Martin and Me

As the roll-out of expensive and potentially controversial biomedical HIV prevention tools looms, I wonder whether we too will insist on being heard.  Will we urge authorities to understand that in a crisis, a higher tolerance of risk is sometimes warranted? Will we demand early access, fast access, and expanded access for those who need it most?

I spent last weekend in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, attending one of America’s best consumer-focused HIV treatment and prevention conferences, Positive Living. On Saturday, at the same time a San Francisco memorial was being held for Martin Delaney, we were holding our own on the east coast. Martin had been part of the conference since before its inception twelve years ago, delivering a treatment update every year but one. Various members of the conference faculty lit a candle, came to the podium, and shared their memories. Here are mine.

Before I knew Martin, I knew his work. Before daily wire stories about AIDS, before cable news networks, cell phones, the internet, and LOGO, there was Project Inform. Shortly after my 1987 diagnosis, someone at a support group handed me a dog-eared photocopy of a PI publication. I took it home, read it, and with the same trepidation I’d experienced as a southern suburban adolescent ordering the Milwaukee-based Gay People’s Union News, I subscribed. Like the GPU News, the sometimes sporadically published updates from San Francisco came in discrete plain wrappers. I came to depend on the discussion papers, fact sheets, PI Perspectives, and special alerts as my primary source of information about HIV and AIDS.  

Read the rest at http://lifelube.blogspot.com/2009/03/martin-and-me.html