AIDS

Hide/Seek: Raising Awareness of AIDS Through Art

On October 30, 2011, the National Portrait Gallery opened its first major museum exhibition to focus on themes of sexual differences in modern American portraiture. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture brings together a wide range of media, including paintings, photographs, works on paper, film, and installation art. Hide/Seek takes a historical approach, beginning […]

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Untangling Roy Cohn

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America features Roy M. Cohn, a fictionalized version of a real right-wing lawyer who stood center stage in the American politics of the Cold War. Roy Cohn was, in life as in the play, a complex figure full of contradictions. A precocious and arrogant young man, he graduated from Columbia Law […]

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“Don’t you think I’m handling this well?”: Angels in America and the AIDS Stigma

Fear can be a deadly poison. It spreads quietly and without warning for reasons we cannot always understand. It tears us apart from loved ones, and keeps out all other emotions: joy, anger, remorse, grief. Few understand fear’s silent power like victims of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a disease just as poisonous as the fear […]

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AZT Break

For years, the only thing I knew about the culture of the early AIDS epidemic in NYC, I knew from the musical RENT. Sure, I knew more about the disease itself. In fact, in high school I was vice president of a club called the Teen Aids Task Force. We were trained and educated about […]

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The Faces of HIV

photo from http://www.wemakethechange.com/faces/ Roy: And what is my diagnosis, Henry? Henry: You have AIDS, Roy. Roy: No, Henry, no.  AIDS is what homosexuals have.  I have liver cancer. [1] Oftentimes, it seems as if HIV/AIDS is a faceless epidemic that people do not want to speak about or associate themselves with.  However in reality, the virus […]

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