Hep C Is Manageable—If You Know the Ins and Outs by Larry Buhl You’ve been diagnosed with Hepatitis C. Now what? First, don’t panic. Doctors agree a Hep C diagnosis is not a death sentence. But the virus does require some lifestyle changes and careful monitoring to avoid chronic liver disease. There are a lot of misconceptions in the general public about hepatitis C. We spoke with Lisa Oldson, M.D., an internal medicine physician and medical director for the Analyte Physicians Group in Chicago. Dr. [...]

Elizabeth Taylor’s on the line with A&U’s Dann Dulin discussing her impatience with ignorance, her exasperation with President Bush, attending the sick, and basking in the white light [Editor's note: This interview originally appeared in the February 2003 issue of A&U.] “AIDS is my life. I’ve retired from films, and I don’t want to do them anymore,” Elizabeth Taylor asserts firmly in her feminine yet commanding voice, igniting the phone line from her Bel-Air home. As an aside, she adds flippantly: “I did a couple [...]

Napa Valley Comes to Altadena, APAIT (Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team) Health Center’s wine tasting fundraiser, will help make this year a very good year. Enjoy a variety of wines—from cabernet sauvignons to chardonnays—from the vineyards of Bartalotti Wine Company, J. Moss Wines, Midsummer Cellars, and Rosalynd Winery, paired with a menu prepared by Chef Akira Hirose of Maison Akira, Pasadena. Attendees also receive a complimentary bottle of wine and APAIT wine glass. APAIT’s mission is, in part, “to positively affect the quality of life [...]

According to the press release from AIDS Project Los Angeles, War Diaries is “a new collection of words and images that highlights the impact of HIV and AIDS among people of color, featuring perspectives from LGBT members of the African Diaspora.” Edited by writers Tisa Bryant and Ernest Hardy, the ninety-page softcover volume features poetry, memoir, critical essays, and photograpy and art-based photographic images that portray and preserve the many kinds of voices from the HIV and black communities in the United States. In a [...]

Rachel Chapple Recruits Artists, Writers—Everyone—for a Conversation About AIDS by Chael Needle Imagination is the path to empathy. That’s the core of a recently launched on-line HIV awareness and prevention campaign called Real Stories Gallery. The not-for-profit Web site brings together visuals and storytelling into an ongoing and ever-changing conversation, one that interlinks diverse geographic regions, topics, and media. The aim, in part, is to pull visitors out of their spectator role and into a participatory one. Toward this end, the conversation—like any good one—needs to [...]

Left Field by Patricia Nell Warren As the recent censorship of an AIDS-themed film reminds, the separation of church & state is a thin line. By now, most of the world knows that David Wojnarowicz’s short film A Fire in My Belly was blasted by religious righters at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery LGBT-themed exhibition in Washington, D.C. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), wasn’t explicit about his religious motives, complaining merely that the film was an act of “arrogance” with taxpayer money (though the show [...]

While federal efforts move forward, hepatitis prevention remains unfunded by Larry Buhl During the seemingly interminable debate over health insurance reform, other health legislation was quietly making its way through Congress. Perhaps it was too quiet. In October, 2009 Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) introduced the bipartisan Viral Hepatitis and Liver Cancer Control and Prevention Act to address the epidemic of hepatitis B and C in the U.S. The bill, with a price tag of $90 million, would have increased the ability of the Centers for [...]

Photographer George Dinhaupt Explores the Beauty and Importance of Human Diversity by Brent Calderwood Born in Los Angeles, George Dinhaupt has been exhibiting his portrait photography since the early 1990s. Formerly a truck driver by profession, Dinhaupt dusted off his old camera in 1991 after he was sidelined by a car accident; a year later, his work was part of a show in Southern California. Dinhaupt refers to much of his work as “honorific portraiture,” which originally referred to the large-scale iconography of pharaohs and [...]

by Carolyn Agee I am the latest in a line of who knows how many women. I’ve accepted that. He says he loves me. That much I believe. If he loved himself, he’d get the test. How can you love someone else, if you do not love yourself? Maybe, once he’s wrapped around me, this won’t matter. But I know better. I am worth the cost of $15.75: the dignity—respect of a blood test. Carolyn Agee is an actress and author living in the Pacific [...]

On January 16 at e3rd Steakhouse & Lounge in Los Angeles, The Red Party fundraiser treated an enthusiastic crowd to live music from local acts Long Nguyen and Dez Hope, hors d’oeuvres, and a silent auction and prize drawings that offered some amazing items, including a week of TaeBo classes led by Billy Blanks and Caribbean resort packages, among others. Guests were encouraged to dress in red or red-accented cocktail attire and, if anyone needed a pop of color, red AIDS awareness ribbons were handed [...]