Famous gay men with hiv
It's in our politics, our schools and homes.
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Harrington was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Award for his work, and still works fighting AIDS today.This story is part of a series from NPR's Science desk called " The Other Side of Anger." There's no question we are in angry times. The Science Club later became its own group, the Treatment Action Group, and continued its mission of saving lives through accelerating AIDS research and getting treatments out to patients. Harrington even delivered a speech in which he showed slides of his own infected lymph nodes to illustrate what he thought key areas of research needed to be and what the shortfalls of current research on animals and lab strains of HIV were. Members of the group attended and spoke at conferences with scientists, explaining where researchers needed to focus and what drugs should be made available to patients. The group members became experts on the disease as well as the drug-approval process so that they could not only protest but have real data-driven discussions with scientists, including Anthony Fauci. They read everything from textbooks on virology and immunology to the most recent papers being published. They addressed the lackluster response by the scientific community by diving into the biology of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and the syndrome. Though not formally trained as lab scientists, Harrington and members of the Science Club made a real impact on HIV treatment through their activism and studies. One branch of ACT UP called the Science Club was headed by Mark Harrington, an HIV-positive gay man. They protested at the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to try to demand AIDS research and treatments. ACT UP staged many protests and marches to bring attention to the fact that, each day the crisis was ignored by those in power, people were dying. The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) was formed in 1987 to address the AIDS epidemic, which was killing thousands of people a year in the U.S., the vast majority of whom at the time were gay men. Before she died however, she told O'Shaughnessy that she didn't have to be secret about it anymore, and it became public when her obituary was published. Ride had been very private her whole life, partially because of the culture of NASA and fear that revealing her orientation might overshadow her career, and she never discussed her relationship with O'Shaughnessy in the press.
However, when Ride died in 2012 it became public through her obituary that she had a female partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy, for the last 27 years of her life. Ride was married (from 1982 to 1987) to fellow astronaut Steve Hawley. She used her fame from her time as an astronaut to promote science education, founding Sally Ride Science to encourage kids to go into STEM fields and writing several books for kids about space travel and the solar system. After two missions to space on the Challenger shuttle, during which she operated the robotic arm to set satellites into orbit, Ride left NASA.
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She was a physicist by training and was hired to be in the first class of NASA astronauts to ever include women. Ride was the first American woman to go to space.
FAMOUS GAY MEN WITH HIV HOW TO
If you are looking for how to be a good ally, here's a good article about that. If you are especially looking for info about LGBTQ+ people of color in STEM, this profile and this article are good places to start.
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If you’re looking for more resources, you can look at the Out to Innovate site for LGBTQ+ people in STEM. If you are more interested in learning about current LGBTQ+ scientists, take a look at 500 Queer scientists, the Twitter account PrideInSTEM or this article about LGBTQ+ people in STEM. This list is more on the historical side and includes mostly (though not entirely) people who are no longer working scientists. So I've included in this list people who were public about their identity and/or orientation as well as people who are thought to have been LGBTQ+. It's important to learn about the contributions LGBTQ+ people have long been making.
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But I also know that the good that comes from the visibility of those historical figures is significant. Many LGBTQ+ people in history couldn't come out publicly (and the truth is that many today still can't), and it feels a little intrusive to guess based on a letter or some ambiguous anecdote. I often feel uncomfortable with these lists, especially when sexual orientation and/or gender identity is speculative. To celebrate Pride Month, I wanted to share a bit about LGBTQ+ scientists of the past. It was an inflection point in the gay liberation movement. June is Pride Month, which commemorates the Stonewall riots of 1969, when patrons of a gay bar, The Stonewall Inn, in New York City fought back against a police raid.