Category: AIDS

Gay Men Going To the Far Right In Germany; Gay Men Afraid To Hold Hands In Public; Louise L. Hay, Gay Men, AIDS, and "Kitsch Spirituality"

Gay Men Going To the Far Right In Germany

Here’s a piece about something that’s been going on in Germany that rarely makes headlines in the US, not even in LGBT presses.

It’s about two gay men who suffered a violent attack that has changed everything about them…right down to their core beliefs.

Police identified the attackers as two locally known Muslim extremists. They were never arrested and later fled to Syria. After demanding answers from local prosecutors and the mayor’s office and not getting a response, Karsten turned to Germany’s far right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
“I don’t like everything they say,” Karsten says, “but this is too dangerous for gay people to live openly here, if we get attacked like that. We need a party that’s talking openly about this.”

You can read the rest here.

Gay Men Afraid To Hold Hands In Public

This is happening in the UK, but I think it could probably happen anywhere. There was a survey taken and more than half the gay men in Britain feel unsafe holding hands in public. And it gets into other hate crimes with other groups that fall under the LGBTQ+ umbrella.

Stonewall said the UK had much to do before all LGBT people “can feel safe, included and free to be themselves”.

While hate crime was more effectively recorded than in the past, the charity said there had undoubtedly been “a genuine increase” in incidents since its last major survey in 2013.

Here’s the rest.

Louise L. Hay, Gay Men, AIDS, and “Kitsch Spirituality”

This is actually a difficult one for me because I did follow a lot of the principles and techniques of Louise Hay, and I never knew any of this. But I followed Hay in a very general sense, and at the time I was very, very young and I wasn’t as heavily invested as some people were.

Evidently, now that she’s dead people are speaking up about Hay and how she affected a generation of men.

Many AIDS survivors and caregivers have testified to the tragic personal cost of Hay’s philosophy, and what some have called her brutal dismissal of actual people with AIDS, including the poor and people of color, as well as her willingness to profit personally through the pain of the sick, the psychically unsettled, and the terminally ill. Activist and filmmaker Peter Fitzgerald saw Hay in action with his desperately ill comrades. After her death he said, “I understand that she providedd hope at very dark times to a great many people, I also know all too well that her clay feet were deeply mired in the guilt of being an AIDS profiteer, a disloyal friend and purveyor of false hope. Namaste, bitch.”

It’s a long piece, that you can find here at this link. They refer to Hays and what she taught as “kitsch spirituality.” I really don’t know enough about it to make any specific comments.

Said With Care

Smashwords

Amazon

A PG Rated Gay Romance

Here’s the Amazon link

Not All Gay Books Have Sex

In Their Prime by Ryan Field

Amazon

Smashwords

Pope Francis, Again; Gays Donating Blood; Openly Gay Cast Member In SNL Not Included; Meadows Are Not Forever

Pope Francis, Again

Many seem to be up in those cliched arms because Pope Francis recently compared transgender people to nuclear weapons.

He said this:

Pope Francis has compared trans people to nuclear weapons, saying both do not ‘recognize the order of creation’.

The argument could be made that if transgender people are, indeed, part of the order of creation then the Church and society are more like nuclear weapons than anything else for judging and going against this natural order. The trans people I know did not choose to be trans, they were born that way. If you believe in God, then God created them. No one manipulated them.

He also said this:

‘Let’s think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.’

This could also be argued in more than one way. For one thing, if the Pope’s argument held truth than fire, the wheel, and penicillin wouldn’t have been created. It’s all science related, so how do you choose one against the other?

You can read more here about what the Pope says. He also wears a white maxi dress and a matching white hat. With all due respect to the Pope, would you take any advice from a strange elderly bald man on the street wearing the same outfit?

Gays Donating Blood

I’ve posted about this before…gays donating blood and organs. You can read more about that here. As you’ll see below, it’s not a simple matter.

Tony winner Alan Cumming has a big problem with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) blood donor deferral policy for gay and bisexual men.

‘If you’re gay and you want to save lives, the FDA will let you. You just can’t have sex for a year,’ Cumming points out in a video released today to raise awareness about the policy.

In a mocking video, Cummings offers suggestions about how to abstain from sex for one year.

