The Latest New York Magazine

The First Jewish President

Bill Clinton was widely called the "the first black president" thanks to his positions on issues important to black Americans. New York Magazine this week gives a similar treatment to Obama, despite what Ed Koch says.

HomoQuotable - Mike Albo

"Is it finally okay to be a 13-year-old sissy? From the feather-cuffed, drama-filled Olympic figure-skating competitions to the unashamedly oddball high-school TV show Glee, being young and gay suddenly has a place in pop culture that isn’t cruel or tragic.

Of course, there has never been a lack of gay subtext on TV (Dukes of Hazzard, Pee-wee Herman, Jonny Quest, SpongeBob). But it seems that, in our world of niche-entertainment marketing, gay boys are becoming a viable demographic, up there with tween girls and security moms. Call them Twinkles: preteen boys who may not know they are gay yet, or may not want to say they are gay yet, but who have a gleam in their eye and a definite sensibility. Twinkles proudly prance, unashamedly emote, high-kick, jazz-hand, belt out Paparazzi with piano — everything a gay kid used to do in his bedroom with the door shut." - Performance artist and author Mike Albo, writing for New York Magazine.

Larry Kramer Profiled In NY Magazine

It's too long and covers too many subjects to effectively excerpt here, but I encourage you to check out Jesse Green's fascinating profile of Larry Kramer in New York Magazine. Kramer is working towards finally publishing his decades-in-the-works 4000 page book, The American People, which among other things, claims that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and other notable historical figures were all gay. The massive length of the book alone poses a problem on how to publish it.

Aging And Mental Problems Mount For Longtime Pozzers

David France has published a sobering and heartbreaking feature at NY Magazine that looks into the accelerated aging and mental problems that longtime HIV patients can suffer. An excerpt:

Some fifteen years into the era of protease inhibitors and drug cocktails, doctors are realizing that the miracles the drugs promised are not necessarily a lasting solution to the disease. Most news accounts today call HIV a chronic, manageable disease. But patients who contracted the virus just a few years back are showing signs of what’s being called premature or accelerated aging. Early senility turns out to be an increasingly common problem, though not nearly as extreme as James’s in every case. One large-scale multi-city study released its latest findings this summer that over half of the HIV-positive population is suffering some form of cognitive impairment. Doctors are also reporting a constellation of ailments in middle-aged patients that are more typically seen at geriatric practices, in patients 80 and older. They range from bone loss to organ failure to arthritis. Making matters worse, HIV patients are registering higher rates of insulin resistance and cholesterol imbalances, and they suffer elevated rates of melanoma and kidney cancers and seven times the rate of other non-HIV-related cancers.

Whether this is a result of the drugs or the disease itself, or some combination, is still an open question and certainly varies from patient to patient and condition to condition. Either way, it is now clear that even patients who respond well to medications by today’s standards are not out of the woods. Current life-expectancy charts show that people on HIV medications could live twenty fewer years on average than the general population. “It’s spooky,” says Mark Harrington, who heads Treatment Action Group, a New York–based HIV think tank. “It seems like the virus keeps finding new tricks to throw at us, and we’re just all left behind going, What’s going on?”

Read the entire story.

Who Still Dies Of AIDS And Why?

New York Magazine has posted an excellent dissection of "who still dies of AIDS, and why."

By the time [Mel] Cheren learned he had AIDS [in 2007], he was already suffering from a rare, drug-resistant pneumonia, what infectious-disease specialists refer to as an opportunistic infection, and he had lymphoma, an AIDS-related cancer that had spread to his bones.

Within a month of his diagnosis, Cheren was dead. The official cause was pneumonia, although, as his cousin Mark Cheren points out, cause of death in these cases is a moot point. “Infection from pneumonia was probably the culprit,” he says, “but only because that acts quickest when you don’t stop it.”

Dying from AIDS, or dying with an HIV infection, which may not be the same thing, is a significantly less common event than it was a decade ago, but it’s not nearly as uncommon as anyone would like. Bob Hattoy, for instance, died last year as well. Hattoy, 56, was “the first gay man with AIDS many Americans had knowingly laid eyes on,” as the New York Times described him after Hattoy announced his condition to the world in a speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. Hattoy went on to work in the Clinton White House as an advocate for gay and lesbian issues. In the summer of 1993, he told the New York Times, “I don’t make real long-term plans.” But the advent of an anti-retroviral drug known as a protease inhibitor, in 1995, and then, a year later, the multidrug cocktails called HAART—for highly active anti-retroviral therapy—gave Hattoy and a few hundred thousand HIV-infected Americans like him the opportunity to do just that.

If the pharmaceutical industry ever needed an icon for evidence of its good works, HAART would be it. Between 1995 and 1997, annual AIDS deaths in New York City dropped from 8,309 to 3,426, and that number has continued to decline ever since. The success of HAART has been so remarkable that it now tends to take us by surprise when anybody does succumb, although 2,076 New Yorkers died in 2006 (2007 figures are not yet available). Though many of the most prominent deaths, like Cheren’s and Hattoy’s, tend to be of gay men, the percentage of the dead who contracted the disease through gay sex is now reportedly as low as 15 percent (with a large proportion still reported as unknown). Intravenous-drug users make up the biggest group, 38.5 percent, and women account for almost one in three of total AIDS deaths.

Mel Cheren, the founder of famous dance music label West End Records, was a well-known and highly-regarded HIV/AIDS activist who provided the Gay Men's Health Crisis with their first office back in 1982. Yet somehow he had stopped testing himself for HIV in recent years. The virus was full-blown before he realized he'd been infected.

The article also makes several references to "sins of the past" patients, people who have been living with HIV since before the advent of HAART, but are now suffering the ill effects of the pre-HAART monotherapies like AZT. The treatment kept them alive, but allowed their virus to mutate to be resistant to today's front-line drug arsenal. Says one doctor: "I still expect most of my patients to live a normal life expectancy, but they may do so with a bit more nips and scrapes.” Nips and scrapes like heart, liver, and kidney disease.

Test, test, test. There is no excuse not to do so. Not everybody goes on treatment right away and some don't begin for many years. But constant vigilance as to how your body is handling the infection right now will pay off in ten, twenty, or thirty years.