulate your life and share it with the neighborhood.