The 31 year old ban dates back to the first days of the AIDS crisis, when people were infected because of contaminated blood that had been donated by people with AIDS…without knowing it. Back then no one knew much about AIDS and it took years to figure out the concept of safe sex alone. I was young, but I do remember hearing about it all.

But the FDA wants to replace the policy – enacted during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the US – with a one-year deferral that would only permit gay and bisexual men to donate blood if they have not had sex with another man in the past year

Many are considering this discrimination, and count me among them. You can read more here.

Openly Gay Cast Member In SNL Not Included

Recently, there was a 40th reunion of Saturday Night Live (SNL) and you would have thought the heavens opened up and God came down from straight heaven if you were on Twitter that night. Twitter is like that whenever there’s an award event or something straight people just can’t seem to get enough of. Personally, I never watched SNL more than once or twice in my life because of the straight humor. I found myself yawning and the time just didn’t pass quickly enough.

In any event, I obviously didn’t watch the 40th reunion either so I didn’t know about this until just now. It’s a form of passive aggressive homophobia I post about often. Evidently, a gay cast member from SNL, Terry Sweeney, wasn’t recognized on the reunion show and now there’s talk about why.

Sirius XM Radio talk show host Frank DeCaro was among those outraged by what he considered a slight.

‘Leaving Terry Sweeney — the only openly gay male cast member in the forty-year history of Saturday Night Live — out of the anniversary special doesn’t sit well with me,’ DeCaro wrote in a Facebook post.

‘His Nancy Reagan impression could easily have been included in the political clip montage.’

Up until 2012, Sweeney had been the only openly gay cast member ever on the show…notice I emphasize the word openly here. But this isn’t all there is to the story.

According to a 2012 Gawker article entitled He’s Not Chevy, He’s an Assole: A History of Chevy Chase’s Horrific Behavior, Chase suggesting that Sweeney star in a sketch where they weighed him every week to see if he had AIDS.

‘So then he ended up having to apologize and actually coming to my office,’ Sweeney says in the article. ‘He was really furious that he had to apologize to me.’

The one redeeming aspect of this article is that Lorne Michaels of SNL was very supportive of Sweeney during a time when gay people were dealing with all kinds of discrimination because of AIDS. That’s called going down on the right side of history.

You can read the rest here.

New Release: Meadows Are Not Forever

I have another new release out today, Meadows Are Not Forever, that’s a contemporary gay romance with all classic romance elements. I didn’t waver on this one because I wanted it to be a romance. Right now it’s up on Smashwords, and I’ll post more links when I get them.

Meadows Are Not Forever

Smashwords

Review: The Normal Heart

There has been a lot written and said about Larry Kramer’s play, The Normal Heart, since it was introduced in the 1980’s. And the recent HBO film adaptation directed by Ryan Murphy, starring many well known names which include Mark Ruffalo and Matt Bomer, will have people talking about it once again for a long time.

The theme of the film revolves around the early days of AIDS…before it was recognized as an actual crisis, back when no one knew anything about it…or wanted to know anything about it. I was still very young and what I remember most was the lack of information we were getting. After, watching TNH for the first time as a film I understand more now about why we didn’t get that information. I understand the obstacles. In this respect, the film held nothing back, and it even openly exposed the closeted gay mayor of NY at the time, Ed Koch. That I already knew through gay circles. But it was never disclosed in public. When Koch died a year or so ago, they did not even mention it once. There are still people who will argue the point for the sake of Koch’s image.

And that’s because anything gay related came with the stigma of shame, which in turn created men who were often filled with such self-loathing and doubt that hiding who they really were ruled their lives. We’ve all been there at one point…all gay men. A lot has changed since the early days of AIDS, but remnants of that shame still linger on as always. Films like TNH designed to educate and disabuse the myths help reduce the stigma for future generations of gay men, many of whom don’t even realize what’s happened.

In full disclosure I came to the film with mixed feelings about how Ryan Murphy would pull something like this off, so to speak. I couldn’t help imagining Glee scenes where Matt Bomer was wearing a white suit tap dancing to Singing in the Rain. But what I found in Murphy’s adaptation instead was the fastest two hours I’ve spent in years, and a film that handled one of the most serious issues of the twentieth century that held nothing back.

