When I was a teenager in Oregon in the 1960s, I imagined the pope would one day name me a bishop. But I went even further. I expected to become a bishop in charge of dozens of parishes. I thought I could get the red hat and robes of a cardinal, an even higher ecclesiastical honor. I wanted to wear the robes, be a leader, and make a difference in a worldwide institution. (never interested in the (literal) trappings of Catholic clergy?  Google “cardinals in red robes.”)

Reality caught up with me, and I thought better of my grandiose crimson dreams.

I thought of all this today as I applauded a new brilliant but delicate golden bloom on my Bishop’s Cap (Astrophytum Myriostigma ) cactus. The shape mimics a “bishop’s hat,” also known as a mitre.

If you clicked on a recent blog post of mine, you probably received a security warning. We took care of that, signed up for enhanced protection, and Facebook confirmed there is no longer any risk. Go back and take a look at an exciting development of an HIV vaccine for African women.
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Coming Soon! 
A new biography of gay journalist Randy Shilts.  A new gay sex memoir. And magic mushrooms, anyone?  I follow Publisher’s Weekly to track what’s new in the book publishing world. Last week, I noticed a tempting, teasing list of new books expected in the next few months. I haven’t read any of these as advance copies, and I’m not reviewing them here, but you might want to be among the first to take a look at these titles.

First, San Francisco’s gay journalist Randy Shilts will receive the biographical treatment with When the Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts, America’s Trailblazing Gay Journalist by Michael G. Lee, Chicago Review Press, 320 pages, hardcover. Available October 8, 2024.

Shilts has been profiled before and after his death from AIDS in 1994, mostly in magazines and journals, but this is the second book-length biography of the much-applauded but controversial writer. I’m curious to read how this new book treats Shilts’  reporting style, the controversy over the fabrication of Patient Zero, and whether the book provides a meaningful look at Shilts' inner life.

Esteemed Author Edmund White Makes Sense of 60-Plus Years of Sex.  Not many men can compile more than sixty years of their gay sex lives, much less with the literary and popular reputation of gay writer Edmund White who does so at age 85. Yet we can look forward to White’s accounts next January 2025 with the publication of The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, Edmund White, Bloomsbury (publisher), 246 pages.

I was slow to become an eager fan of each of White’s books – novels, fictional memoirs, and sagas of travel. Now, I’m ready to delve into his work with anticipation, especially at my own advanced age as I prepare my own memoir for publication. I’ll be signing up for one of his pre-release copies. How about you?

Magic Mushrooms Are Everywhere, right? I’m told that Colorado and Oregon are the two places to be for everything magic mushrooms. As a native Oregonian, I hear intriguing stories about the legalized but facilitated trips with psilocybin mushrooms. A new report by Grant Singer, a reporter for Oregon Public Broadcasting counts 3500 clients who have taken a guided trip with psilocybin in Oregon.  

In October this year, look for the new “Have A Good Trip: Exploring the Magic Mushroom Experience,” by Eugenia Bone, Published by Flatiron Books, 352 pages. Tell us what you think.

Be contrary and jump to the last line of this important news in today’s New York Times. Usually, the news value of an article or report diminishes toward the end. Yet this major announcement about AIDS vaccine development nearly buries a goal pursued by women’s health and AIDS activists for decades.

The headline: New Drug Provides Total Protection from HIV in Trial of Young African Women (June 21, 2024). An incredible development. As one of the researchers quoted in the article, Dr. Linda-Gail Bekker, noted, “After all our years of sadness, particularly over vaccines, this truly is surreal.” A drug trial found that a twice-a-year injection of a new compound, a drug named lenacapavir, gave young women protection, total protection, from HIV infection.

The last line: “Lenacapavir is also the first HIV prevention drug for which trial results have become available for women before men (emphasis mine); most are tested in gay men in industrialized countries before trials reach African women, long the most vulnerable population.”

African activists, buoyed by the demands in the Global North from groups like ACT UP, had demanded equity for women as participants in AIDS trials to little avail. In the U.S., Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the heads of the National Institutes of Health, refused. The whole federal health bureaucracy in the early 1980s barred women from clinical trials of new drugs.

But this time, women were included. Not only that, but young women, ages 16-25 and pregnant and lactating women were among participants. Community health advocates accepted nothing less. They demanded that women and older adolescent girls who were sexually active must be included.

When I worked for the first U.S.-funded AIDS Communication Project, known as AIDSCOM, 1987-1993, that targeted Global South populations, we struggled to convince Ministries of Health and the U.S. State Department to employ the known AIDS prevention strategies targeting women. Today’s news merits sustained applause for the achievement by thousands of women worldwide ever since the early days of AIDS.

Note: Look for future posts on this blog as I complete my new memoir. 

​The citizens of Barga, a small city in Tuscany, officially honored Dr. Marie Equi by naming a street after her on Saturday, May 18, 2024. Dr. Equi’s ancestors lived in and near Barga for many generations. The new “via Marie Equi”  recognizes the doctor’s contributions to society and her family origins in the city. Barga is located 25 miles directly north of the walled city of Lucca. The two cities are located in the Tuscany region of Italy.

