Tag: AIDS

Vote + amazon music + Podcast: Hope for the Future by David Hunt

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Heading over a picture of a VOTE button.
Want to listen to an audio version of today’s post? Click the Spotify podcast link above. And please give it a follow.

Voting day is right around the corner. Readers and writers, please don’t throw away your voice. Fortunately, there’s still time to make it easy on yourself. Vote by mail! I just did.

Rev up your keyboards and pens and lips — tell every single politically like-minded connection you have to vote and to do it immediately before they find themselves too busy or too absent-minded!

Most of my decisions were easy. 1) Naturally, I’m pro-choice, and 2), whenever possible, I support candidates least likely to give an inch to our ex-ogre, errm I mean former president.

Besides voting, this week I’ve been progressing with learning about podcasting. Since my show’s start a little over a year ago, it’s been on amazon music (and a bunch of other places, as listed at the top of this post). Have you ever reached out to someone or somewhere and, when they took 10+ months to reply, you could’nt remember why you did? In this case, amazon music has a free bonus for podcasters, though I’m murky about particulars…

No matter. Since this show is for me to practice and learn, I did as they asked. Here’s the advert they requested, highlighting that Happiness Between Tails podcast streams on amazon music…

Upon receipt, they quickly (wow!) emailed back that it looked good (double wow!), and asked which of their music genres to aire the commercial on. Umm… I asked them if they have analytics on which attract dear blog-sphere folks like you. But, now hoping they won’t take another ten months to get back to me.

What genre of music do you listen to? Do you ever listen on amazon music?

Dunno how many free times this ad will air, when, and so forth. Will keep you posted if I learn more.

Now that we’ve all voted (yes?), today’s guest blog post is by David Hunt. He also contributed here too. Basically, we met as infants, working at a car rental at LAX. Since then, together we’ve traversed many winding roads.

Voting in mind (and again, tell your friends to be like you and me and get out their black pens to vote now), wouldn’t it be great if our votes resulted in supporting great workers like those at the fore of HIV/AIDS?

Hope for the Future by David Hunt

Thirty-five years ago this month the CDC warned about a troubling outbreak of Pneumocystis pneumonia in five otherwise healthy young, gay men in California. Later that summer, when I reported on the outbreak for radio station KPFK, the number of cases had grown to 41, including 6 in California and 20 in New York. And, in addition to the rare form of pneumonia, gay men were starting to come down with a rare form of cancer and other opportunistic infections. By the end of the year, this new disease, later called AIDS, would claim 121 lives.

Clinical immunologist Joseph Church at Children’s Hospital L.A. with a young HIV-positive patient in 1992. From “Hope for the Future,” produced by David Hunt and Daal Praderas.
Clinical immunologist Joseph Church at Children’s Hospital L.A. with a young HIV-positive patient in 1992. From “Hope for the Future,” produced by David Hunt and Daal Praderas.

I don’t suppose anyone who covered the early years of the AIDS epidemic came away untouched. I’ll never forget Robert Bland’s soft brown eyes and calm determination to serve as “an AIDS guinea pig,” even as he acknowledged that a cure would surely come long after his own death. Or the button imprinted with the defiant message “I Will Survive” that San Francisco AIDS activist Bobbi Campbell proudly wore right up until his death in 1984. Or the scathing criticism gay journalist Randy Shilts leveled at bathhouse owners who refused to provide their customers with condoms or educational materials. Courage, defiance and anger; like the stages of grief, these came to symbolize for me the stages of AIDS activism. To be honest, fear was there, too, just below the surface.

Expanding Epidemic

By the time I began working as a video producer in 1985 the AIDS epidemic had expanded beyond the gay community, and now affected people of color, teens, women and even infants and children. An educational video I co-produced for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in 1992-93 told the stories of three families struggling to deal with AIDS. it featured a 12-year-old boy, a 4-year-old girl (pictured above) and a baby boy. The message of the video, targeted to the parents and caregivers of children with HIV/AIDS, was not to give up hope, that new drug therapies were being tested and would soon be available. We titled the video “Hope for the Future.”

I don’t know if any of the children on the video survived long enough to benefit from the new drug cocktails that eventually made AIDS a largely manageable disease. I heard that the baby died shortly after we finished production. One thing you learn in an epidemic is to ration the amount of grief you have to handle at a given time. While I’d love to see those kids grown up and healthy, I’m not ready to face the other possibility.