Matt Bomer has had a great deal of press with this film, and rightly so. He was excellent and after seeing him act in TNH I’m glad he won’t be part of Fifty Shades of Grey. He’s too good for it. Every performance in the film was excellent. But the one that stood out for me the most was Mark Ruffalo. He didn’t even look like Mark Ruffalo. He became the character. He created the ultimate illusion every good actor strives for at least once in his/her career. And he did it so effortlessly.

Part of the storyline discussed the beginnings of ActUp and Gay Men’s Health Crisis. I remember them as well, but didn’t know the details. I did some work for an activist publication in Philadelphia called We The People, where I wrote for a newsletter in the early 1990’s. I’m going to post the fiction I wrote about AIDS at the time very soon, never thinking that one day there would be HIV drugs and that HIV would become a chronic illness instead of a death sentence. Back then there didn’t seem to be much hope, which is also something this film showed well. Though Murphy can be self-indulgent at times, he managed to break that mold with TNH.

The way gay marriage was handled will make you cry at times, especially knowing how far we’ve come and how little those in the past had in terms of basic equality. I just hope younger people watch this movie and see how it was back then. It may not be easy to fully grasp it all, but it’s important to get the overall impression of how things were. Even the politics in TNH film was different. It isn’t partisan. This time each and every political statement really happened right down to the way the President of the United States handled AIDS.

I think one of the things I found most interesting about TNH film is that the subject and the characters back then were on the fringes of society fighting for recognition in a very unfair environment. And here we are, almost forty years later, and it’s a mainstream film millions watched on national television.

Review: The Normal Heart

Kramer vs Streisand; Hotel Asshat List; Modern Family Gay Wedding

Kramer vs Streisand

As the Memorial Day weekend air date for the film adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play, The Normal Heart, approaches, Kramer has lashed out once again at Barbra Streisand. This time he’s alleging that Streisand finds gay sex “distasteful.”

“I said, ‘I really think it’s important that after eons of watching men and women make love in the movies, it’s time to see two men do so,’” the playwright and activist told The New York Times of his desire to see his 1985 autobiographical play brought to the big screen. “I bought [Barbara] a book of very beautiful art pictures of two men making love, and she found it very distasteful.”

The back story to all this is that Kramer wanted Streisand to adapt The Normal Heart into a film (for years) and she never did it. Evidently, he’s been holding a grudge for a long time. I’ve posted about it a few times, here.

Streisand has responded quietly and with professional dignity:

Streisand — who has long been a gay icon and gay rights advocate — responded to the Times story, saying her goal is “to promote the idea of everyone’s right to love. Gay or straight!”

“Larry was at the forefront of this battle and, God love him, he’s still fighting,” added Streisand, who for a time owned the rights to “The Normal Heart.” “But there’s no need to fight me by misrepresenting my feelings. As a filmmaker, I have always looked for new and exciting ways to do love scenes, whether they’re about heterosexuals or homosexuals. It’s a matter of taste, not gender. … I was trying to reach a large audience, and I wanted them to root for these two men to get married.”

Clearly, Streisand is not only a supporter of LGBTI people, but I would imagine very deeply involved for personal reasons. Her son is gay.

I would never wish for my son to be anything but what he is. He is bright, kind, sensitive, caring, and a very conscientious and good person. He is a very gifted actor and filmmaker. What more could a parent ask for in their child? I have been truly blessed. Most parents feel that their child is particularly special, and I am no different. I have a wonderful son. My only wish for my son, Jason, is that he continues to experience a rich life of love, happiness, joy, and fulfillment, both creatively and personally.

In any event, Ryan Murphy of Glee fame picked up the option and he’s done the HBO film adaptation that will air this weekend. According to this article, in true Murphy fashion, he gathered up all of Hollywood’s most beloved “icons” to star in the film. Originally, Alec Baldwin was set to be in it, too, but that changed fast.

There’s also an e-mail exchange between Kramer and Streisand that was leaked, here at this web site. This comment by Kramer is interesting.

