November 25, 2005 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

There has been an upsurge in books about HIV this

by Earl Pike

After several years in a row in which only a handful of significant new books were published about HIV and AIDS (noteworthy exceptions last year were Anne-Christine D'Adesky's Moving Mountains, Greg Behrman's The Invisible People, and Jacob Levensen's The Secret Epidemic), this year has witnessed an increase in new volumes about an array of HIV-related issues.

More specialized works, generally of greater interest to professionals or researchers, include AIDS and the Law (Aspen Publishers), The African State and the AIDS Crisis (Ashgate Publishing), Progress in AIDS Research (Nova Biomedical Books), Medication Adherence in HIV/AIDS (Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.), Community Interventions and AIDS (Oxford University Press), AIDS and the Ecology of Poverty (Oxford University Press), and AIDS in Asia: A Continent in Peril (Palgrave Press). Though there is nothing

particularly queer, either ideologically or thematically, about any of them, together they help round out the evolving profiles and patterns of the AIDS epidemic.

One volume geared toward professionals that stands out amid the rest for its queer sensibilities and inclusiveness is Sexual Partnering, Sexual Practices, and Health (Springer Publishing) by Sana Loue, J.D., Ph.D., director of Cleveland's Center for Minority Public Health, and a staunch advocate of queer health generally.

Books such as those listed above are ones you highlight, but don't necessarily just read. But there are other, more accessible works published in the past year or so that may be of interest to the general browser.

The first, and easily the most gorgeous, is Pandemic: Facing AIDS (Umbrage Editions, 2005) the companion volume to the awardwinning documentary by Rory Kennedy and Nan Richardson. Pandemic is essentially a viral travel narrative. It offers a vast tapestry

Six events mark AIDS Awareness Week at OSU

by David J. McDermott

Columbus Ohio State University will have a series of student and staff-generated

campus events to recognize AIDS Awareness Week and World AIDS Day. These are a unique opportunity to stop and acknowledge the distance we've come with HIV and AIDS as well as the distance we still need to go.

All week long, there will be information tables on campus, from Monday through Thursday from 10 am to 2:30 pm near Mirror Lake and at 17th and Neil Avenues.

Monday, November 28 Speakers on the

Global AIDS Crisis

Independence Hall Room 0100, 7 pm

Dr. Darrell Ward of OSU Medical School Vicki Rush, operator, Montana de Luz orphanage in Honduras for children with HIV or AIDS

Tuesday, November 29

Speakers on the Domestic AIDS Crisis

Eighteenth Ave. Building, room 0160,7 pm Eric, a student living with HIV

Kim, with a personal story

Eddie Jones, Jr. of the Tobias Project Short Video: Kevin's Room 2

Wednesday, November 30

Voices from the Quilt

Starling-Loving Hall room M100, 6 pm Post movie discussion led by Columbus AIDS Task Force

HIV Grab Bag Presentation

Ohio Union Room 436; 8-10 pm, Thursday, December 1 Candlelight Vigil on the Oval

Speaker: Michael McDonald of the OSU Medical Center AIDS Clinical Trials Unit Wear red and be part of a human red ribbon. 6 pm rain or shine.

Late-Night@RPAC

10 pm-12:30 am A fun awareness event with free food, music and HIV testing.

Late-Night@RPAC (Recreation and Physical Activity Center) is for students presenting a valid BuckID only. All other events are open to the general public and the greater OSU community. All events are free of charge. For more information, see http://swc.osu.edu.

These events are sponsored by the Student Wellness Center, GLBT Student Services, GLBT Alumni Society, Undergraduate Student Government, Student Global AIDS campaign, OSU Human Rights Campaign, Project Community, Amnesty International, Allies for Diversity, OSU AIDS Clinical Trials Unit, the Columbus Health Department, the Columbus AIDS Task Force and Peer Advocates for Total Health.

David J. McDermott is the grant coordinator for the Ohio State University Student Wellness Center.

of images, portraits, and texts from around the world, and the net impact is so multi-layered that by the last page, all you can do is take a deep breath and set the book aside until another day and the book is so compelling that you will return. For a hardcover that has the weight and texture of a coffee-table book, it's remarkably inexpensive (under $28 on Amazon.com, with an actual cover price of $39.95) and is worth having simply as a reminder of how immense and weighted with sorrow and life this epidemic really is.

A similar volume is Focus on Living: Portraits of Americans Living with HIV and AIDS, with photos and interviews by Roslyn Banish (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). With beautiful photographs and often heartbreaking, accompanying narrative, the book is a quietly fierce meditation on lives at the center of the whirlwind. The only criticism is that there aren't enough representations of AIDS in the heartland, or the South, where HIV rates are growing rapidly--and where people with HIV often find themselves utterly invisible, with few resources for support and care.

Gregg Bordowitz has been writing about AIDS since the early days in New York, when all we really knew was that there was a Strange Virus of Unknown Origin" killing gay men. A collection of his writings, The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003 (MIT Press, 2004), is now available. His early work, such as the title essay, has profoundly impacted discussions about HIV, art, and queer identity since 1981.

Unfortunately, his musings do not always age well. Unlike Larry Kramer, who looms more prophetic as time passes by, Bordowitz seems more antiquated after time. He also has an annoying habit of falling backward into post-modernist language and narrative structures that obscure more than clarify. Nevertheless, it's good to see some of his better known essays collected in one volume.

One new book, published just this October, promises to be a groundbreaking contribution to the evolving conversation about

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AIDS, activism, and social/political history. Peter Baldwin's Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS (University of California Press, 2005), is a comparative analysis of how so-called First World nations-mostly the United States, Canada, and European countries have variously faced and formed policy and public health decisions about HIV, and how activists and politicians have helped shaped those responses.

The questions of coercive testing, contact tracing, access to treatment, and acceptable discussion about risk and risk reduction have vexed just about everybody, and everybody, it seems, has crafted a different way of answering the questions. Baldwin's is a progressive, human rights perspective, and the book is an excellent basis for discussion about what the United States can and should do to more forthrightly embrace the human rights dimensions of the epidemic.

Finally, as a volume of mainstream interest, Robert Klitzman's and Ronald Bayer's Mortal Secrets: Truth and Lies in the Age of AIDS (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) should be mentioned, even though it more properly belongs among research works. Klitzman and Bayer conducted an extensive study of how people with HIV make decisions about disclosure and silence. This book is a report on that study but it is not dry or academic, and in fact confronts important issues people with HIV face on a daily basis. individually and collectively. Given that Ohio law mandates that people with HIV tell their status to prospective sexual partners before having sex, Mortal Thoughts helps us understand the moral complexity behind simplistic legal requirements.

Once again it becomes apparent that as the virus mutates, the number of narrative mutations increases: There are not simply more stories to tell, but more varied stories. The narratives are tools in the fight against AIDS. Keep reading.

Earl Pike is the executive director of the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland.

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