Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS and Survival
Sean Strub has been an internationally recognized authority on AIDS treatment and policy reform for more than 25 years. This blog will serve as a forum for Sean’s thoughts and ideas about HIV criminalization, educational, treatment and other urgent issues in the HIV/AIDS global community.
Last week, Salon.com published an excerpt from my book, Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival that is about Bill Clinton's administration and how poorly they responded to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly their failure to lift the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs.
Read MoreThank you to the Des Moines Register for its editorial leadership in advocating for modernization of Iowa's HIV criminalization statute. In 2012, the Register was the first major mainstream media in the U.S. to recognize how criminalization imposes a horrific injustice on people with HIV and is terrible public health policy.
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Sean Strub discusses his new memoir with fellow veteran ACT UP activist Michelangelo Signorile on the latter's Sirius/XM radio show in mid-January. In a very lively and involved discussion, the pair talked about the early days of the AIDS movement, the progress made and the work that still has to be done – especially in the area of HIV criminalization, a legal issue that Sean Strub's Sero Project has pledged to reform.
David Mixner reports, on Towleroad, that next week's (Tuesday, January 21) NFL's A Football Life Cable TV program will feature former Washington Redskins player Jerry Smith, who was gay, closeted and died of AIDS in 1986.
Read MoreAlicia Menendez enjoyed the movie Dallas Buyers Club, as so many of us have. But also like many of us, she was disappointed that Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto failed to use their platform at the Golden Globes — where they each won awards — to bring attention to the epidemic or convey any sense of concern about the realm in which the characters they played existed.
Read MoreWriting Body Counts was a promise kept, a responsibility as a survivor of the Plague Years to pay tribute to the friends, lovers and comrades who fought — and died — to make a change in the epidemic.
Read MoreMy work today, with the Sero Project, fighting HIV-related stigma, discrimination and criminalization, is about the future, but is necessarily informed by the past. I wish the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could learn a bit more from the past and let it properly inform their plans for the future.
Read MoreA Pennsylvania paper yesterday had alarming news about another case of HIV criminalization. A 25-year-old woman from the central part of the state, not far from where I live part of the time, was charged with sexual assault, simple assault and recklessly endangering another person —because she allegedly did not disclose her HIV status to a sexual partner.
Read MoreI am looking forward to 2014. I am surrounded by loving and supportive friends and family. My health is good. The criminalization reform advocacy work I have been immersed in over the past five or six years has made great progress and I know we’re going to see even more advancements this year.
Read MoreIn my new book Body Counts, I recount a horrible experience I had meeting Wilson at a dinner party in New York two decades ago. I had only recently met the host and was pleased when he invited me to dinner. The other three guests, all men, I was meeting for the first time, in the host’s fancy apartment on the Upper East Side. A servant took my coat when I arrived.
Read MoreSean Strub, founder of the groundbreaking POZ magazine, charts his remarkable life—a story of politics and AIDS and a powerful testament to loss, hope, and survival.