“Overnight this is going in the press? This will make her mad. But she had every opportunity to make the movie. If she had made it in 1986, it would have been out there a long time ago, doing its job. But I always sensed there was something troubling her about the play that she wouldn’t put into words. I think, maybe, she was uncomfortable directing the sex stuff. We invited her to our opening night [of last year’s revival] in New York, but she never responded.”

If you do a simple search, you’ll find even more information about the vituperative attack Kramer has launched against Streisand in public. He makes the jaded politically incorrect expression “mean old queen” look tame in his quest for publicity and attention.

Side note: if anyone is looking for an excellent, comprehensive account of what it was like for people living with AIDS in the 1980’s, John Irving’s novel, In One Person, is the best I’ve ever read…and there’s nothing self-indulgent or insulting to many gay men about it. The details and research is astounding. It won a Lambda Award last year, and I’ve reviewed it. This link has all the information you’ll need to know. If I were Streisand I’d go after the film rights on this one, make a feature, and flip the bird to Kramer when no one else is looking, with a great big smile.

Hotel Asshat List

Here’s an interesting article involving Twitter and asshats that go to hotels and complain about them on social media.

At the taping of yesterday’s Pando “webinar” I asked founder Sam Shank outright: By any chance does Hotel Tonight keep a list of whiny Twitter assholes to ensure they get special treatment?

“It’s not a list of assholes,” Shank insisted, thus confirming that it absolutely is.

He wouldn’t tell me precisely how many people were on Hotel Tonight’s asshole list, although he would say it’s “a few hundred.” But again he insisted the assholes on it were referred to in the company as “influencers.”

“What kind of influencers?” I asked.

Shank hesitated. “Heads of state, Victoria’s Secret models, that kind of thing,” he lied.

This is proof that nothing we say or do anymore goes unnoticed. I keep a few asshat lists myself whenever I see something on social media.

You can read more here.

Modern Family Gay Wedding

The gay wedding between Mitch and Cam on Modern Family focused more on comedy than politics and emotion. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve read and heard a lot of positive things about it.

‘We want emotion we want to send a message but if it’s not funny then people are going to lose interest really fast,’ show creator Steve Levitan said at a party this week celebrating the episode. ‘I think its got an abundance of heart but I also think that it’s a really funny episode.’

Eric Stonestreet (Cam) and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Mitch) play the grooms who have been together for several years already and are raising an adopted daughter who was introduced in the show’s first episode five years ago.

Stonestreet said at the party: ‘(Our) first and foremost goal is to make an audience laugh. (The fact) that we have these two characters on our show that also get to check in and be cultural touchstones for people who may have questions or may not know what a gay wedding might be – this TV show transcends that.’

I think he makes an excellent point. Many people still are so unfamiliar with gay marriage and gay weddings it’s important to show things like this to the mainstream. It’s relevant. And what better way than to do it with comedy?

There’s more here.

Giovanni’s Room Shuttering for Good; Larry Kramer’s AIDS Comments

Giovanni’s Room Shuttering for Good

It’s believed to be the oldest LGBTI bookstore in the US, and this May Giovanni’s Room will be Shuttering its doors forever. I’ve been shopping there myself for a long time and it was the first LGBTI bookstore I ever visited. The owner, Ed Hermance, had planned to sell the business but the buyer couldn’t come up with the funds. Hermance also said the money he’s lost made it impossible to keep the bookstore open any longer.

He blamed retailers such as Amazon for the tough environment independent bookstores are currently facing.

“The government is allowing Amazon to tighten their fingers around the throats of the publishers and drive their retail competitors out of the business by clearly monopolistic methods,” he said.

Hermance said there is a possibility that Giovanni’s Room could be resurrected in some form, but said ideas would have to change in order for it to be successful.

“Whatever it is that they do, it will have to be something different than what we are doing now. If won’t survive if it isn’t different,” he said.

There’s a press conference tonight, and if there’s anything worth repeating I’ll follow up on it tomorrow.

While I find it a shame to see GR close, because it’s really the end of an era in many ways. I don’t believe Amazon or other online retailers made it a tough environment alone, nor do I think anyone has their fingers around the throats of publishers. In the past decade never before in the history of publishing have there been as many LGBTI books published and self-published. Never before have writers had the opportunity to make even a slight living by writing LGBTI books. But most important, never before have readers had so many choices when buying LGBTI books. If anything, the old publishing system had its fingers around the throats of writers, and gatekeepers, including bookstore owners, only gave a select few the opportunity to be heard.

