Newtopia | Issue #6 - December 2002: "Aids: Then & Now"

It is 21 years after Dr. Michael Gottleib treated his first three patients carrying the similar baffling symptoms of AIDS and although treatment has overcome some incredible milestones since then, the disease has only managed to grow. Worldwide at the end of 2001 there were 40 million persons living with HIV/AIDS, including 28.5 million in Sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide there were 5 million new infections with an estimated 40,000 new infections in the U.S. HIV/AIDS is not a disease that happens to those other people over there. It is a pandemic that is eating our planet like a virus and it is wiping out large portions of our world.

Essay, Poem, and images: Marcus Reichert on his Touring Exhibition of The Crucifixions to Benefit the AIDS Services of North Carolina

In America when you are trying to raise money or awareness you need vaudeville. Look at Jonathon Swift with Gulliver's Travels. He was able to get dissent for the King across with a humorous satire. People got it but didn't have to admit they got it. They could laugh protected.

At the end of 2001, UNICEF estimated that there were at least one million cases of HIV infection in eastern Europe. Many other credible estimates indicate that there are at least a million people infected with HIV in Russia alone. This is not recognized as a crisis because victims are doubly invisible to authorities. The majority display no symptoms and are not tested, so they receive scant attention from barely functioning health-care systems. Second, they belong to politically, socially and economically marginalized groups - drug addicts, prostitutes, prisoners, homosexuals - in a world where life at the margins is brutal, and often short.

To alter the old euphemism, a disease is something your neighbor has, but a plague is something that you have. I wouldn't assume to say that this is true of the rest of the world. My understanding is that the thing that is killing people in so many parts of the world is more a lack of education about the disease. There are staggering numbers of people out there who are carrying the disease and infecting others without even being aware of this, and there are even more who are unaware of what the problem is.

One of the more unique leaders in the fight against HIV and AIDS has been the Navajo AIDS Network. By combining modern medical and health education knowledge with a special understanding of the Navajo culture, this organization has been in the forefront in combating HIV and AIDS within this American Indian community.

First time I ever heard of AIDS it was a fag disease-- "anally inserted death sentence" they joked in my high school, and I laughed with them. Little did I know that in just a few years I'd be a fag, too. When I finally started to have sex at the age of 19, AIDS was there. Waiting. First person who ever solicited sex from me was an HIV positive man. Told me he'd wear two condoms and that was plenty safe. Yeah, sure.

If we step back a bit and begin to look at where our tax dollars are going in this full-on war, we begin to see that most of this is not directed towards educating our children, providing treatment, or even towards heavy community-based policing. Nor is the bulk of our expenditures for the "War on Drugs" to combat drug distribution within our nation's borders. Rather the majority of the money spent is to fund military operations across the globe, particularly as it pertains to our presence in South America, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia.

Science is truth - a clarion call of civilization. More so, in today's context - the era of miracles, or wonders, and mass destruction. A case in point: New York and Washington, September 11, or the daily dose of somber violence in Kashmir, a 'Paradise Lost.' They are tragedies never before incarnate in history.

Cicciolina (ne Ilona Staller) is better known to the western world as a member of a left-bent Italian political party called the Radicals. She came into the spotlight a few years back for flashing her left tit in public to show the angle of her convictions, but there are a few of us that have known her a little longer. During the '70s, '80s and into the '90s she was also a thespian of filme du terré.

It's common knowledge we're constantly being bombarded by electromagnetic waves. This electromagnetic radiation comes to us in the form of the sun's heat, radio and television signals, microwaves, visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays, and more. Every radio and television commercial ever aired has been designed to persuade us to do something. Even if these waves don't generate the signals in our auditory nerves and visual cortexes, it still seems conceivable that this electromagnetic radiation - especially in the range from infrared through visible light, and possibly ultraviolet - affects our sensory nerve endings enough to send signals up through our nerves.

Most non-Christians believe that Jesus Christ existed, but as rational people they reject the claim that he was, in any literal sense, the son of God, and they don't believe that he was resurrected. This leaves an important question: Why did Jesus Christ become the most written about person who ever lived?

From the shattered streets of Israel and the Occupied Territories comes a vivid account of one man's anguish and determination to make sense of a conflict seemingly without end. Living at the very heart of East Jerusalem, Henry Carse, writer, practical theologian, scholar, and father of four children living amidst the mayhem, ventures out to engage with Israeli and Palestinian friends alike to starkly reveal the desperation and hope that thrive in that barren place.