If anybody’s still counting, AIDS has claimed more than 35 million lives worldwide since 1981.

David Hunt’s blog
More about the initial outbreak... and more.
Pediatric AIDS then and now.

Have you voted? And what genre of music do you listen to? Is it on amazon music?

Pro-Age Flamenco + AIDS + Iran + Books + Podcast: M. Alfieri on Story

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Titling over photo of Flamenco dancers Elisabeth Fruth and Alina Coman Coman-Rodriguez.
Flamenco is fierce at any age: Elisabeth Fruth, left, with Alina Coman Coman-Rodriguez. Photo: Justine Grover, owner of Naranjita Flamenco school.
Want to listen to an audio version of today’s post? Click the Spotify podcast link above. And please give it a follow.

Fiction writing, from short stories to novels, is woefully underrated. When people ask me about my writing, I ask if they like reading. Eyes bright, they answer that of course they do. Argh, then they list their fave non-fiction titles. Any discussion of fiction elicits sighs about their lack of free time.

Folks in my circle muscle through books, gobble self-help and cookbooks and how-tos the way they do bitter greens and vitamins. Fiction, to them, is dessert, chocolate that isn’t even in the dark anti-oxidant range.

I beg to differ.

In keeping with the food/nutrition analogy, self-help is great in the way of popping supplements. Fiction, on the other hand, is whole-food goodness, nourishing in ways that defy science.

Cover of "Like a Love Story," by Abdi Nazemian.

“Like a Love Story,” by Abdi Nazemian, is an exquisitely told novel. Ostensibly, it’s for young adults, but don’t let that keep you from reading it. In it, an Iranian-American teenage boy comes to grips with his gayness amid 1980’s AIDS. The audiobook also features a terrific cast of narrators.

In the way only fiction can, “Like a Love Story” evoked memories, feelings, and thoughts. A couple of nights after finishing it, I dreamt of a beautiful young man, David Fradkin, who I knew back then. He was wise, fun, talented, full of life… and got sick… Here’s a bit more about him.

Some liken AIDS to Covid. Hardly!

Yes, Covid involves ugliness, including squabbles between maskers and vaxers. However, the early days of AIDS were completely hateful.

With AIDS, people from government officials on down — and unfortunately they still do! — blamed victims and refused to help. Countless lives would’ve been saved if it had been handled with even half the urgency Covid inspired, false starts, mishaps, and all.

Besides my prior post’s mentions of experiences with AIDS, at another job during the early-ish AIDS era, this one as a temporary administrative assistant at an advertising agency, there was a man who impressed me because of how truly kind and professional he was. I worked many of the agency’s desks, filled in when full-timers were on vacation or sick leave. This man was a dancer in his real night-and-weekend job, and we liked to talk about our involvement with the entertainment industry. When I eventually subbed at his desk, days turned into weeks into months. The office was smallish and everyone lamented his absence. When I couldn’t find one of his computer files, one of his bosses insisted I phone his home.

Oh, how I wish I hadn’t. Everyone knew he had AIDS, that he was home dying. But I called and this good soul answered and then promptly hung up on me when he found out why I’d called Good for him.

On another day back then, I parked my car to temp at another office. (Most likely I was running late, having gotten lost, asked for directions at a gas station, and searched the Thomas Brothers map book under my seat, haha.) In the lot, a gaunt young man gasped with exertion, trying to get out of his car, then sat back down to catch his breath as he rested his forehead on his steering wheel. No, I couldn’t help, because yes, I knew…

In my heart’s eye, we’re all lucky for any gay man who’s still with us, having survived those horrible times. In my circle, by comparison, Covid seems like nothing, nowhere near the overwhelming number of deaths. Regardless of real statistics, senseless deaths due to hatred define AIDS, whereas politics and stupidity define Covid.

Read “Like a Love Story” because it’s hopeful — also, in ways that non-fiction can’t, it lets readers step into history to see that always, we’re more alike than not, when it comes to confusion and fear. Nazemian’s “The Authentics” is a great read too!

Cover of "Cat Brushing," a book of short stories by Jane Campbell.