The fact is that life has changed, reading habits have changed, and we’ve been moving toward a new era for at least the past five years. And I’m only talking about publishing now, not everything in retail.

You can read more here.

Larry Kramer’s AIDS Comments

With the date to air The Normal Heart film adaptation in May approaching fast, Larry Kramer has been on a major public relations binge that’s only going to increase in the next few weeks. In this article he talks about how making this film is a highly charged personal political statement, and he makes a few good points and a few I’m not sure I understand. You see that’s because I was there, and I lived through those times, too. I was very young, but missed nothing. And my own experiences with AIDS didn’t just stop in the 1980’s, and I’ve never made a dime from those experiences.

Kramer says in a new promo video released by HBO: ‘How do you get attention when the mayor (Ed Koch) doesn’t care? When the president (Ronald Reagan) doesn’t care? When the commissioner of health doesn’t care? When the gay world doesn’t care? The gay world did not want to know about this illness.’

I do recall the silence with both Mayor Koch and President Reagan. All politicians went dead silent. It’s almost the same kind of silence we’ve seen with politicians like President Obama and Hillary Clinton with gay marriage up until recently. They weren’t very vocal about it either. This is what politicians do in all things too controversial.

However, I don’t recall the same silence Kramer mentions within the gay community, at least not within my circles. We knew what was happening, we wanted to know what was happening, and many of us took precautions because of what was happening. I can recall a time when gay men would go to a bar and order straight alcohol instead of a mixed drink thinking that the straight alcohol would kill AIDS germs. It sounds ridiculous now, but that’s because we really didn’t know all the facts about AIDS back then. No one really did. As we learned more, all that changed.

So while I’m sure certain people within the gay community didn’t want to know about AIDS, I can state from personal experience that many did want to know about it and they cared about what was happening. I have one of the first works of fiction I ever wrote for an AIDS organization in Philadelphia in my files waiting to be re-released. I only have it in hard copy but I’m going to scan it eventually and publish it here on the blog…for free.

I’ve also had my own personal devastating experiences with people I know who have had AIDS. I can tell you everything you need to know, from PCP to IRIS. So Larry Kramer doesn’t know all there is about AIDS or what happened back then. I’m not trying to diminish his personal experiences, but I don’t like it when other gay men speak for me, or about me. There are many of us who know as much, if not more, only we haven’t tried to make money on it. Most of us have been trying to make money FOR AIDS. I’ve always thought it uncouth for me to write about my personal experiences with AIDS, as intense as they have been. But I’m starting to rethink that, especially when I listen to Larry Kramer promote his experiences.

You can read more here.

Mark Ruffalo The Normal Heart; Colin Firth On Rupert Everett; Matt Bomer Too Beautiful for Normal Heart

Mark Ruffalo The Normal Heart

Mark Ruffalo who is straight playing gay, talks about why he did The Normal Heart, and how he feels about it.

“I was growing up during the AIDS epidemic, and I saw how cruel and how insensitive people were to these people suffering. It sort of has been forgotten in our culture what happened during those times.”

Many of the pioneering HIV/AIDS activists depicted in the film, he added, “brought us to the point today…gay marriage is as common almost as marriage right now.”

“That was an important story that needed to be told, and I was honored to tell it with the folks that I got to tell it with, and having Larry Kramer’s words to convey it,” he noted.

I’m looking forward to The Normal Heart. I grew up gay during that time, too. But I think this is what happens sometimes when straight actors play gay roles. It’s not that they can’t play the parts. It’s just that when it comes time for publicity they say things that often make me wonder. Matt Damon did the same thing after the Liberace HBO movie and I commented in a post about that in March 2013. (And I thought Damon was wonderful in the film.) I think if Ruffalo were gay he would have said a few different things. First, the comment about marriage. Tony and I are legally married in only a few states, not in PA where we live and pay taxes. One mile away in New Jersey we are legally married. Gay marriage outside New York and other metropolitan areas is far from being as common as “marriage” right now. But more than that, marriage is marriage. Period.

