Across town and weather permitting, volunteers will begin laying out the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The Quilt hasn’t been laid out in full since 1996, which was, not coincidentally, when we as a culture stopped talking about AIDS. After 1995, new retroviral therapies began drastically slowing the death rate, and conversation shifted to HIV: better treatments, better tests, slowing infection rates. AIDS, that gruesome specter that had dominated the conversation for nearly a decade, and the battle against it, was put back in the closet.

But over the past year, AIDS has reentered the conversation, this time not as a spook, but as inspiration. Maybe it’s the debates over Obamacare. Maybe it’s the rise of Occupy. Maybe it’s the battle for marriage equality. Or maybe, as many former activists mentioned this weekend in D.C., enough time has passed that the post-traumatic stress that marked the fight has finally begun to subside.

Continue Reading...

I stumbled into it because my would-be writing partner was working at a mainstream media company that padded its bottom line with sales of hardcore DVDs. By 2002, even in the midst of a recession, that padding was getting pretty thick. The studios noticed the sales that the Internet generated. They needed someone who could string together a press release, or a script, or a marketing campaign that would work in this new world. It was good money, and plenty of porn. For two gay guys – hell, for two any guys – the next five years were a string of Christmas mornings.

And not just for lucky idiots like us. Everyone was making money. Internet startups had started to figure out streaming video, and you could still sell DVDs all day long. Hundreds of new companies sprouted, like mushrooms after a rainstorm. We were lucky enough to be there for the harvest. We didn’t realize it then, but it was the beginning of porn’s golden age – and it wasn't going to last.

Continue Reading...