Equi became known for her fortitude and courage in fighting for women's rights, including reproductive rights, economic justice for working people, and free speech. To many, Equi was also controversial as a lesbian; she lived openly with her female companion in Portland. She is the first publicly known lesbian in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California.

Equi enflamed the sensitivities of many – including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover – with her opposition to what she considered the “capitalistic” World War I. The U.S. Government prosecuted Equi on a charge of sedition for protesting U.S. involvement in the war. She was found guilty and sentenced to San Quentin Prison. She lived and practiced medicine in Portland, Oregon. Equi died in 1952 at age 80.

The street-naming honor was bestowed in memory of Dr. Equi (1872-1952) with the initiative of Barga librarian Ms. Maria Elisa Caproni, who contacted Equi biographer Michael Helquist for assistance.  A copy of his book “Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions” was displayed at the naming ceremony.

Equi has also been publicly recognized in New Bedford, Massachusetts, her hometown; in Portland, Oregon, where she lived her adult life; in the Walk of the Heroines; in a mural of notable Oregonians on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene, and with a granite plaque placed along the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco that recognizes significant LGBTQIA+ individuals.

On this day 100 years ago Dr. Marie Equi, out lesbian and political radical, marked the start of her term in San Quentin prison. She was charged with sedition for giving a speech protesting the U.S. entry into WWI. Here's a brief excerpt from my biography of her, catching her in Richmond, CA after her train trip from Portland, OR.

"Equi's train stopped the next day in Richmond, a city north of Oakland, where she and her escorts boarded a ferry to San Quentin State Prison on the western shore of San Francisco Bay. During the half-hour crossing, the stark white prison buildings, standing isolated on a short stub of a peninsula loomed ahead. Three large cell blocks formed a solid horseshoe shaped front close to the shore. In the interior of the arc stood the desolate building that had housed female inmates since 1856. From the San Quentin dock, the US marshal transferred Equi to the custody of prison officials. She was registered as inmate number 34110 on October 19, 1920, marking the start of her term. She was finger-printed, measured at five foot three inches, weighed at 165 pounds, photographed from the front and side."

Equi named San Quentin "The Palace of Sad Princesses" in letters to her 5 year old daughter. Equi was the only "political" among the "princesses". She served for ten months.

In the last few years Equi was been honored across the nation, in New Bedford MA, Equi's hometown in a exhibit Lighting the Way: Historic Women of the Southcoast; in Portland, OR's Walk of the Heroines, and San Francisco's Rainbow Honor Walk with bronze plaque placed in a Market Street sidewalk.
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San Francisco and Oakland are set to co-host the 23rd global AIDS conference beginning tomorrow July 6, 2020. Reports about the still-destructive AIDS pandemic will compete with the daily slog of frustrating, frightening, and maddening COVID-19 updates.  While we wait for the latest iteration of the global gathering to begin, let’s take a look at the very First International Conference on AIDS, convened 35 years earlier in Atlanta, GA.
 
I arrived in Atlanta a day early to get oriented to what would become the pre-eminent annual convention of scientists, behavioral researchers, health education specialists, activists, and the media. Sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization, more than 2,000 participants had registered for the four-day event. Although the conference was a prestigious affair, President Ronald Reagan did not attend, as became the rule for heads of state at future international AIDS conferences. But then, four years had passed and 10,000 Americans were AIDS-infected and Reagan had still not voiced the word “AIDS.”
 
No one warned me about Atlanta at that time of the year. San Francisco has its shape-obliterating fog, but the Georgia city was thickly layered with pollen from surrounding pine, oak, and mulberry trees, and various grasses as well. I hadn’t suffered like this with the barrage of explosive sneezing, sniffling, soaked tissues, poor sleep and fatigue as I did with the Atlanta pollen.

​Familiar Territory
I covered the Atlanta AIDS conference as a reporter for the LGBTQ newspaper Coming Up! in San Francisco. Afterwards I stitched together a national readership by syndicalizing my articles in other media that served New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix, Portland, and Oakland. I had worked the “AIDS beat” for nearly three years before I registered for the Atlanta conference. More importantly, I began collaborating in mid-1982 with Mark Feldman, one of the first 50 men in San Francisco diagnosed with AIDS. We began writing about his experience of having “the condition.” The stigma and pain, depression and defiance, the horrors, and the treasured calm periods of relief and joy. Mark Feldman was the first to coin the term “People with AIDS (PWA).”  This became a fundamental aspect of his message; he wanted to counter the notion that those with the disease were “victims,” “helpless,” and to be pitied. Mark went on to become one of the best known PWA speakers in that early wave of AIDS in 1981-1985. He died of AIDS at age 31 on June 2, 1983. The experience of being present with Mark and loving him changed me in ways I try to understand fully even today.
 