And please don’t tell me I’m scrutinizing this too much. No one dares to say that to Whoopi Goldberg or Oprah Winfrey if they know what’s good for them. I want the same respect.

You can read more here.

Colin Firth On Rupert Everett

This bit of news won’t change the world. But what the hell. Sometimes it takes a while for actors to open up, and when they do it can be interesting. This time it’s Colin Firth talking about working with Rupert Everett years ago when most of us were still kids.

‘We started off as friends, then it went horribly wrong about two weeks in,’ Firth recalled. ‘He was incredibly unpleasant.

He described me as a “ghastly guitar-playing socialist.” I did not have a guitar.’

But the two managed to patch things up and work together again – most notably in Shakespeare in Love. Says Firth: ‘We’re great friends now.’

There’s more here. Best buds forever.

Matt Bomer Too Beautiful for Normal Heart

No one can promote anything better than Larry Kramer, so there will be more than a few posts and links until The Normal Heart airs on HBO this May. When it comes to self-promotion Kramer makes one pushy gay male m/m romance author I know look tame in comparison. (Sorry, no names.) This time the link is to an article where Larry Kramer thought Matt Bomer was too beautiful to play this part in the film but Ryan Murphy didn’t agree.

To convince Kramer, Murphy arranged for the two men to meet and the 36-year-old Bomer admits that going in, he was ‘starstruck’ because he had first read The Normal Heart as a 14 year old.

‘It was like meeting one of the Beatles,’ Bomer tells the magazine.

‘He was so central to my understanding and development. We talked for a really long time.’ Kramer, who has waited nearly 30 years for his acclaimed play about the early days of the AIDS crisis to be turned into a movie, sent Murphy an email immediately after his meeting with Bomer which simply stated: ‘He’s the one.’

Frankly, I’m still not over the fact that Matt Bomer isn’t going to be Christian Grey. But I’m glad he snagged The Normal Heart role.

You can read more here.

Matt Bomer In Time; Foot Cream Kills HIV; Paid Reviews

Matt Bomer In Time

For those who’ve been disheartened by Matt Bomer not getting the part of Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey, I recently came across the film, In Time, where Bomer plays an interesting character that basically sets the stage for the rest of the film.

It is the year 2169 and humanity had been genetically engineered to be born with a digital clock, bearing a year’s worth of time, on their forearm. At the age of 25 a person stops aging, but their clock begins counting down; when it reaches zero, that person “times out” and dies. Time has been turned into the universal currency; one can give time for products or services, as well as transfer it to others. The country is divided into time zones based on the wealth of its population. The film focuses on two time zones: Dayton is poor, with a populace that has learned indifference to the timed-out bodies on its streets; and New Greenwich, the wealthiest zone where inhabitants enjoy the benefits of their immortality and wealth, but are constantly surrounded by bodyguards and spend their time worried about accidental death.

You can read more here at Wiki.

I’m not the biggest fan of this genre, however, this film is excellent. The concept will make you stop and think about how you’ve always thought about time. And Bomer is great as always. His part is small, but you can’t stop thinking about what he did throughout the entire film. Of course Justin Timberlake holds his own, too. I feel a little guilty, as if I’m betraying the gay guy here, because I do like Matt Bomer. But Timberlake is the man of which all dreams are made.

Foot Cream Kills HIV

Whenever I see something like this I like to post about it because it creates a continued sense of hope that one day, hopefully in our lifetimes, there will be an end to HIV/AIDS. Now there’s evidence that a common foot cream might be beneficial to those with HIV.

In a study performed at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, not only does the drug Ciclopirox completely eradicate infectious HIV from cell cultures, but unlike today’s most cutting-edge antiviral treatments, the virus doesn’t bounce back when the drug is withheld. This means it may not require a lifetime of use to keep HIV at bay.

If this is accurate, it’s highly significant for anyone who is HIV positive and is now taking HIV meds. HIV is looked upon as a chronic illness, and in order to keep the virus at bay expensive drugs that have multiple side effects have to be taken daily. It’s a very difficult lifestyle that requires constant blood work and monitoring, not to mention discipline. And if they can come up with something to keep the virus at bay millions of lives will be vastly improved.

