Note: I ran the POZ Planet column’s EARTHWATCH map for nearly a year. I also researched and wrote copy blocks for other POZ Planet content.
When, at the end of David Rabe’s powerful new drama, A Question of Mercy, Dr. Robert Chapman admits to wishing he’d never answered his telephone, it’s hard to blame him. The call, an entreaty to assist in the suicide of a young man suffering the agony and desperation of a protracted AIDS death, has plunged the doctor into a quagmire of soul-searching, recrimination and human tragedy any sane person would wish to avoid. (Read More)
It’s hard to have a conversation about video artists who have lent theif voices, visions and passions to the struggle with AIDS without Gregg Bordowitz’s name coming up. Repeatedly. In the first sentence. This young, HIV-positive video activist is mentioned right off the bat by everyone from… (Read More)
I wasn’t always Octavio. My first 20 years — spent in a sleepy provincial city — I was Javier, the nombre everyone called me, my middle name. For 10 more years — as a doctor, then an epidemiologist, living in Mexico City, succumbing to the widespread homophobia of my culture — I remained Javier. (Read More)
Numbers have always haunted the AIDS community: skyrocketing numbers of people with HIV/AIDS, free-falling numbers of T-cells, inexorably rising viral load counts. Protease inhibitors have brought a measure of relief, and more numbers: thousands of experimental drug and dosage combinations being taken by hundreds of thousands of patients.