“Cat Brushing,” is a book that Jane Campbell at age 80! Among her radical collection of short stories, no topic is off-limits. Each vignette of noir humor illustrates how, to put it mildly and without revealing too much, we don’t ever have to stop surprising ourselves or anybody else.

While I’ve got your ear or rather eyes, if you haven’t already heard, a young woman in Iran was killed merely for not wearing her head scarf modestly enough. People there are so angry, so beyond fed up with government oppression, that the murder has lit the fuse to numerous public outcries.

To censor protesters, the government has closed access to WhatsApp, a major international internet phone/text/video app. You can help their voices be heard by sharing this video… 

Were you around to remember or hear about AIDS in the 1980s? Then or now, what’s your most potent impression?

AIDS Before it Had a Name: Grace within Tragedy

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“Hope for the Future,” an earlier post by my good friend David Hunt, got me to remembering AIDS during the early 1980s. At that time, it was a mystery so dark that scientists had yet to name it. It took a while for experts to figure out how it was contracted. All anyone knew for sure was that it was deadly, most of all to gay men at their physical primes.

People in other countries called it an American disease. They talked of screening us before allowing us to visit. Some argued that gays should be segregated. Conspiracy theories abounded.

During then, I reported news for KPFK, a non-profit radio station based out of North Hollywood. At the same time, I paid my rent thanks to a ‘real’ job, while I attended college part-time and interned at CNN.

David was news editor for a lesbian and gay show at KPFK, called IMRU. Today IMRU is syndicated. It proudly boasts itself as, “The nation’s longest running Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Radio News Magazine.”

Despite my workload, David’s civil rights stories seemed far more imperative than anything I was already reporting on. After enough pestering, sometimes he allowed me to help him with his projects.

IMRU 1982There we are in the back row, David Hunt to my right. To my left, the man with the devilish grin and muscled good looks is a fellow radio host.

David Fradkin’s entertainment career began as a kid on the TV show, Romper Room. He was smart, multi-talented, and totally fun. To this day, it’s still hard to believe that AIDS took him only some years later. The description here and at this Find A Grave link don’t begin to do him justice.

David Fradkin 1982David Hunt’s post describes Robert Bland, one of the valiant first to battle AIDS. Thinking of Robert makes my eyes mist up, as much for him as for his mother. During his final months, she moved into his small apartment to nurse him through the horrible, messy, gut-wrenching end.

David Hunt 1982Months later, she appeared at my workplace. It was a car rental counter in one of Los Angeles International Airport’s terminals. Flights unloaded customers, some of them nice. A lot were drunk businessmen who would holler when their cars were five minutes late, or threaten to slug each other over who was next in line.
Employees were closely policed. During quiet times, we were prohibited from reading, socializing, and talking on the phone.

The despair in his mother’s eyes sheered away my trepidations about risking my job. I set out an extra stool for her. She stayed for my entire eight-hour shift, desperate to talk to anyone who had known her son.

Eventually, David and I opened a video production company. Later in his post, he refers to some of the HIV infected kids we featured in a video, along with professionals from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles on AIDS. HIV is the virus that lowers the immune system. AIDS is the final stages. We interviewed scores of patients, professionals, and volunteers. Every single one fought hard to conquer AIDS. One was a woman whose husband, a drug user, had died of it. She lovingly cared for him until his last breath. He had infected her and their infant.

Another mother adopted two small children, a boy and a girl, whose biological mothers had died of AIDS. Both kids were charmers, a shy girl with pink ribbons in her hair, and a rambunctious boy with a fierce hug.  The new mom sobbed inconsolably through many nights. Lest her husband miss work from lack of sleep, he took up residence on their couch.

Back then, blood donations weren’t screened. A young boy we interviewed had hemophilia. He was infected as a result of a blood transfusion. His parents feared that people at his school would be awful to him. Was it health and social challenges that matured him beyond his real age of about twelve? That made him and his family so caring and wise?

Fortunately, AIDS research has made great strides. It’s become rare for kids to die of it. Still, it remains a tragedy. At such times, grace is most evident. I was fortunate to meet those early AIDS fighters, each of them full of wanting to live, to love, and to give.

David Hunt’s blog
More on the early days of AIDS
KPFK
IMRU
More on the difference between HIV and AIDS
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
Libraries still carry the video
Classroom lesson plan we wrote for the video
Ways to end AIDS