Paid Reviews

There are some very strong opinions on the web about authors paying for book reviews. And a few things I didn’t know…like google can penalize you if you get caught buying reviews for your books or any product you’re hocking to the public. This article covers all businesses on the web that depend on reviews. But from what I hear, it includes authors, too.

Google states that they have methods in place to automatically remove reviews that they believe may have violated their guidelines. They also pre-apologize because they know they might incorrectly remove some perfectly valid reviews.

I can just hear the free speech zealots harping on that one.

In this next article the blogger is adamant about authors who pay for reviews. Adamant to the point of stating it as bluntly as possible so there’s no misunderstanding.

Paying for reviews is stupid from a marketing perspective. As an author the only feedback you should care about is honest feedback. And you’ll never know if you’re getting honest feedback when you pay for that feedback. Even if you don’t insist on a positive review, not all reviewers going to tell you what they really think. They’re too afraid of how you’ll react or they’re afraid others won’t pay them for the same. There are ethical paid reviewers out there. But you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference. And you can’t improve your product or your marketing strategy based on a bunch of bullshit.

I actually posted about this dude in August 2012. He started out with the best of intentions trying to market and promote authors. However, he found out there’s an easier way to make a buck.

Suddenly it hit him. Instead of trying to cajole others to review a client’s work, why not cut out the middleman and write the review himself? Then it would say exactly what the client wanted — that it was a terrific book. A shattering novel. A classic memoir. Will change your life. Lyrical and gripping, Stunning and compelling. Or words to that effect.

In the fall of 2010, Mr. Rutherford started a Web site, GettingBookReviews.com. At first, he advertised that he would review a book for $99. But some clients wanted a chorus proclaiming their excellence. So, for $499, Mr. Rutherford would do 20 online reviews. A few people needed a whole orchestra. For $999, he would do 50.

You can read more here.

I don’t see the paid for book review issue disappearing. It’s part of our culture now, and unfortunately retail web sites promote the behavior. I just wish they would be a little more discreet about it, is all. I’ve discussed this with other authors I know in private and we all agree that when you see a book being released by a relatively unknown author and the very next day after the release that same relatively unknown author has over fifty five star reviews on Amazon something’s rotten in Denmark and it’s not the cheese. And no matter how many times they swear on their moms, dads, kids, and dead dogs, that they aren’t buying reviews, once the red flag is up there’s no turning back.

I’d like to see the FTC getting more involved.

7,000 Dental Patients Take HIV Test

At least 7,000 patients of the Dr. Scott Harrington Oral and Facial Surgery practice in Tulsa, Oklahoma, have been alerted after one patient tested positive for HIV and Hepatitis C. However, when tested again this patient tested positive for Hepatitis C and not HIV. The 7,000 have been encouraged to be tested for HIV and Hepatitis C as a precaution.

Even so, a complaint filed by the Oklahoma Dental Board cites Harrington for an array of safety and health violations that created contamination risks for his patients. He is scheduled to appear before a dental board hearing on April 19 and has voluntarily closed his practice and surrendered his license.

I read this here.

And this article goes into more detail:

Inspectors found a number of problems at the doctor’s clinics in Tulsa and suburban Owasso, according to the state Dentistry Board, which filed a 17-count complaint against Harrington pending an April 19 license revocation hearing. According to the complaint, needles were reinserted into drug vials after being used on patients, expired drugs were found in a medicine cabinet and dental assistants administered sedatives to patients, rather than the doctor.

I’ve also checked out a few other places and basically I found the same information in a simple search. The reason why I’m posting about it is because I saw it on TV earlier and I was left wondering more about the story. The alleged needle issue is scary. But you can’t get HIV from expired drugs and sedatives administered by dental assistants.

I’m also posting for another reason. When a friend of mine was discharged from the hospital a few years ago for an HIV related issued, I took him to the dentist about two weeks after he was discharged and found the dentist more than apprehensive to work on him. He basically passed him off to a “specialist,” for something basic. I found that not only insulting to my friend, but to all people with HIV. And I let the doctor know how I felt before I left, in private, so my friend wouldn’t hear me and get embarrassed. It was evident this dentist was terrified to treat anyone with HIV.