From the shattered streets of Israel and the Occupied Territories comes a vivid account of one man's anguish and determination to make sense of a conflict seemingly without end. Living at the very heart of East Jerusalem, Henry Carse, writer, practical theologian, scholar, and father of four children living amidst the mayhem, ventures out to engage with Israeli and Palestinian friends alike to starkly reveal the desperation and hope that thrive in that barren place.

Editor-in-Chief Charles Shaw tries to make sense of a senseless world and provide a blueprint for tomorrow.

12. Cacophony: The Current State of Activism in America

An alternative to the life you've been dreaming, the ideas you've been drinking, and the rhetoric you've been eating.

11. Crime and Punishment: An Investigation Into Integrity

The current state of affairs in sex, relationships, and sexuality from a global, political and cultural perspective. All things cold, detached, multi-partnered and hedonistic.

Newtopia associate editor Greg Everett's unfiltered column. It's a little dirty and doesn't always taste too good, but it's real and it keeps you alive.

7. More Than You Should
8. The War on Tobacco

Newtopia's resident mother hen chimes in on Motherhood and its role in the New World Order.

7. Christmas Infoletters
8. A Dead Bird

A monthly musing from our boys across the pond at CODE UNCUT MAGAZINE

A rampant nosedive into the road flanked by media and politics.

2. Down the Grim Stream Without a Chaser
3. Automatic for the Patriots

Twelve years since your footfalls graced my steps and / Still your Tai Chi sword stands near my door, / Still draws the occasional glance. / "My only weapon," I say, / "A gift from a cherished friend.

Poems from the book Blue Father Nomination by Matthew Wascovich, Kimberly Nichols and H.P. Tinker.

PA drop in the bucket? Maybe. / But we need something / quickly / to make religion more hip. / Maybe a slick, clever ad - / Commercial, a slogan, a / motto, a quip or lip / service / to appear as if / it took some thought.

Female dancers twirl gently / against neon lights / on the inevitable dance floor. / They rub on one another, / in feminine squalor

I have walked through puddles of urban detritus and stacks of limestone glacial till with eyes perched so far from my body that my sight was like a blindness. Like a lover, this land has taken hold of me and as a love lost it makes no apologies to me as it sits there, stone cold, not offering one word of condolence to the pain in my heart; a pain brought on by the pending divorce of my departure.

At her final concert of her wildly successful seven-month North American tour, twenty-seven-year-old rocker Dayna Clay hands her guitar to a fan midway through her encore and beats a hasty retreat. She takes a taxi to the airport and flies back to Chicago alone.

Randy Shilts's documentary book tells the scientific, political, and human story of the first five years of AIDS in the U.S.(1980-85). It is a story of dedicated medical researchers groping to understand the horrifying new disease while simultaneously battling the public fear and indifference during those Reagan years that prevented both public funding of their research and acceptance of their findings.

CinemaShrink Says "At best, Punch Drunk Love spins a fantasy that a man drunk on love can throw a great punch and overthrow a miserable lifetime of cowering behind walls of fear. At worst, sister abuse has become yet another rationale for a man believing that all his problems will disappear if he follows Ms. Blue-eyed, Blonde-haired Angel to some special place at end of the earth.

CinemaShrink Says, "If you have ever stood in front of a Frida Kahlo self-portrait, wishing you knew the real woman who lived that neverending pain, those wild choices and odd triumph of becoming one of the few women painters ever to become a household word, you're in for a treat withFrida. Filmmaker, Julie Taymor, peels Frida straight from her canvas, giving us the gift of her vivacious, courageous spirit in full living color.

CinemaShrink Says, "If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine what motion pictures about AIDS are worth. Film has not simply changed a cultural attitude toward AIDS as a disease, preventing it from becoming closeted like tuberculosis was. Films about AIDS have broken through stereotypes, boundaries and emotional barriers that feed alienation and breed disaster between family members, friends and communities - not to mention nations. As World AIDS Day brings attention to the heroism required to bring unpleasant truths out into the open where health can triumph, take another look at films that have paid attention -- and made a difference."

CinemaShrink Says, "Graham Greene's Quiet American likens the U.S. rescuing a country to a man rescuing the woman he loves from danger. She may be vulnerable but his life is at stake."