How Would a Therapeutic HIV Vaccine Change the Sexual Landscape?

A Nobel winning scientist as predicted a therapeutic HIV vaccine within 5 years this weekend.

I am interested how this would change the social sexual landscape of gay men. Managing HIV through HAART drugs has significantly altered the way gay men have sex. With HIV no longer being a quick death sentence, fewer men since 1996 have treated condom use as 100% mandatory. Would managing the virus with a therapeutic vaccine change the landscape even more?

An available preventative HIV vaccine might all but eliminate gay men’s use of condoms. Would a therapeutic HIV vaccine – one where an infected person would continue to harbor the virus but not progress to a disease, essentially like a measles inoculation – also drastically change the way gay men look at safe sex?

Nobel Winner predicts HIV vaccine in 5 years | 365 Gay News:

(Stockholm) One of the scientists sharing the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering the HIV virus said on the weekend that he believes there will be a therapeutic vaccine to treat it within five years.

Luc Montagnier said in Sweden he believes it is ”a matter of four to five years” before a therapeutic vaccine to treat HIV infection is developed.”

He did not elaborate as to why he believes scientists are close.

Scientists have developed lifesaving drugs that can inhibit the disease but there is no vaccine to prevent or treat HIV infection. Finding a vaccine has proved elusive in the past, with the most recent trials ending in failure.

However, a therapeutic vaccine would be a key step in fighting the virus, he said. A therapeutic vaccine would be given to people who are already infected, in order to lessen the impact of the disease while a preventative vaccine would, ideally, protect people from HIV.

Why Is Barack Obama So Popular?

The following is the text of a post written by me on prior to the reboot of this blog. I am reposting it here because it was one of my most read articles.

Originally published Friday, December 01, 2006

Why is Barack Obama So Popular?

I’ll tell you why.

In his e-mail today marking World AIDS Day, he talks about the challenges we face with the pandemic. And this is how he frames it:

“We can turn away from these Americans, and blame their problems on themselves, and embrace a politics that’s punitive and petty, divisive and small.

“Or we can embrace another tradition of politics – a tradition that has stretched from the days of our founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another – and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done for the people with whom we share this Earth.”

This man is inspiring. He knows the importance of leadership. He actually answers questions instead of dancing around talking points. He’s becoming a symbol for the “Common Good,” and America needs that right now. The world needs it.

I don’t care if he’s just a “Freshman Senator.” I’m ready for him to be President. Today.

More Memories of the Real Harvey Milk

S.F.’s Milk blazed trail followed by Sacramentans – Sacramento News – Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee

Freshman Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco – a newcomer to Sacramento – also knew Milk well.

Ammiano was a teacher in San Francisco. Though the city has a different reputation now, at that time the concept of an openly gay teacher was not well-tolerated.

‘The established gays were not happy with it,’ Ammiano recalled. ‘They wanted us to be quiet. … I had a lot of doors shut in my face, but Harvey was never like that.”

Benton: The Harvey Milk I Knew

Falls Church News-Press – Nicholas F. Benton: The Harvey Milk I Knew

Milk’s effectiveness as a naturally-gifted leader was demonstrated only weeks before his killing in the defeat of a mean-spirited, California statewide anti-gay referendum pushed by well-financed religious rightwing elements.

Ironically, in terms of results, he and his cohorts did better spearheading the defeat of the referendum to root out homosexual teachers in public schools in 1978 than did the effort to defeat the regrettable Proposition 8, reversing a state court ruling favoring gay marriage, in California just last month. And that’s in the context of a far greater acceptance of gays and lesbians now, compared to then.

Perhaps the key difference: Milk was a natural movement leader, and uncompromising when insisting the issue was not about vague platitudes concerning human rights or fairness, but was about the lives of real, flesh and blood people.

His political rallying cry in the gay rights movement from his earliest activist days was that any gay person’s most radical political act is “coming out of the closet,” usually requiring, especially in those days, enormous courage.

By thousands “coming out,” as he was forever repeating, the public becomes aware of what the issues are really about. If voters know someone who is gay, they’re far less likely to vote to deny gay rights. Moreover, by “coming out,” there is the unexpected, even more salutary personal benefit: the almost magical way it imbues an individual with a liberating sense of integrity.

Strong resistance to Milk’s infectious enthusiasm for pushing the cause openly came from existing leaders of the closeted gay community, fearful that by being open and bold, the hatred of mainstream society would intensify against them. In fact, the opposite proved to be the case.

Podhoretz Says Condensed “Milk” Is Too Sweet

John Podhoretz of the Weekly Standard sees “Milk” as a whitewash of Harvey’s Milk’s radical side, writing as if that side was a flaw. While Podhoretz may be right that Milk was a radical, he is wrong to think that the movie portrays him as politically correct.

He points specifically to the movie allegedly ignoring Milks sexual radicalism. On the contrary, the film portrayed Havey as quick to share his sexuality with new lovers while using public displays of affection as a political statement on the streets of the Castro. The film shows how Harvey had an affinity for the “lost puppy.”

Podhoretz insults Milk’s memory by calling AIDS a “horrifying natural refutation of” Milk’s “doctrine.” His review of the movie is just an opportunity to attack lives of gay people who won’t conform to what Milk called the “heterosexual model.” He further simplifies the complexity of the film in an effort to reduce the significance of it.

Rose-Colored Milk

The real Milk was a sexual liberationist of a very specific 1970s type. “As homosexuals, we can’t depend on the heterosexual model,” Shilts quotes him as saying to one boyfriend in San Francisco by way of explaining why he had another boyfriend in Los Angeles. “We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don’t have to follow it. We should be developing our own lifestyle. There’s no reason you can’t love more than one person at a time.” Shilts adds: “That ultimately was what his politics were all about, Harvey decided.”

Milk was murdered three years before researchers identified the AIDS virus, which was the horrifying natural refutation of his doctrine (and which took the life of Scott Smith, the man with whom Milk moved to San Francisco from New York in 1970). It is understandable that screenwriter Black and director Gus Van Sant do not want to muddy their iconographic portrait with the inconvenient truth about Milk’s polyamorous views or behavior. They no longer represent the vanguard of the effort to expand gay rights, which is now focused almost solely on the institution of marriage. But it is a distortion, and a significant one.