That same day, after my friend was rejected by that one dentist, I called another dentist who is also local and she saw my friend the next day. There was no issue whatsoever with her. The second dentist was a professional and she knew what she was doing. Not a single issue. And, my friend has been going there ever since. NONE of her other patients have contracted HIV as a result.

In an unrelated TRUE story, Tony and I had good friends who lived in New Hope about ten years ago. One was a dentist, however, at the time we became friendly with these two guys the dentist had stopped practicing altogether. I couldn’t help but wonder why. He was only in his early forties at the time. So I asked him and heard yet another horrible dentist/HIV story.

Back in the late 1980’s, my dentist friend had a growing practice. Although he was gay, he was also married with two kids at the time. One thing led to another, he met his gay partner and fell in love, and he ultimately left his wife. As a result, “someone” started a rumor about him. This “someone” spread lies about him being gay and having AIDS. At that time, HIV wasn’t as commonly used as a term as AIDS. And, also at that time, those who tested positive didn’t have HIV drugs and AIDS was basically a death sentence.

The rumor about my dentist friend spread rapidly, which ultimately killed his dental practice and put him out of business. To make an involved story short, my dentist friend filed a civil suit against the “person” who started the rumor, he sued for defamation, and won a three million dollar settlement. Of course he wasn’t HIV positive and he had no problem proving this in court. He also had eyewitnesses to testify on his behalf.

Unfortunately, this changed his entire life; guilt by association because he was gay. He stopped practicing for years and went into a small business. He eventually moved to Palm Springs and went back to school to become a licensed dentist in California, and started a thriving practice there which lasted until his recent passing from a heart attack.

And whenever I see something HIV/AIDS related to anything involving dentists, I’m always curious about all the information, not just a piece of it. If I find out more about the story above, I’ll post a follow up to this.

New York Times Koch Obit Creates Outrage Over AIDS

Yesterday I posted a short piece about the death of former NYC mayor, Ed Koch. I mentioned how he’d ignored questions about whether or not he was gay, and how he became almost vicious and defensive whenever he was asked about being gay. As a side note, I’ve heard more than my fair share of Koch stories over the years through the proverbial grapevine in and around NYC that you won’t read about in Huff Po or anywhere else, stories that would leave you speechless. But I’m only sticking to facts right now because it’s all hearsay.

According to this article, the NYT actually revised the Koch obit to include AIDS because so many people started tweeting and ranting over the fact that nothing at all had been mentioned. You have to remember this was the mayor at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in NYC and a lot of people didn’t think he did enough…if anything. To ignore something like AIDS during that time period completely makes no sense at all. And more than thirty years later we’re still dealing with AIDS all over the world.

Legendary writer and activist Larry Kramer called Koch “a murderer of his own people” because the mayor was widely known as a closeted gay man.

@MarkHarrisNYC Posted this on Twitter:

In its epic-length obit of Ed Koch, the NYTimes completely omits any mention of his (non-) reaction to the AIDS crisis.

Koch wasn’t the only one who ignored AIDS back then. They ALL ignored it. Even The President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, ignored it.

The article to which I’ve linked has more comments with more outrage, and it’s hard for me to say I blame them. I’ve seen what AIDS can do to people first hand, up close and in person, and I find it difficult to understand how anyone can ignore something so serious. But the fact remains that Ed Koch had always maintained a firm stand on not speaking publicly about his sexuality, or anything that would link him to being gay. It was a different time and a different place, and he came from a generation where it was normal to hide being gay. If Koch had been open about being gay I doubt he would ever have been elected mayor back then. I doubt he would have had any political career at all.

However, the NYT really should spend a little more time getting the facts right, because this comment was just insane. Even I remember this back then, and I was just a kid.

Hundreds of New Yorkers were desperately ill and dying in a baffling public health emergency…

You have to wonder what these people get paid to do at the NYT, and who the hell hires them, because there were a hell of a lot more than “hundreds” dying.

The saddest part of all this to me is when I think about what a wonderful legacy Koch would have had if he’d done things differently. And now all I’m seeing are cries of outrage. But this obit in the NYT is very classic of they way the mainstream media always covers up all things gay in what I guess they feel is a politically correct lame attempt to protect people from the fresh hells of all things gay?