Why Atlanta?
I don’t know the backstory on why Atlanta was selected to host this stand-out AIDS conference, but the city had the Centers for Disease Control within its boundaries. The CDC connection was likely enough. The U.S. bid for sponsorship easily drew upon the prestige of the vast federal bureaucracy; including the CDC, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Those realms of scientific expertise included Robert Gallo, MD, the prominent virologist who misappropriated credit for being the first to identify the AIDS virus.
 
U.S. Scientist Takes Credit for French Discovery of AIDS Virus
For those unfamiliar with the scandal triggered by Robert Gallo’s lab, the episode was a dark period in the history of AIDS science. Gallo and his colleagues, purposefully or not, misidentified the virus sample shared with him by researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and called it their own. Drs. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier had already announced in May 1983 that they identified the AIDS virus which they named “Lymphadenopathy-Associated Virus, LAV.” But wait, Gallo declared that he was the first in the world to identify the AIDS virus. He named it HTLV-3.
 
In reality he had “identified” the already discovered French LAV that had been shared with him. That was a mistake from the start; it risked cross-contamination. Almost a full year after the French announced in a medical journal their discovery of LAV, Gallo reported his own “discovery” of HTLV-3 in Science in May 1984. He failed to mention the earlier French finding. With high stakes of the Nobel Prize, worldwide fame, millions of dollars in revenue from sales of the eventual antibody test, and national pride, the U.S. government initially attributed sole discover to Gallo and, later at the Atlanta conference, to the “discoverers in France and the U.S.”  
 
At the conference, Gallo advised his colleagues, “Science becomes debased when nationalism and chauvinism come with competition.”    
 
First American to Independently Identify the AIDS Virus
Jay A. Levy, MD, University of California San Francisco Professor of Medicine and Director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research, deserves the honor and accolades for being the first American to independently identify the AIDS virus ((meaning he did so without having the French drop it on his laboratory bench). In early May 1984 Levy isolated what he named AIDS Associated Retrovirus, or ARV. Levy’s discovery ranks him as the second worldwide and the first American to discover the virus that caused the worst epidemic of illness and death in the 21st century. Granted that COVID-19 may soon claim that distinction).   
 
Jay Levy’s ARV discovery was recognized at the 1985 Atlanta conference only in presentations and papers by himself or his team. He is among the most under-reported and under-appreciated of medical science pioneers. Jay Levy continues his lab work at UCSF today.
 
Quick Notes from the Atlanta Conference
· The lag time between AIDS infection and development of symptoms may be more like seven to ten years rather than the five years earlier believed.
· AIDS-infected individuals may remain capable of infecting others for several years after their initial exposure.
· One study suggested that closure of gay bathhouses may have little impact on the spread of AIDS.  (San Francisco had ordered 14 such establishments to close in October 1984).
 
Viewing Note: These articles appear on my website, michaelhelquist.com, as part of my “Politics and Passions Blog” on the left side of the Home page. 

The 23rd International AIDS Conference will be like none before. San Francisco and Oakland expected to physically host the tens of thousands of health officials, scientists, activists, and Big Pharma representatives gathering at the pre-eminent scientific gathering of the year.
 
The 2020 conference was poised to welcome more than 20,000 participants for four full days, July 6-10. Travelers from 170 countries around the globe expected to meet top researchers who would discuss in convention halls the newest HIV prevention strategies, the still-elusive HIV vaccine, and the long-term efficacy of medical treatments. They hoped to visit labs and HIV testing sites. They wanted to compare strategies for reaching sex workers and minority communities. In the midst of what would become an overload of information, attendees eagerly anticipated the Bay Area’s renowned restaurants, bars, clubs, and the tourist sites.
 
Then, COVID-19 appeared and everything changed.
 
For the first time since the first international AIDS conference was convened in Atlanta in 1985, the thousands of conference participants will forego face-to-face plenary sessions, lectures and poster talks. They won’t attend an elaborate reception in a city landmark. They won’t be gathering with San Francisco and Oakland mayors under the dome of San Francisco City Hall. Nor will they benefit from face-to-face interactions with peers. They won’t experience the same kind of camaraderie and support that has been one of the most important aspects of these conferences.     
 
Early this year the organizers of “AIDS2020,” as this year’s gathering is known, hoped that the disturbing clouds of COVID19 would not disrupt their plans. Once the threat of the corona virus forced the Tokyo Olympics off the calendar this year, the risk of infection for thousands of people gathered in packed halls was far too great. The only options were to cancel AIDS2020 outright, postpone a year, or to live stream.
 
Live-streaming isn’t new anymore, to the point that the platform Zoom has entered English as a verb. Ever since most countries adopted some form of “sheltering in place,” millions of people have zoomed for business, chats with friends, and celebrations with family. Next up is the largest scientific gathering of the year, all live streamed. Stay tuned as AIDS2020 tests the final logistics to reach a worldwide audience with 12 plenary sessions, 27 workshops, 50 symposia, 62 abstract/poster talks, and 70 satellite session, beginning July 6. Learn more at aids2020.org
 
#AIDS2020  #AIDShistory  #Covid19